Alumni Cazzy and Bradley on their travels at Bryce Canyon National Park
Living the dream: Alumni duo’s travel blog success
Alumni Cazzy Magennis (Flexible Combined Honours, 2016) and Bradley Williams (Economics with Industrial Experience, 2015) have been travelling since they graduated and now live as digital nomads travelling in their van and running Dream Big, Travel Far a travel blog that was set up to inspire type 1 diabetics to travel the world without limitations.
Initially Dream Big, Travel Far was a travel blog set up to inspire type 1 diabetics to travel the world without limitations. Being a type 1 diabetic herself, Cazzy couldn’t find anyone who was providing information for what she wanted to do, and travel the world continuously, so she and her partner Bradley decided to create Dream Big, Travel Far whilst at university.
Travelling and living nomadically as a diabetic has been something that Cazzy has had to adjust to and has come with new challenges with new foods, new climates and new altitudes: everything is a learning curve. However, she’s grateful for all the new technology that is available and allowed her to travel safely and freely, and feels lucky to have such supportive doctors and a diabetic team behind her. She was driven to provide helpful travel information to fellow diabetics so they could experience the world in the way she loved to do.
Cazzy says: “It was always a business-orientated idea, but initially, we didn’t know what the future held for it. Naturally, it evolved into a full-blown travel blog, and it’s now one of the world’s biggest travel blogs, which is amazing! We knew we wanted to travel the world, and we knew we wanted to work for ourselves, so becoming digital nomads was a great way to do that. We never could predict our success with it, but hard work and determination resulted in it!”
During the COVID pandemic in June 2020 Cazzy and Bradley were unable to go abroad so they bought a van, named ‘Helen’, and spent three months of 9am – 9pm days doing it up into their dream home. They used YouTube tutorials as well as advice from family and friends, and got Helen ready to journey around the world in when restrictions were lifted; starting with Scotland in September 2020.
Cazzy says: “We had done a number of road trips over the years and always found them to be awesome. We tried out a variety of campervans and always thought it would be cool to create our own, but we could never find the time with the traveling we were doing. We honestly had never built anything in our lives, and we are super proud of what we built.”
As well as travelling as a diabetic being a challenging, they have also encountered other challenges on their journey such as time management. Cazzy says: “Running a business, trying to grow it, while also trying to capture everything at the same time, as well as being in the moment is always a challenge and something we’re constantly trying to work on. We are grateful for what we do, but it’s not a constant holiday. Overall, we’ve been pretty lucky on our travels, but more recently we’ve run into a number of problems with our campervan Helen. She struggled with different climates and all the driving she has been doing (thousands and thousands of miles), but it was to be expected!” Despite the challenges of this lifestyle Cazzy and Bradley absolutely adore that no two days are the same and find it a continuously exciting, challenging, and breath-taking way to live.
In order to make a business from their travels they realised that other people were making a full-time living from their travel blogs and wanted to do the same with theirs so took the time to learn, learn, and keep learning about all things SEO, affiliate marketing, and more. Then after a couple of years of growing the blog, whilst doing copywriting on the side to fund our travels, they took the leap in 2019 and committed full time on the blog, and it paid off, and it’s been their full-time job since then.
Cazzy finds it super exciting running her own business and says: “Lots of people tell us “they wish they could do what we do” and honestly, they can. The great thing about starting a blog is that you need very little investment to start with, you’ll need to cover the costs of building a website, hosting, etc., but time is what you need, time to learn, time to grow and those who stick at it are the ones who become successful. The chances are you won’t make any real money for the first year or so, but when you push through, you’ll suddenly see the potential. And, my biggest piece of advice is to find a niche and run with it. You can grow and craft something far quicker with a niche.”
However, if you’re not looking to start your own travel blog but are searching for some travel tips the duo say that: “Three of my popular travel trips are to use Monomdo and Skyscanner to search for your flights and set up price alerts, prices can change by hundreds depending on the time of week/month you book. Use booking.com for refundable rooms, it’s super useful if you need to book a room for proof of onward travel, or if plans change when traveling, and when dining out and you want to save money, eat out at lunchtime, it’s the same across the world, all restaurants do the best deals at lunch!”
In terms of what’s next for Cazzy and Bradley and Dream Big, Travel Far, they say that they will “continue traveling the world for the next few years, and meanwhile grow the blog further, we want it to reach one million monthly page views, and right now we are at 400,000 so almost halfway! Then we would like to buy some land and build our own eco-home in Kent. We will always travel, but the style of travel will change and adapt as our lives change. But one thing is for sure, we will always be working online, for ourselves.”
You can keep up with all of Cazzy and Bradley’s travels and tips on Dream Big, Travel Far and view some pictures of their travels below.
Helen the van camping at the vineyards in France.
Brad and Cazzy in Greece.
Helen the van in Utah.
Inside Helen the van.
Brad and Cazzy ready for the Grad Ball.
Date: 2 November 2022