There is a big difference between having a ‘popular’ vs. a ‘profitable’ blog. You can be a very popular blogger but you might not be monetizing your site properly, or you may be a blogger who does not have a huge audience but still earns a decent amount of money with a well-optimized, niche website. Which side do you want to be on?

For some, a travel blog may be nothing but a hobby but there are others out there who make carve a serious job out of their travel blog and build business empires off it. The first step is in realizing the latter is possible and that your travel blogs not only can support you but also your entire family, not just for travel but for absolutely everything.

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INSPIRATION: You better believe it. Here are travel bloggers who earn a minimum of $20,000 up to 10,000 each month just off their travel blog.

NOTE: All figures are in USD. Income information is based on data disclosed by each travel blogger excluding all travel expenses.

How do travel bloggers earn money from their travel blogs?

There are at least 10 different ways on how to monetize your travel blog. But it is important to note it does not happen overnight. On average, it takes one to two years before the money kicks in but this is variable.

For us, we had our first $1000+ month with Two Monkeys Travel after just three months but that came out of working 12 to 16 hour days on the laptop for those first three months. Also, how quickly you earn depends on your knowledge and skill base the moment you start. Obviously, learning from this course is a big plus for you!

One of the best ways to learn money from your blog is by choosing a profitable website builder. Check out the best website builders for blogs and see how they can help you.

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Start well, keep working hard, and follow these tips to get the most cash out of your efforts.

10 Ways to Profit From Your Travel Blog

1. Affiliate Marketing

This is the best passive income model you can use for yourself and your blog. Do it from Day 1! Affiliate marketing refers to recommending a brand, product, or service to your readers. From your blog, you refer people to the website of your affiliate partner. When these people buy, you get a commission, a reward that is a small share of the profit.

The best way to learn affiliate marketing is to enroll in a course that details the ins and outs of the process. It is worth studying this program because the potential earnings are limitless. For us, we make $6,000 a month just through affiliate marketing.

VALUABLE TIP 1: Amazon Associates is a great affiliate program for selling products. Here are the ones we work with:

Affiliate Window – One of the best that generates 1/3 of our affiliate earnings! You can also create a customized campaign with the advertisers listed on their platform.
CJ.com – Marmite – some love it & some hate it! Lots of brands, clunky and time-consuming to use but they have a Content Certified group where you can get sponsored campaigns.
Share a Sale – Lots of smaller brands and companies on here, also very good. We make around $1,000 to $ 2,000 per month from this platform.
Rakuten – Lots of options here, decent platform.

NOTE: They ask for a credit card on registration so they can charge $5 as an anti-fraud measure. But this is immediately refunded. If you would like to try to avoid this, e-mail me directly and I can try to assist with a referral, but this is at their discretion.

VALUABLE TIP 2: Accommodation affiliate programs are gold for travel bloggers including Booking.com, Agoda, Hostelworld, and Hotels.com.

VALUABLE TIP 3: More fantastic options include tours, transportation, and equipment.

VALUABLE TIP 4: Think about what you would spend money on to go traveling, find a company you would be happy to recommend to your grandmother, then check their website for a Partners or Affiliates section. This is how we partnered with World Nomads Insurance. We personally use them and recommend their services.

2. Brand Campaigns

When you have an audience and a following, companies will approach you to promote their products and services. If those products and services are appropriate to your audience and you would be happy to use them yourself, then you can promote them through sponsored posts, social media campaigns, ad banners on your website and more. Join these websites to help you find brands looking to work with bloggers:

Famebit
Webfluential
The Blogger Programme – if you are from the UK or based in Europe.
Tap Influence – the sponsored campaigns that we get here are usually around $800 to $ 4,000! We once ran a campaign that paid us $3,000 for a blog article + Facebook post.

Again, more are popping up every day, so keep an eye on the blogging groups to see what’s being said about them.

3. Brand Ambassadorship

Brand Campaigns vs. Brand Ambassadorship defined:

In a Brand Ambassadorship, you are promoting brands in the same way as you would for a brand campaign but on a longer-term basis. It is far more beneficial to both parties to form a long-term brand partnership, providing greater exposure for their brand and demonstrating a higher level of trust in their products. Of course, this also means that you’re securing a longer-term, more reliable income.

IMPORTANT: You need to be picky here because you are choosing to become a supporter and spokesperson for that brand. Make sure the brand, its practices, and its values are aligned with yours and those of your audience.

4. Paid Press Trips

This takes time, networking, and practice. But opportunities are definitely out there. Once you score one, be very clear about what you will provide in exchange for your fee.

Put a lot of effort into this and design something that looks great. If you just type it out as an email, it implies that you might just make up your fees and deliverables on the spot.

However, there is nothing wrong with free press trips either. They are great to build up your portfolio and network.

5. Freelance Writing

This is not directly making money from your blog, but it is leveraging your blog to get paid work writing for other websites and publications who then link back to your blog to expand your audience, so it’s all connected.

6. Selling Own Products

Selling products is a great way to add new income streams to your blogging business. E-books can be made from re-purposed blog content and photography. Audiobooks can be made to up-sell e-books. Alternatively, you can make themed merchandise like mugs and t-shirts using online companies. If you know a lot about a certain subject, including blogging, then you can design a course to teach others.

7. Providing Services From Your Website

Some travel bloggers have built such an audience and become such an authority on a subject that people are willing to pay them for their expertise. Some travel bloggers offer food tours, trip planning, and even one-on-one travel and life coaching! Of course, the prerequisite to all these is building your credibility as an expert.

