about Me

Hi, my name is Ben 👋🏻

I have been in the travel space since 2015. I started by creating, building, and growing theme accounts on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

Before doing travel theme pages, I started a blog during my first year of college that was a devotional-style blog. The concept behind it was every day I would read a new chapter of a devotional and share how it related to me in the moment. For example, if today was about being “bold,” I wrote about how I was to be bold in my day to day.

After dipping my toes into blogging with that site, I paused my efforts and focused on school. Entering my sophomore year, I stumbled upon MKBHD and Unbox Therapy and fell in love with the idea of reviewing products. So I decided to build up a blog around product reviews. At the time, I reviewed things I bought recently because my thought was if I bought this, then I have a personal connection to it and will have an unbiased view of it.

After getting my first batch of product review posts up, I saw some traffic and thought, d*mn, I have something here. So I decided to take to Instagram, where I would spend days reaching out to brands for free products in exchange for a product review from a college student’s point of view. I made sure to share that the reviews would be unbiased and I would share good or bad things. The brands loved it. Soon after that, I would find myself getting new gear for my next year at school!

After that year of doing posts with my product review website, I was home for summer break. During one of my lunch breaks, I opened up Instagram, where I saw an account called Modern Outdoors. After researching more about Modern Outdoors, I noticed they just reshared content from others, so I told myself I could do this! So I figured out a name that was catchy and started to build the account up.

Fast forward 6 months, and this is where things started to pick up steam. I hit 100k followers and thought to myself, I am the sh*t. Well, kind of. Once I reached that milestone, I wanted to work with brands again, so I tapped back into that old product review network, and sure enough almost all the brands were on board to work with me more.

Over the years, I have worked with countless brands, tourism boards, and hotels. It’s been a wonderful and wild ride to bring me to where I am today.

Well, remember that Instagram account I mentioned to you? Well, in 2018, I decided to start selling my own merch which worked out for a few months then sales stopped coming in. When that happened, I stopped using my website. Fast forward to 2023, when I started to post more seriously, took some courses, and decided to see what I could do with the site. Now the site is growing daily and on track to get over 10k pageviews at the time I writing this.

This brings me to why you are on this website. I started a new X account (formerly Twitter) a few weeks ago and started to share my journey in the niche site space. I put out a poll to see if people wanted to see me build a new niche site in public, and sure enough, they did. So I present to you Epic Road Tripper a site by nichesitesben.

The goal with this website is to be a build in public project where I share the ups and downs publically and see how far I can grow this website. I want this to be a public case study for new bloggers to share that if I can do this, so can you!