I’m here to help you travel to some awesome places.
Hey, my name is William!
I’m the founder of Going Awesome Places or more aptly, the Chief of Awesome.
Here’s a little about me. I’ve travelled to 52 countries, love capturing beautiful landscapes, am an avid travel hacker, usually loses one thing on every trip, and am OCD when it comes to trip planning.
11 years ago, I embarked on this crazy journey of starting a travel blog. I never would have imagined where it would take me and the adventures I’d go on. If you told me back then that I’d be doing this full-time and be able to make a living out of this, I would have to that you’re crazy.
Today, not only is Going Awesome Places a travel blog but we’re a brand, Will is a frequent video host, a digital marketing consultancy, an ambassador for Destination Toronto, and one-time IMDB credit thanks to Tripped Up.
What Going Awesome Places Is All About
Our goal from day one has been to write honestly and genuinely to inspire others to travel. Through inspiration, we want to give our readers the tools and guidance to have similar, if not better, experiences of their own.
The only way I know how to do that is to share stories, educate, and leave no detail behind.
I get it. Planning a trip is hard so I want to help with ridiculous detailed itineraries, travel guides, and packing lists.
The Origin Story
Out of school, I pursued a career in consulting. I was pretty happy with my job, but at the same time, I realized my passion for it had waned and what I was learning was starting to taper off. On top of that, the living-out-of-my-suitcase life was really wearing me out. Fast forward 4 years to December 2011. I had started to evaluate what I wanted to do, and I began to draw out an exit-strategy. A lot of that involved timing when to leave my company, the start of planning my trip to Asia, and devising the best way to use my remaining vacation days.
Come April 2012, I had everything figured out and handed in my 2 weeks resignation. April 13, 2012 was my last day and what a relief it was! The only thing holding me back from leaving immediately was my friend’s upcoming wedding in May. I decided to use this time to prep, pack and see old friends.
One of those meetings led to the question of whether I was going to be blogging about my experiences while I was away. The idea intrigued me but the truth is I had never thought about it before then.
I went home that night and quickly did some research before ultimately purchasing this domain, getting WordPress set up, and creating my first blog post.
Keep in mind that this was with only 3 days left at home. The wedding happened and then I was out of Toronto by May 21.
For the next 3 months I roamed around Asia and was lucky enough to have friends travel with me for a good chunk of it. I had no idea what I was doing but I blogged about my experiences day to day. I treated it like a diary and it was really about letting my friends and family know what I was up to.
What I didn’t know was that the world was also reading.
It was an adventure of a lifetime and truly put a perspective on the important things in life. It was something that profoundly changed my core and gave me a renewed sense of direction.
When I eventually came back at the end of August, I reviewed the blog and how it was doing. To my surprise, I started seeing traffic come in from places I wasn’t expecting. This is when the lightbulb clicked inside and I realized that may there was more to all of this than a glorified online diary.
The Evolution
Since then, it’s been a rollercoaster journey of building up the site whether it be content, social media, the brand, readership, and so much more. The big thing I realized was that blogging isn’t a sprint, it really is a marathon. Bit by bit, I kept learning and improving and all that work has culminated into what you’re seeing today.
I’m an electrical engineer turned business consultant to now a full time travel content creator.
Anyone that’s in the business knows that running a blog/channel/brand is no easy task. I learned the hard way as I went from full time blogging to a full time job. It got to the point where I was literally working two jobs. I did it for just over 2 years and eventually I just couldn’t do it anymore.
So I’ve gone full circle – quitting my job the first time to travel, starting the blog, attempting to blog full time, working a full time job, to quitting again and blogging full time. When I say rollercoaster, I mean it!
The Future
The work never ends. Since going full-time in 2017, I’ve poured my heart and my soul into the business and treating it like my own mini-startup.
With a renewed sense of purpose, I’ve doubled down on SEO, video content, long-term relationships with brands, and honestly just writing useful content and not the usual travel fluff.
Now, Going Awesome Places is expanding where it’s not just Will behind the scenes but a whole incredible team.
We look forward to sharing with you all the awesome places of the world.
We get a lot of questions about what I use or recommend.
Well we got pretty good at answering the “what do you use?” questions over the years and eventually we thought it’d be a good idea to put it all together in a toolbox page that has everything from what we use to plan our trips to what you’ll find in our camera bag.
