Our Blogging Life In A Caravan

I got this email from Jools and Mikki Mauro explaining that “we sold up last year and proved to everyone that it is possible to live in a caravan, work, and enjoy life. I have inspired others to do the same (the power of blogging) so would like to write about what we have done, how, why and the benefits of blogging as we do!” I thought it was very interesting so here is the full story:

Hi, our story is only too familiar to most of us. Not enough money to do the things you want to do.

So the question was, after cutting back as far as we could, what else could we possibly do?

The answer, buy the biggest touring caravan you could and live in it!

No more worries about bills, we only have our site fees averaging £300 per month and a bottle of propane gas every thirty days.

So thats a massive saving our our house bills which used to average out at over £1400.00 per month!

We were no strangers to caravans or trailers as you call them across the pond, but the longest we had ever stayed in one was 4 nights.

Now we are over 250 consecutive nights and after surviving one of the worst winters we have seen here in the UK for decades. Lowest recorded outside temperature was -9.5 but we were lovely in warm averaging 22 degrees.

When we first looked into doing this, on searching the internet I found very little of value which we could relate to, yes there are blogs on living in 40ft motorhomes travelling europe or the other extreme of living off grid and using compost toilets!

We decided to document what we did

So we decided to document what we did and what we do, with the hope that anyone else who find that they too want to take up our way of living can have a reference or point of contact to point them in the general direction.

I had never written a blog before, so all this was new to me back in July 2010, but you learn as you go along.

One of the first things that I leant was that people are interested in what you do, if you write on a regular basis and you write original content that is written from the heart.

I dont hold back, I speak my mind and tell it how it is, but with this comes a genuine story of how we live in our caravan on a full time basis.

Living in a caravan is not an easy option, we both work full time, “M” is a retail manager and I run my own antiques/collectables business. But the benefits far outway any disadvantages, not that we have come across many!

Our blog has steadily increased with followers and readers, the month of April will be our best ever yet.

I use Twitter to promote the blog with the user name of “caravanliving” and I am very active on a number of forums, again I use these as platforms for promoting the blog.

One other thing that I do, which does work, is that with every item that I sell I include a “Our Life In A Caravan” business card. This surprisingly does work.

Something else that I wasnt expecting this blog to do was to inspire others to do as we have and live full time in a caravan.

We have managed by the power of blogging to inspire several other couples into making the same lifestyle choice as us. This I find absolutely amazing! We know what it takes to do what we have done, which is give up your bricks and mortar and sell your furniture etc! Like I said its not an easy option. So for someone to do this after reading our blog is awesome, if not a little scarey!

Simply “write” and “write often”

I blog more or less everyday, writing about the things that affect me, I can go weeks and not even mention the caravan.

People crave original content, not hashed over, recycled spin.

Its still early days for our blog, it takes time to build up readers/followers, but after 8 months of blogging to start to see the increase is heartening and rather fun. Along the way if I help others realise their dreams then even better.

The best bit of advice I’ve seen on blogging, which is the most obvious, is simply “write” and “write often”.

Thanks for taking the time to read through this, we can be found here.

Till later………..

Jools and Mikki Mauro

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