& That's How I Found My IKIGAI!

Apr 24, 2021

4 min read

Hello everyone, A few of you might know me as #dorafromsopara or someone vocal about the beautiful vicinity of Vasai - Virar but the truth is 8 months back, I wasn't this person. I was a travel enthusiast and a person who could speak lengths and bounds about my love for travel. since I was in 7th std. My definition of travel has changed drastically in the past, be it aspiring to be an air hostess, getting graduated in Tourism and Hospitality Management, to working in the best travel company in the world and now I find peace and soulfulness in the unexplored destinations, hence I began my blog page named Sayyaar (an Urdu word for an explorer). But becoming a travel blogger and travel content creator was never on my to-do list.

Chapter 1: Covid made me do it!

Let me remind you of 2020 when everyone was scared of covid 19 and I was chilling at my farmhouse in Khed, Maharashtra, enjoying the most beautiful view from my window. It was that moment when I picked up my phone and shot a timelapse video of a gorgeous sunset without a tripod, How did I do it?

Simple, I just placed my phone on my makeup box and browsed through some settings and tada! hit record and the magic began. My Instagram account was private back and only a set of friends/followers saw it and seemed to have fallen in love with the video of this unexplored part of Maharashtra.

So once I came back home to Nallasopara, I had this budding rage of adding value and building my personal space in the world of the internet and to it hence Sayyaar was born. With that, I decided to make my private life, public and just follow my heart.

Chapter 2: The Initial Days with blogs and REELS

Initially, I was just writing blogs on my website about unexplored places in India but after a few blogs, I realized that I wasn't delivering an authentic experience to my readers since I wasn't travelling to those places because of covid. Also in those days I was health-conscious and used to cycle around the beautiful villages and beaches of Vasai - Virar. since I love to record photos and videos it followed naturally. So I started posting about it on my Instagram stories and it surprisingly gained a lot of attention. By that time a lot of people liked my articles on my blogs and even appreciated the content I was posting but I wasn't happy with it and I needed to level up my content game and set myself apart from the crowd. As they say, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, my short cycling trips in Vasai - Virar changed my perception and played as a catalyst to my content creation game. Instagram REELS played a major part, it was just launched and was a no. 01 tool to grab the attention of your audience.

( Instagram algorithm was favoured towards creators who were producing reels, It was a feature that they were pushing hard to kill the competition, as a matter of fact, it is still very dominating. )

So I just randomly posted my first reel of a calm lake surrounded with greenery in Sopara gaon with zero knowledge of how to use hashtags or the perfect angle of the camera, nothing at all! But to my surprise, it gained around 1k views whereas my followers were just 300 back then, people started loving my 15/10 secs reel videos because it gave them a very calm, soothing, and sukoon feeling.

Check out some of my reels to get the context.

Chapter 3: The Game Plan

My previous encounter with the reel segment boosted my confidence to the next level and I started to educate myself on how to use hashtags, insights, music to use for the videos, so on and decided to run a one-week reel campaign wherein I posted a 15-sec reel every day at 7 pm and audiences went flabbergasted ( hehe, I just went Sashi Tharoor ) by it and started sharing my reels across. My biggest achievement will have to be a reel that was shot on my bucket list trip to Goa and unexpectedly, it reached 500k + views. That caught the attention of a lot of local Goan brands, they approached me to create something for them. but unfortunately, I was back in Mumbai then.

The more pictures and videos I posted of places explored by me in my local surroundings the more people were amazed by the fact that is these places exist in Vasai Virar.

Questions were poured in like

"aren’t you in Goa ?"

"Is this where you stay?"

And I felt amazing each time the questions poured in.

There was no looking back for me after that. Being from a south Bombay college, I was always been said "oh! you stay in a gaon." but now the journey of them saying I stay in a gaon to hey! your space is amazing made me make more travel content and then influencing them and various others wanting to visit the same gaon for its fascinating clean beaches and lush green villages is where I found my IKIGIA! Check out my Instagram page

So here's a tip for every one

It doesn't matter how big or small your following is you can still be able to reach 500k views through Reels
Always follow consistency, keep posting regularly or keep a target for the number of reels or post you want to post at the given time.
Engage with your audience.
Research and keep experimenting.
Be open to using new features during the initial days, remember trial and error is the key.

Hope you enjoyed reading this, share with people who have just started, and share your amazing reels with me. Would love to see them!