Hey Aleah, great idea about documenting a backpacking trip through Europe for the “not so rich” traveler.

The need to heavily promote your adventure in the beginning isn’t that important if you choose to document your travels properly.
1. Give your readers as much of a heads up as you can before hand. Maybe show off some of your equipment you will be taking and what some of the things you think you will need will be.
2. Create posts about the general route you will take, some of the places you think you “must” visit and some that are a possible interest. Maybe a rough timeline on how long each leg of the journey will take.
3. Give your readers a general posting timeline that you hope to follow while away. This will give your regular readers something to look forward to.
3. I don’t know if you use YouTube, but this is the perfect time to start. You can record your backpacking adventures and then upload them to your channel every time you get a chance. These videos would be a great way to promote your blog as people are always looking up travel related videos.
Even if you only uploaded a video or two every three days or so, and blogged on your site as well, you would end up with a heck of a lot of content by the end of your trip.
4. recap and promote. once the trip is over you can do a recap post and video to show highlights of the trip and turn it into an easy to follow series that any new visitors in the future would be able to follow your travels from start to finish for years to come.

I think that if you follow something like what I have written there that you will see an increase in the number of visitors to your site each week. On top of that, any unused footage or journals writing you may have not used can be utilized in the future for posts on days that you don’t have much to write about. Just pull out the old, unused content and title it as “The other day I was reminded of an old museum I visited” or something along those lines.

Well good luck and have a great trip.