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We have been traveling blogging for over fourteen years then and we’re really fortunate to be able to make money with our travel site and earn a living from it.
Whenever we meet people and we tell them what we do, we’re often met with “wait a second, you can make money go blogging”?
Few persons believed blogging to be a viable career opportunity when we first started blogging. To be honest, we did n’t realize the full profit potential when we started – we started because we love traveling and sharing our adventures and tips, but we soon saw an opportunity to make it our business.
Why no? Cedar Key is JOY, too? There are many ways you can make money go blog, from sponsorships, partnerships, affiliate plans and marketing – as well as so much more.
So the next day I get asked “wow you can make money go blogging” I now have this link to share with them.
The biggest query that we get asked frequently is now addressed:
How Do You Make Money Travel Blogging?
This experience it, the majority of people are drawn to our journey life and desire to travel for money. When I tell persons we make money writing about our journey activities, I’m often met with amazed eyes, mouths dropping to the ground, and sighs of “wow you can do that! “?
We launched a local, nice niche website about living in Raleigh in 2020 ( our current home ), and we have since experienced rapid growth. We are now able to make a steady income from it as well as our travel blog ( plus a few additional options that are not related to travel blogging ).
But, what’s the best way to make money go blogging? What are some ways to monetize a vacation blog?
Begin With The Right Mindset
Lake Louise, CanadaBefore you jump the gun and start signing up for online courses and reaching out to commerce planks, you got to start with the right attitude.
That is, approach your site with the idea that it is a reflection of your knowledge and expertise, certainly a tool for making money.
The point you must know is you will not make much money OFF your travel website (you you but you need very high traffic numbers ) but BECAUSE of your travel blog.
Blogging can open many doors for you, but they wo n’t close until you establish yourself as a leader and have a loyal following.
If you want this to be a long- word attitude therefore treat it as such. I see far too many travel influencers getting into this activity just to get free visits so they can go. If you do it in a morally righteous and reliable manner, that might be all you want, but it’s not a long-term business plan.
If you want to make money as a traveling blogger, you need a lengthy- word business plan, no a free ride.
Okay, I’m now giving my two percent on this subject; however, here’s how to go blog.
CAVAET: Get it from someone who travelled for 12 years before starting a travel site ( and then getting free trips and getting paid to travel ) Free press trips are the WORST way to travel. If you just want to travel the world for free, and you have no higher purpose for starting a travel blog, then do n’t start one! Very little work and effort is required.
Selling Your Own Products
It took us three times to start earning money from selling our own goods. I had the text 2/3 written before we even started the journey website. It was my damned anxieties and fears that got in the way.
A reliable source of income from your vacation site, even though you can create your own goods or services, is another option. The points actually on your website that make you money, like advertising and affiliates, are centered on traffic which can be dangerous ( more on this later ), so it’s important to consider outside your website first.
We now have three textbooks published: Step into Sacredness: 12 rules for creating the life your heart longs for, 30 days to Money Mindfulness: helping you build a better connection with the things that will help you travel more because of B-School.
I also have my superior instruction program” How to shift from Blog to Business” and I have collaborated on a program with my business manager and his family called Confidence Igniter.
It’s all about gaining trust and power in your life – requirements for success and happiness in any aspect of your life.
Begin examining the various products you can make and the benefits you can offer when you write your business plan for your travel website. ( Be innovative, there’s so much you can do ).
You can also create merchandise as well, which does n’t have to be digital products either. Some individuals have their own branded packs and sweatshirts, others have actual maps or photo books.
Paid Marketing Campaigns With Brands and Tourism Sheets
A paid Mardi Gras with kids strategy is something I’m aware of, and it’s fun, but we also do a lot of work behind the scenes, promoting places for businesses and hospitality boards.
We work with destinations to promote their experiences via our travel blog and social media platforms, such as Instagram and Pinterest.
We collaborate with them to select activities, experiences, and places to visit that we are confident will appeal to them as well as what our readers will want.
We only pick brand promotions if we know it will be high quality and we know our readers will be interested in it, otherwise we risk damaging our reputation.
We do n’t participate in campaigns that do n’t fit with our brand or readers, it’s that simple. We very rarely engage in group campaigns with other bloggers or media because they frequently do not appeal to our target audience.
We just do n’t think that it best fits with our travel story and we just like to do our own thing.
