It's been nearly a year since I last posted on this site and, if I'm honest, I've been wondering whether it's finally time to close it down.

WAIT, WHAT?!!!!

Let me explain a bit more....

The early days of Outdoor-Girl.com coincided with a change in my career direction. I was a budding outdoor writer, moving towards making my passion for the outdoors into my career. You know what they say, when your career is something you love, you'll never work another day in your life.

Writing about outdoor adventures gave me a real buzz and this platform was great for sharing the things I loved. Business wise, I intended to carve out a career writing commercially for a variety of outdoor magazines and guidebooks.

However, as time went on, I realised that the reality of being a full-time outdoor writer meant that I never had a day off. The place that I normally went to empty my head had become the place where my head was always thinking, always considering what information I needed in order to write about the adventure.

If I'm honest, I was losing the joy of simply being outdoors.

It was time to rethink my writing career. In doing so, I realised that I missed working with businesses. Fast forward through the tweaking phase, and I now have a business model which provides content writing (ie. blog posts and website copy), copywriting and digital marketing services for businesses.

The amazing part about this is that some of my clients are businesses placed firmly in the outdoor sector so in a roundabout way, I have actually managed to link my passion for the outdoors into a career. I can draw upon my own outdoor experience and knowledge of the sector to provide a better service for my clients, but it happens in a way which still allows me time to empty my mind when outdoors.

Which brings me back to Outdoor-Girl.com

Because of everything mentioned above, I simply lost the joy in sharing my own adventures on this site. I no longer wanted to spend time writing about what I was doing in a blog post and instead chose to be in the moment. Instagram also changed the dynamics as it became really easy to post a few pictures with a micro-blog about whatever I'd been doing.

That said, instead of closing this site down, I've been mulling a few other ideas around in my head. Outdoor adventure is one of my passions, but I'm also really interested in health, wellbeing and the environment. These other interests never really seemed to fit into the structure of Outdoor-Girl.com so they never featured.

So, with all this going through my mind this morning, I decided it was time to give my subscribers an update and explain why they'd not seen anything for so long. When I logged on, I was gobsmacked to see that there are still plenty of people clicking onto Outdoor-Girl.com every day - which I guess confirms that there's still value in keeping the site active.

It will take me a while to look at how and whether to restructure this site to incorporate blog posts about topics such as yoga, gardening, growing my own veg, healthy eating and eco-friendly products, but I'm pretty excited about making some changes.

The ethos will always be around the outdoors - whether that's outdoor adventures, outdoor relaxation or staying healthy - but watch this space for future changes.

Finally, a BIG THANK YOU to all of you who have been loyal subscribers to Outdoor-Girl.com for so long.

Outdoor-Girl is run by Jacquie Budd, a freelance writer providing content writing, copywriting and digital marketing services for businesses.

Visit www.jacquiebudd.com for more information.