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How to Make Money From Your Travel Blog

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blog for money
Travel blogging generally seems to be considered as a dream job by many. Images of awesomely tanned people with sunglasses pushed up their foreheads, backpacks ready to go, and all sorts of exotic adventures – who wouldn’t want to have a job that involves all that and more?

In reality, however, travel blogging may not actually be such a glamorous endeavor. The grass is not greener on the other side, and all that jazz. Still, there have been quite a handful of travel blog success stories. Enough to convince more people to give travel blogging a try.

From the outset, I believe that you should make your goals clear to yourself. Why do you want to engage in travel blogging? Is it mainly because of your love for travel, or does your intention of making money weigh heavily? There is no right or wrong answer to that question, but your answer will have an impact on your experience.

Now, if you are at the point where you already have a travel blog going, and you want to make some bucks while you’re at it, just look to the expert travel bloggers. Those who have been there, done that. They might even have a collection of t-shirts to show for it!

Here are some ideas on how to make money from your travel blog, courtesy of some of the most prolific travel bloggers out there.

Google Adsense

From the outset, let me say that I do not consider a blog a business. While there are enough bloggers – travel-focused or not – out there who make good money from Adsense, I don’t think that counts as a business model. That being said, if you don’t mind receiving pennies (which is what you will get unless traffic to your blog is amazing), then Google Adsense is always an option. And if you do hit high traffic stats, then you’ll be seeing this option in a whole new light, just like travel blogger Anil Polat of foXnoMad. Browse his site, and learn from his use of ads – placement, size, and so on.

Write and sell your own ebooks

Nomadic Matt was “pushed” to traveling the the world when he visited Thailand in 2005. Before that, he says that he never saw traveling the world as an option, but that life-changing trip was the start and now, he is one of the most popular travel bloggers out there.

One of the ways he makes money? You got it – ebooks!

make money from your travel blog
How to travel the world on $50 a day

How to Travel the World on $50 a Day. You might have heard of that. Matt wrote it, obviously based on his experiences. He has a product to offer, and he makes money out of it. Got enough travel experiences and tips that will actually benefit others? Then maybe you can write your own ebook, too.

Affiliate Links

Don’t think you have the chops to write an ebook just yet? Want more than what Google Adsense brings? You can go the affiliate link route. It’s still selling a product, albeit not your own.

One, you can sign up for the Amazon affiliate program and tastefully include links and image blocks to related products that your readers may want to purchase from the online store. The advantage of this is that many people are already existing customers of Amazon, making a purchase an easy deal.

Two, you can hook up with the popular travel bloggers mentioned above, who have affiliate programs for other travel bloggers who promote their products. And do check out Unconventional Guides, which also has an affiliate program.

These three methods can get you started. And once you get bigger, you’ll have even more opportunities to make money from your travel blog, ranging from creating your own services to selling your own apps.

About the Author
Gemma is an ardent fan of traveling and writing. She has her list of non-negotiable travel requirements, with fun, adventure, and safety at the top. For Gemma, peace of mind is of paramount importance, too, so she recommends travel safety/insurance at all times. See here for Gemma’s go-to travel insurance resource.

Lead image via Start to Run

2010 Reminder: Test the Monetization of Your Blog

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Monetization can get lost in all the blogging activities we have to juggle. Let’s face it, there’s a lot that goes into blogging. Content, marketing, and building relationships take up a lot of our time and it can be easy to forget about monetization. But if you want to make money with your blog, you can’t ignore, well, the making money part 🙂

I believe that content and traffic comes first, but after you generate a healthy content and traffic base, there comes a time when you must focus on optimizing your monetization. Otherwise, you’ll leave a lot of money on the table.

So, at the beginning of a new year, I thought I’d remind you to look at your monetization tactics and see how you can improve on them. How can you get conversion rates and make more money with the same amount of traffic? I’ll share two examples from my sites.

There are various ways to approach the monetization process but basically it boils down to testing. In other words, try different ways to make money. Then, let them run at the same time and after a couple weeks, analyze the results and pick the best method.

Testing AdSense

I’ve been testing the AdSense ads for a dating blog I co-own with my sister. The blog reached a respectable level of traffic a few months ago, so I started optimizing the ads since they were the blog’s primary income source.

In my first test, I created two different ads and placed them above the fold and below the fold. Then, I let them run for a couple of weeks. During the testing period, ad #1 ran half the time and ad #2 ran in the other half. After the test, it was pretty clear what we needed to do to make more money. Above the fold, ad #1 made almost four times as much money as ad #2. Below the fold, both ads made the same amount of money but it was very small amount.

Based on the results, we kept ad #1 above the fold and discarded ad #2. The money from the ads below the fold was so low that we scrapped them to make the site less cluttered.

Giving Up on a Strategy

Sometimes you have to drop a monetization strategy since it’s clearly not working. For example, I’ve tried multiple ways to get AdSense working on my gaming blog. The biggest program was the irrelevancy. AdSense kept showing irrelevant ads even when I tried to tweak my posts. Because of this, the dating blog makes 30 times more than the gaming blog yet it has half the amount of traffic. I understand that dating is probably a more lucrative niche than gaming but not 30 times more!

Therefore, I scrapped AdSense and found a couple related affiliate programs. It’s still early, but the numbers have been better than AdSense.

Continual Improvement Through Testing

Fortunately, it doesn’t take much time to set up a monetization campaign. Most of the work is just setting up a test and that can be done in a couple of hours. Once you’ve done that, you don’t have to check it until a couple days or weeks have passed. Then, you spend a couple more hours to analyze the results, make the necessary changes, and setup a new test.

But you do have to remind yourself to continually test every couple weeks or so. Again, it’s easy to forget since you can get lost in all content generation and marketing so put it on the calendar as a reminder.

Performancing offers blog management services.

Making money with Amazon even if you miss the direct sale

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Until recently, I’d almost given up on being an Amazon affiliate. It wasn’t necessarily hard to get people to click on links but they rarely seemed to buy what I was offering them.

However, times have changed. I can’t think of any of my family, friends or acquaintances that isn’t aware of the Amazon brand and hasn’t bought at least one item from them.

What I’m discovering more with Amazon is that, while the basic rules of affiliate success remain the same — including traffic, deep-linking, compelling and relevant enticement — Amazon is one of the few big names that rewards you even if your visitors’ first clicks don’t make a sale.

Granted, you only get 24 hours from a visitor landing at Amazon from your site in order to earn commission from items placed in their basket, but there’s also a 90 day window of opportunity if users add something to the basket on day one but don’t purchase it immediately.

I used to think that Amazon had less earning potential than pay-per-click advertising such as AdSense or Chitika, because someone not only has to click but also purchase before you earn any money.

Thing is, I’m finding that if I can get people to visit Amazon, I have a good chance of earning commission on everything they decide to buy, even if it’s not something I initially recommended.

Looking a what people order, a number of items are either the exact product I recommended, or something closely related. The other items are seemingly random.

So, with decent traffic and a positive push towards Amazon from a wide variety of your blog posts, you do have the potential to earn, letting Amazon do its usual great job of drawing people further into its site and towards the “Add to Basket” button.

I know some other affiliate programs also offer this kind of deal. It’s worth looking into. If you’re transparent about your links and recommend stuff that you own, or would buy yourself, then regardless of whether your visitors buy those items when they go to a merchant site, they’ll hopefully remember your site as a useful source for genuine product recommendations.

Income from Amazon is still far more unpredictable than from other forms of advertising I run on my blogs, but I now believe it has much greater earning potential too.

Now to drive the traffic in.

What’s your experience with Amazon or other affiliate programs and indirect conversions like this?