Sponsored Posts
Yes, we do sponsored posts on occasion, which is when a brand wants us to promote their product or experience for any particular reason.
Again, we choose carefully based upon the criteria I mentioned above.
We’ll share products or services that we think are valuable to share with our audience and who we believe to be useful.
We always disclose if we have been paid to create quality content for a brand, and so must you. If you do n’t, you’ll be criticized and your credibility will suffer.
Sponsored posts are basically like an advertisement that is written by us, but we always include our own ideas, opinions and expert knowledge.
Sometimes these may come in the form of a sponsored social media update as well.
Speaking in front of an audience
TBEX presentationSomething I’m really enjoying lately as an income stream is public speaking.
I had no trouble stepping up on stage to share my thoughts and experiences because I taught for 15 years. It’s definitely something I want to do more of and am really digging into to sharpen my abilities in this area.
Over the years, I had presented at conferences organized by tourist boards, and have spoken at several blogging and social media conferences such as TBEX, Problogger and SoMeT and TBEX.
Even the unpaid ones are worthwhile because you can connect with other speakers in the field while some are paid while others are not.
I decide if it’s worth it on a case by case basis, depending on the packages offered. If the family wants me to speak without getting paid, then leaving must be a pretty awesome package.
I also speak at events in Raleigh for our other site This is Raleigh, some of which has been paid.
Mentoring and Coaching
We have a private mentoring program connected to B-School. This technically falls under the affiliate stream of income, but I actually offer a mentoring bonus instead of just taking the affiliate commission and sending them on their way to fend for themselves.
Therefore, we put a lot of effort into it.
We offer coaching calls where we share our tips and insights, and we have an active Facebook group where we answer questions from the Dreamer Fools and help guide and support them. ( They are such a cool group btw! )
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money from your travel blog because you only set it up once, and the income keeps coming in forever more. You find your true freedom there through passive income.
Affiliate marketing is where you promote other people’s products and services and receive a commission every time someone books through your link. It does n’t cost the reader ( most of the time ) as you are paid a commission by the company.
You must be knowledgeable about what your target audience wants and how to place affiliate links in order to get enough traffic to convert.
There is a lot of work required and you do need to have decent traffic ( though surprisingly not a lot, if you know what you’re doing ) and an audience who trusts you.
To keep that trust, you want to be transparent with your affiliate marketing campaign. If you recommend tours, hotels, or attractions that you’ve personally experienced and would recommend, you’re more likely to convert.
We only recommend products or services that we personally use, like and trust. There might be the odd few that we have n’t had personal experience with, but we know the source as a highly trusted and reputable one.
We work with Booking.com and Discover Cars.com as affiliates, which we mostly promote because we think they are the best and regularly use them.
We do n’t want to be shoving 13 different accommodation booking sites in your face just so we can make money. We’d rather provide less choice for our readers from a trustworthy and worthwhile source.
If you want to learn how to make money with your travel blog through affiliate marketing our friend Michelle’s course, Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing, is the best out there.
Learn how she went from$ 0 to over$ 50, 000 a month in affiliate income. That is freedom, exactly. We’ve done the course and loved it and learned a lot! We would now generate a LOT more passive affiliate income than when we first started using it.
And if there is one income earning strategy I recommend you implement straight away, it’s affiliate marketing. You wo n’t get immediate results, but it will pay off i n the long term. Six years later, you wo n’t be as shocked as you realize how much money you have left over and must spend the following year researching the strategies through hundreds of blogs.
Click here to get started with the affiliate marketing course!
Freelance Content Creation
As well as sponsored content, we also have various freelance content creation gigs running in the background. These are essentially travel guides, guest posts, and articles we have written for other publications, as opposed to publishing on our own blog.
For the two-year Nissan sponsored Kidspot Going Places campaign, I contributed. Kidspot is the largest parenting website in Australia and I wrote a column on family travel.
Craig also contributes to the HomeAway blog and the Skyscanner flight comparison website with two articles each month.
We’ve created videos for tourist boards and often do some ad hoc freelance writing gigs here and there, including some print.
Consulting
There is a sizable market here for us to assist DMOs and tourism companies with their social media and blogging strategies.
If you’ve been blogging for a while, and you’ve picked up some tips and tricks on how you’ve been getting traffic, there are people out there who would love to hear your insights!
What knowledge did you gain from blogging, and how could you help other businesses gain the same knowledge and increase their visibility?
