Well hello there! Welcome to my blogging corner on the interweb. No matter how you’ve landed on my page, be it through my social media channels, or someone sharing this page, I’m happy to have you here and thank you for spending some time on my blogs. This is my first official blog here, and I wanted to use this to introduce myself, what I do, why I started it and how blogging fits into all of this.

I am Mili. I am a marketer by profession and qualification, a traveller by passion and a YouTuber in addition. Considering travelling is my passion and I have been doing it since I was 2, it only made sense to have a YouTube channel dedicated to travel. However, this was not always the plan. In fact, over the past year, the way my channel has grown and the people I’ve met still amazes me.

Here’s how the story goes. It all began in 2011. Video blogging on YouTube was becoming the next big thing. People logged on to YouTube to watch their favourite video bloggers more as opposed to watching music videos. I wasn’t actively following any YouTubers at the time, but I did stumble across a video or two every now and then.

Somewhere, I’ve always wanted to share my experiences, my stories. At that point I was at a crossroads in figuring out if I wanted to do this, and if I did, would I want to write about it or film it? At the time I was not confident enough to be in front of a camera, be creative and shoot a video. Neither did I have the necessary equipment nor the time as I was tied for time because of University.

The other thing was that at the time I didn’t feel I was creative enough to write a script, shoot it, edit and upload it. As a matter of fact, I didn’t know what being creative was? My perception of creativity was always, someone who could draw or sketch beautifully, or could take a pen and a paper and write down lyrics and potentially maybe even give it music. I couldn’t do any of that, trust me I tried. I still draw stick figures. And somewhere deep down in my heart I was also trying to escape the hate that comes on YouTube. People can be very cruel under an account name and use their keyboard as a weapon.

When I finally finished university in 2012, and I had more time on hand, I seriously started considering putting myself on YouTube. Why? Because if I didn’t try, I wouldn’t know if I like doing it or not? I needed to overcome my fear of cyber bullying. I have in the past, been bullied at school. So knowing that being on YouTube meant hate comments would follow made me anxious. Not only that, I still felt that I lacked creativity, which was another hurdle I needed to overcome.

So how did all of that happen? At the end of 2012, I reconnected with a good friend of mine, which helped boost my confidence. Why? Because she also wanted to try out creating video blogs. In fact she’s the one who first said it and it wasn’t till I knew for sure that she definitely wants to make some videos, did I raise my hand and say okay let’s do this. And thus in January 2013, my YouTubing venture began. Once that happened, we knew we had to keep creating videos to entertain people that watched our videos. Releasing our very first video was probably the hardest. The butterflies, the anxiety, the nerves, I can keep going. But it was received with more positivity than negativity that worked as a great booster and we knew we had to keep going. It was then, that a lot of ideas started flooding my mind; I needed my pen and paper to jot them all down.

The first time my pen touched the paper to write down a list of ideas that we had, I feel I found my creative streak. Because not only was my mind just bursting with ideas, it was bursting with complete scripts. I could envision what I wanted to put forward.

Days passed, weeks pushed and months flew. I was loving what I was doing! But all good things unfortunately come to an end. As time passed, my friend got busy with her commitments, and I with mine and making videos together was no longer an option.

But how could I stop devoting time to do what I love. Dramatic much. Not making videos, made me miserable, my mind was still bursting with ideas. I had gone to USA in 2013 and had taken A LOT of footage that was just lying around. I had written extensive scripts, showcasing some of the most popular spots that people have heard about like The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, The Walk of Fame in Los Angeles, The Strip in Las Vegas, The White House in Washington, Central Park in New York City, Millennium Park in Chicago and more!

As I had all this footage with me, I thought why not start a brand new channel dedicated to travel mainly, with videos on other topics every now and then. Thus began MiliG on YouTube. In the beginning, as mentioned I was doing videos on the different cities I had visited and I’d think of topics to do to fill in the weeks where I didn’t have any travel related videos. Over time I’ve decided to stop doing videos on random topics and focus as much as possible on travel only. So now my channel consists of:

-        City videos

-        Travel tips to countries and/or cities

-        Hotel reviews

-        Festivities of the world

-        Walkthroughs

It is completely travel focused and those are the only videos that go up.

So the lessons that I’ve learnt from this experience are:

- Make your weakness(es) your strength. I never considered myself to be creative at one point, but after this journey, everyday every minute there’s a new video idea popping into my head with different ways that I want to put it forward.

- There will always be hate no matter what you choose to do in life. It’s upto you if you want to let it affect you and keep you from doing what you want to do or go ahead and continue doing what you love. Now, I’m all for constructive criticism but there are some people out there that are just plain simple rude and pass comments that’s unnecessary. I’ve encountered various hate messages over the course of putting videos up, but I love the process of creating a video so much that I try and ignore the hate messages that do come through. Yes, easier said than done I know.

How does blogging fit into all of this?  Well with travel videos sometimes, you have experiences which can’t necessarily always be conveyed via a video an alternate platform is required. I hope to write blogs every so often to share some of these experiences. In saying that, not all my blogs will be about travel, some might be on other topics too!

Anyway, thank you for reading this post. If you get a moment do check out my YouTube channel www.youtube.com/user/TheMiliGoswami. You can also like my page on Facebook: www.facebook.com/MiliTravels or follow me on twitter @milgos.

Until next time.

Adios

MiliG