We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jeff & Crystal Bryant. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jeff & Crystal below.

Jeff & Crystal, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

When we decided to start a travel and food website, it was an easy leap from an earlier food blog. Our passion for exploring makes this feel more like fun than a job. Picking our niche was a little trickier, until we decided to just stick to our own version of travel. We both like to support locally-owned businesses whether we are in a small town or big city. This turned into our tagline “Visit like a local”.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

We became parents early in our marriage, so travel was limited. As our kids grew up, our excursions were road trips with lots of unique stops. My love for planning has the added benefit of uncovering some hidden gems. By the time we became empty-nesters, our travel style had become easy to replicate. This was a key for building our articles. We want readers to easily create an itinerary using some or all of the stops we highlighted.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

One of the biggest hurdles in our industry is building trust with tourism bureaus. After all, you’re asking them to have faith in your delivery of satisfactory advertisement value well after your visit dates. I overcame this by reaching out directly to not only tourism partners, but many of the businesses. The personalized approach helps us learn what each stop has to offer visitors. There are so many businesses doing great things, they just need their stories told.

When others in our industry told us of a city that stopped working with bloggers, after getting burned, we wanted to help them see that there are plenty of good people out there. Multiple phone calls with the tourism director led to our first sponsored trip. When we returned home, we got to work over delivering on our commitment. In the end, that was the first of many satisfied collaborations.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

In our business, reputation is extremely important. Over the past six years, we have learned to temper our eagerness with the realities of time management. When you are only in a destination for 2 or 3 days, you need to make the most of your time. I will build our itinerary to be a good mix of attractions, food, and local love. Over time, this shows by the catalog of articles we assemble from each destination. Our clients, the tourism bureaus, can scan through cities of like-size to see how we showcased similar destinations. A consistent approach has helped us strengthen our reputation throughout North America.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.ourchanginglives.com
• Instagram: ourchanginglives
• Facebook: Our Changing Lives