Blogger Brand Campaign Relationships
Fun with my fellow blogging fiends in JordanIf we had the time we could easily organize and manage blogger brand campaigns. We are aware of how to maximize their effectiveness.
Essentially, it’s where you collaborate with other bloggers to build a series of content around a brand in order to promote it across all your streams, be it social media or on the blog.
We simply do n’t have time for these groups that are currently forming to manage these types of relationships for travel bloggers.
Create A Travel Agency
There are plenty of mobile travel agencies these days, but you can also run your blog like a travel agency and offer itinerary planning services, or partner with tour companies to tailor experiences directly for your readers.
Because this is a lot of work, we do n’t want to go down that path, but it’s still a good place for readers to form a trust.
Become A Tour Company
You could also turn your blog into a tour company with Chrstina on her Banff group trip, similar to working as an online travel agent.
You could become your own tour guide and organize your own trips, where you take your readers on adventures with you.
Wandering Earl offers group tours around the world. He has more than experience guiding people through the same experiences as what he does because he has a history of traveling.
My good friend, Christina McEvoy has had huge success with running her own tours as have our other good friends, Dave and Lina Stock from Divergent Travelers.
Since we have two daughters, we have considered this to be too much work, but other travel bloggers have succeeded in this field.
TV Travel Show
Our feature on Places We GoOk, so this is a bit of a pipe dream for most, but I would love to fulfill my dreams of being on Getaway.
I’d like to follow my own film crew so I can just relax and enjoy the adventure! Our friends from Places We Go in Australia ( we’ve been featured on her show ) do this as does Samantha Brown with her Places to Love TV Show.
Podcasts on YouTube andamp;
If you are confident in your video creation abilities, why not set up a YouTube channel?
You can make money through advertising on YouTube and you do n’t need a huge audience to generate income ( although it will be small to start ).
Advertising
Views from Hotel Milan and Spa in VeronaI leave advertising to the end because it’s a stream of income, but it’s lucrative and unreliable – so you should n’t start a travel blog with the intention of making money through advertising.
Let me explain.
You earn money every time someone clicks on your ads, and so your ad revenue is dependant on your traffic – more traffic, more likelihood of clicks.
Traffic is dependent on how much of an audience you have, your SEO skills, and your streams of driving traffic to your blog– such as your social media presence or how high you rank on search engines.
You do n’t want to concentrate on making money off of advertising because you need a lot of traffic. As many travel bloggers have found out, once Google changes their algorithm and you get dropped, you use a vast majority of your income overnight.
Some ad networks outperform others, too. Most people with low traffic put Google Adsense on their site, which generates pennies, and slows down your site.
Once you hit 50, 000 sessions per month, you can look at ad networks like Mediavine, and when you hit 100, 000 sessions a month, you can consider Raptive ( formerly AdThrive ).
FAQs on how to earn money as travel bloggers
Can you make good money travel blogging?
You can absolutely make money off of a travel blog, cycling around Versaille. You can make money off almost anything, either directly or indirectly.
It’s incredible the doors that you can open once you build an audience around something, and it’s amazing the number of people I’ve met who make money off their passions.
Making money traveling blogging is the best way to do it. It’s what you love and excel at. That being said, you’ve got to earn it and you’ve got to be honest. People who approach a travel blog almost always conclude that they only want to make money because they neglect their target audience and their goals.
You’ve got to build a foundation, a brand, an understanding of your audience, and a product or service they want.
It’s important you get your foundation in place first. By that, I mean things like:
Your brand and messaging
solidly written.
List of email subscribers
Functional and professional website
resources and tools
Social media communities
Your unique selling proposition ( USP)
Network of contacts
Media kit
Testimonials
You ca n’t build a skyscraper on a one- inch slab of concrete. Invest in your foundation!
Is it easy to make money as a travel blogger?
Do n’t stop the adventureNo, it’s not easy to make money as a travel blogger. It might take at least a year to begin making money off of your successful travel blog, but it could be simpler if you learned how to start a business and start earning money from it right away.
There’s a learning curve and it takes an investment of time and commitment like any business. It necessitates a lot of deliberation and seeking out the right people.
We’ve made huge mistakes, but over years have figured out how to do it the best way for us, and there will be a best way for everyone and a different business model for you depending on your skills, time commitment, goals, location, travel experience, and demographic.
Different doors can open whether you’re a family travel blogger, couple or solo. whether you are based in Australia, Europe, North America, or another place. Whether you’re strong at travel photography, or writing, or creating video content.