8. Photography and Videography

Not the easiest way to make money, but if you have the skills, then there are many ways to sell your photos and videos. As well as the obvious method of selling photos through portals like Flickr, you could sell prints from your own site and sell your services directly to brands and hotel properties.

9. Banner Advertising (Google Adsense + Ad networks)

Only a few bloggers choose this route as a main means of income as the returns are low and the banners don’t look great on the site. Having said that, a limited number of Google Adsense or Ad Networks banners can be a nice supplemental income. Alternatively, some brands will pay directly to have banners on a website, but this is becoming less and less common.

10. SEO Sponsored Posts

There will always be mixed opinions on this one. Brands, or their PR companies, will approach bloggers asking to have an article published on their blog mentioning their name and linking back to their site. This can be a good way to make money, just be careful about who you link to and how.

5 Extra tips to Monetize Your Travel Blog

1. Know your goals and have a business plan. Start with a clear vision for your blog. If you want to profit from it, design a plan to make it happen. Never succumb to conflicting ideas about passion and money. Focus on your goals and always take action.

2. Plan your content. Have you found your niche? What do your readers want to get more of? Can you offer extras that will help your readers and also generate your profit?

3. Attend networking events. Networking events and travel trade shows are an important way to start getting your name out there in the industry, especially with tourism boards and PR companies. Here are great places to start: ITB Asia, New York Times Show, ITB Berlin, Germany, and WTM London.

4. Get a coach. There is nothing wrong with being a self-starter but if you get a coach, things start to move quicker. Naturally, because you are here, you realize the importance of this fact and you should congratulate yourself for making a good decision.

5. Focus on what you are good at. Focus on your strengths. Do more of what you love. Work on your travel blog because you love it not because of the money alone. Let your passion translate into income - it usually happens eventually with or without your help anyway!

Common expenses to prepare for when running your travel blog

It would be great if travel blogging is all about income, but as with any business, the reality is that there are expenses involved too, plus taxes. And just like any other business, growth and increased income often comes with greater expenses!

Below are some of the most common expenses that you should prepare for when running your travel blog.

1. Virtual Assistants + Freelance Writers

Some bloggers have expanded and hired more people, like we have, to create great content for their websites. Hiring a writer is perfect for creating the type of content that doesn’t need to be personally written by you, but provides a different type of value to your readers.

As well as content writers, another way to grow your blogging business is to hire a team to support you with work that distracts you from what you do best. I have three full time, freelance virtual assistants working for me, focusing on graphic design, social media management, article submissions, and marketing. Outsourcing costs money, but done correctly it allows you to focus on what you do best and the things that directly increase your income!

2. Hosting, Domain, Plugins + Themes, Web Development, and Security

Any blogger at any level of income has to pay for at least some of these, and if you want to grow, then you’ll find that you definitely usually get what you pay for. When you’re just getting started, it makes sense to start with cheaper packages, but if your traffic is growing and you’re starting to earn money, then it pays to invest in a higher standard of hosting and technical support.

We started Two Monkeys Travel with Bluehost (because it was the cheapest), then we moved to Siteground (amazing support team), before finally moving over to Performance Foundry when we realized we needed a fully managed service so we could focus on running and growing the business. This is a perfect example of investing in growth – pay experts to do what they do best so that you can do the same!

Budget Hosting Companies:

Bluehost – Mixed reviews, but from $3 per month you get what you pay for!
Hostgator – another cheap hosting and same owners as Bluehost
inMotion

Hosting for higher traffic sites or simply more support:

Performance Foundry – Managed WordPress Hosting that we use for Two Monkeys Travel. As well as the hosting, they have great technical support, they monitor the site, check plugins, improve site speed and keep it secure as well. Highly recommended
Siteground – A good range of options. More expensive than the budget options and still self-managed, but they have an amazing support team 24 hours. They won’t do it all for you, but they’re very good at hand holding!
WPEngine – No personal experience, but we’ve heard good things about them.

3. Automation & Management Tools

Outsourcing is one way to take time-consuming tasks off your hands, but another option is automation. In blogging, especially when starting from the bottom, the list of repetitive tasks just seems to get longer and longer, sucking up your valuable time and draining your motivation to do what you loved about blogging in the first place. Social media is usually the biggest culprit!

The good news is that for every new repetitive task, there is always someone who will design a program or an app to do it for you. Some are great, while many are utterly useless, so read reviews and take advice from blogger groups and forums.

Here are some automation tools that are popular with bloggers and which we use on Two Monkeys Travel. This is only a limited selection; there are dozens out there:

Tailwind – To automate Pinterest
Convert a Kit – Newsletter management
Grammarly – For automated proofreading/grammar checking
VPN (Virtual Private Network) – To use certain automation programs and improve security
Massplanner – Many bloggers use this to automate their social media channels.

4. Advertising

Blogging is the same as any other business – You need to tell people that you exist! Just because you built it, doesn’t mean they will come. The internet is a big place; it’s hard to get seen, and the big players know it.

Facebook, for instance, sometimes suddenly decides to stop showing your posts to your followers. Basically, they want you to pay to boost your posts. This can be a very effective way to get traffic when done correctly, but done incorrectly is just a big fat waste of money!

It seems that every platform wants us to pay these days – Instagram Promotions, Google Adwords, Twitter Ads - there are probably more. Use your own discretion if you want to use these services in hopes of improving your travel blog.

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