G’day folks. Twelve years ago as I readied myself to return home to Australia from Japan after spending two years there, I decided to take my blogging much more seriously. Prior to 2014 my blog was known as ‘The Greater World’ which I felt in the end didn’t really reflect what the blog was about (travel) and really didn’t pick up much in the way of views at all.

I moved from … I think it was ‘blogger’? was that a thing? I can’t really remember it was 12 years back, over to Word Press with what I thought was a great name for my blog – ‘Andy’s World Journeys’. And I think I was right in as much as it was significantly better than ‘The Greater World’.

It took me a lot longer to start taking my YouTube channel as seriously. At some point I did though and changed the name to ‘Andy’s World Journeys’ years after I changed the blog name, and then it was as we emerged from Covid that I decided to focus a lot more energy into the YouTube Channel.

Well. Earlier this year I was looking for my channel on devices that I hadn’t signed in on and felt a little bit of despair. Even when I used the full term ‘Andy’s World Journeys’ that did not appear in what dropped down on the screen. It seems there is a channel that is outranking me severely full of cartoons with NEARLY the same title as my channel. Through the last few years I have been aware that the channel ‘Andy’s World Adventures’ casts a shadow on my small little channel, this is a channel of an actual TV series.

But this channel that has only recently started appearing on these searches which I do from time to time really has made me realise that as far as rankings go, the SEO quality of ‘Andy’s World Journeys’ is low. And I don’t really want to change my channel and blog name, but if I want to continue to grow them, I think it’s the only thing to do. I do so with hope but trepidation, knowing that perhaps it will be a case of one step forward and two steps back initially. But I think this simple change is necessary, and I don’t want to miss an opportunity.

I considered a bunch of different names. I wanted something simple, just the two words if possible, and after searching for synonyms and trying to avoid terms that have saturation out there such as ‘world’ and ‘travel’ I settled on it.

So from now on folks, Welcome to ‘Andy Roams’. Simple enough, but with a bit of uniqueness, and one I rather like! Which is pretty important, don’t you think? Speaking of which, what do you think? Would really love some feedback in the comments on this change and thank you all for your support through the years of ‘Andy’s World Journeys’. I am not planning any major changes to the format or the content I deliver, and I won’t be going back to change references to ‘Andy’s World Journeys’, there are just too many! But from here on – it’s ‘Andy Roams’.

As always, thanks for popping in today. Take care wherever you are in the world, and as always – May the Journey Never End!