There are many factors at play.
We’re always innovating and growing and adding different passive income streams to our travel blog and using our data to evaluate how we’re making money travel blogging, what’s working, and what needs to change.
Experience, and having the right teachers helps immensely.
I want to be clear with you that travel blogging requires a lot of time and effort, whereas other blogging niches appear to offer better income. We started our travel blog because travel is our passion, so it made sense.
You’ll also have expenses, but they’re much smaller than if you were starting a brick and mortar business.
If you treat it like a business from the get- go, and that means investing in education, tools, and resources, then you’ll get paid as a business, not as a hobby.
How much money can you earn as a travel blogger?
There are too many variables to determine how much money you can make. It’s totally up to the ways in which you generate income and the audience you build around your brand.
Travel bloggers can make anywhere from$ 500 per month as passive income to bloggers who are managing sizable teams of staff members ( that’s the dream, right? ), all from their blogs. ).
I suggest you set big goals and then work towards them step by step. I believe that the higher your goals, the more you’ll advance and eventually make money. Some people like to set more realistic goals.
You are familiar with the proverb,” Should you set for the moon and land among the stars”?
What are your financial independence goals?
It’s a family affair! Most travel bloggers have enough money to live comfortably in developing nations. This is a very worthy goal.
It does n’t matter where you live or how much money you can make as long as you are content and leading a good life.
If you can reach that state of happy financial independence by living in a country where your travel expenses are much lower, then that could be a raging success.
But for me, especially with our kids, I did n’t want to have to live in a developing country to hit financial independence.
No matter where I lived, I wanted to be able to make enough money. That was the whole point to us starting a travel blog in the first place – to have time freedom, to be location independent.
We wished for freedom of where we lived. That involves being able to survive, as a family, in a place as expensive as our current one – Australia. And we have reached that level now.
Great Ocean Road, Australia We are paid six figures by our travel blog. This is not normal, it’s the top tier level – BUT, and this is one of my life’s mantras – if we can do it, so can you.
Adopt this as your daily mantra.
If someone else has done it, it’s evidence you can too. Now all you have to do is learn and carve out your own path AND why not try and do even better?
This is precisely the purpose of our travel blog. We want you to believe you can do it and we want you to go out and do it too!
When you put your credibility and authority before long and develop a loyal following that you value greatly, you can make a full-time income from your travel blog.
You’ve got to help your peeps believe in their own dreams and help give them what they need to do it too
Before You Get Too Excited…
Happy in JordanI wanted to make traveling my passion rather than just my lifestyle whenever I watched another Getaway or Great Outdoors TV episode.
I was shocked when I’d hear behind the scenes tales of just how unglamorous and exhausting getting paid to travel was. ” Yes, I guess so!” I thought,” You’re living the dream – stop complaining”.
It turns out travel blogging is exhausting, and they were not lying about there being challenges. Like most other types of businesses, it’s really not very profitable, especially in the first few months of starting an online travel business.
For me, it did n’t matter how exhausting it sounded, I knew that was the life for me. Ha! I was more interested in getting paid to travel than teaching. you want to know exhausting! ?
However, it is exhausting and requires a lot of effort. It would n’t be fair of me to paint a picture of this business and life that we live as all roses and sunshine.
Amazing life I still prefer teaching to this life, but I do.
I’ve never worked longer hours and I’ve been ejected so far out of my comfort zone that I no longer recognize the planet I’m on, nor the body I’m in. Travel blogging is a wild ride and I’d do it all over again – famous last words!
After two months of blogging, you ca n’t expect to be working with brands on paid campaigns or receiving paid travel experiences. Getting paid to travel is not that easy
Not a sprint, but a marathon.
It took us two years of intense work before money started flowing into our travel blogging business, and even then it was a while before we saw a healthy profit.
The best way to make money travel blogging depends on what skills and value you can bring to the table – play to your strengths.
Be imaginative. Be different. Explore a variety of sources of income.
Grab our free email course: 4 mistakes we made in travel blogging ( and how to fix them )
More Travel Blogging Tips
Do you want to launch a travel blog? Here are some other helpful resources about travel blogging …
The Dark Times and the founding of our travel blog are podcasts.
Helpful Tips for Working From Home
How to Start a Travel Blog ( A Step By Step Guide )
The resources and services we employ to expand our company
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