We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Wes Mergard. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Wes below.

Wes, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Risking taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.

One of the biggest risks I’ve ever taken involved setting my 13 year career in business and finance aside to pursue a business idea centered around something I’m really passionate about, which is traveling. Ever since my time attending the University of Cincinnati, I had been working at the same company. By my 33rd birthday I had already put in 13 years with the same company, coming up from an office assistant internship type role all the way to a Vice President position within their investments division.

But over the years my responsibilities had swelled, my work-life balance had been eroding away, and I couldn’t stomach the prospect of pouring decades more of my time into a career I was no longer fulfilled by. For the first time in my life I had been developing significant anxiety and starting having bouts of depression. At the end of the day, I knew where it was all stemming from and I decided it was time to make a change to protect my mental health.

Back during the COVID lockdown, I had started a personal travel blog and started getting more into photography. I had always really enjoyed traveling as a hobby, but as things were coming together on my blog, I started to wonder if I could ever turn this into something that I could make a living from.

I ultimately made the decision to quit my really safe, but highly stressful job in finance to create a business centered around travel. Today I’m working to monetize my travel blog website and YouTube channel through display advertisements and affiliate links.

I also leverage my travel blog’s success to generate business as a website developer. I usually like to work with small businesses located in Cincinnati where I can provide the tangible website they need, alongside more broad business advice where I can lean into my education and corporate work experience.

I’m also hoping to bring small group organized travel to Cincinnati this year. As someone who loves travel, it’s a niche that I don’t currently see fulfilled in the area that I live. In November 2024, I’m planning to lead a 14 person group trip to Tromso, Norway where travelers will focus on chasing the Northern Lights above the Arctic Circle. It’s a near replica of a trip I planned and took back in 2023. If all goes well, my plan is to offer additional trips throughout the year. My hope is that by marketing the trips to folks living in the Greater Cincinnati area, people can make new friendships and stay connected with their fellow travelers afterwards.

Having a few different ways to generate income that feed off each other is part of my overall business strategy and one that I helps mitigate the risk that I’m taking!

So far the risk has been paying off as I’m making a lot of progress in all of the above mentioned areas. With that said, there’s still a lot of work and progress to get done to ensure I’m not forced back into the traditional work force!

Wes, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Hey! My name is Wes and I’m the Owner of the Travel With Wes travel blog. Travel has always been a passion of mine, I love traveling to new places, meeting new people, experiencing new cultures and hiking through some of the most beautiful places on our planet.

I partially started this journey back in 2020 when I created the first iteration of this website and blog to start documenting my travels. I share all of the guides and blogs that I write about different places I’ve visited on my website to help educate travelers on places to visit, provide inspiration for future trips and travel better using tricks I’ve learned along the way.

As of March 2023, I quit my corporate job to pursue the blog and my YouTube channel full time. The goal is to increase the pace at which I’m traveling and creating content so that the blog can fully sustain itself!

I’ve also turned the skills I’ve learned by building my own blog, into a website design side hustle. From design to SEO, I provide clients with a complete website solution. I like working with small, Cincinnati based businesses, where I can lean into 13+ years of corporate finance and investment experience to provide them value well beyond what they get from the website itself. My travel blog is the centerpiece of my portfolio that I show potential clients, and it’s been great knowing that my travel hobby has contributed to my web design sales. I think my offering to website design clients is really unique, since not only are you getting a great website, but you’re also getting invaluable business advice along the way at no additional cost.

One of my favorite aspects to travel blogging is that in addition to regular photography, I have a drone (Mavic 3) that I use regularly when creating content. Photography is something that I really enjoy, but doing it with a drone adds a whole extra layer of fun and complexity to it. It’s something that I think really helps set my work apart from the average blogger or creator and it’s something that I find really fun. In the crowded world of content creation I think it’s really important to have something that helps separate your work from the masses, and for me that’s the drone element.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

There are two things that have been really helpful for me to grow clientele. The first is word of mouth and the second is upselling.

Word of mouth is by far the cheapest and most effective way of growing your clientele. And the thing to remember about word of mouth is that you create it when you do a great job for your existing clients. If you deliver high quality, results then people are going to speak highly of your work when asked by others. With web design, people will ask my clients who built their websites. The nice thing about that is that they usually only ask if they like the design. I make sure all of my clients have a great experience that they want to share when asked.

Another thing to keep in mind is that your existing clients can be a great source of opportunity. I had a client that was planning to launch a video on demand Pilates class and all she hired me to do was create the website. After working together and delivering a website that she loved, she ended up wanting to bring me on as a partner in her business to help get it launched. We’re hoping to go live with that project in late April/early May! She’s already been extremely successful on Instagram (over 100k followers!) and we’re hoping to carry that momentum over to video on demand.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

It’s important to remember that each social media app is very different, despite how similar they can all feel at times. One works on TikTok does not guarantee success on Instagram, and won’t even be relevant to an app like Pinterest.

With that said, posting consistently, especially early on, is one of the biggest things you can do to improve your chances at success. And while the algorithms do tend to reward you for posting consistently, it’s not even really about that. The important thing to know about posting consistently is that you’re going to develop your creative skills more quickly. By posting more, you’re practicing how you create content more. Just like shooting a basketball, the more you do something, that better at it you’ll get. You need to avoid falling into the trap of thinking that you’ll “post more when you’re better at posting content” because you’ll never get better without practicing it.

A lot of my early content was cringey, and the quality of my early photography barely passes the bar for what I publish these days on my blog or social media. But if you never practice, you’ll never get better. So get out there and post more consistently, not for the algorithm, but because the practice is invaluable!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://travelwithwes.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/travel.with.wes
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/travelwithwes1
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@travelwithwes