Here you will find useful information on how to earn money from a travel blog in a fully detailed guide which can be useful regardless if you starting out or if you have some experience in online business.
I believe all of us (or at least most people who have access to the internet) have heard about wonderful and romanticized stories about how someone left everything behind to travel the world and earn money from a travel blog. Despite the fact I consider this feasible, I will try to analyze this venture from a more business oriented perspective, rather than just pure wanderlust and the relentless need for cash while traveling.
I will break down this guide in a few key points that I consider crucial for the success of your online blog, or any online venture for that matter. Here are these points (you can click on them to jump directly to the part in which you are most interested in):
1 – The Requirements for a Successful Travel Blog
2 – How to Create a Travel Blog with Minimum Investment
3 – How to Generate Traffic for your Travel Blog
4 – How to Earn Money from a Travel Blog (from the traffic you have generated)
5 – How to Partially Automate your Travel Blog (so you have more time to travel)
Now, let’s dissect each one of this points so you can have a full, realistic picture of how viable it is for you to earn money from a travel blog:
1 – The Requirements for a Successful Travel Blog
This section is divided in two parts which I consider essential and somewhat ambiguous for anyone who is wishing to start a online travel website. First there are the abstract requirements, which rely on your motivation and availability, and secondly, there are the technical requirements.
You need to have patience and time, to start a travel blog, in the beginning, no one will visit your website almost, in fact, do not expect to have even ONE single organic visitor (a visitor coming from Google Search) in the first two weeks of your blog, if you post daily (and you will need to, especially in the beginning). So, if you work already 10 hours a day somewhere else, odds are, you will have very little chances of making your online venture take off.
The technical requirements are far simpler, you don’t need to be a developer, in fact, you don’t need to know how to code even one single line to run a fully professional looking website. Here are the technical requirements:
- Domain: you will need to buy a domain, try to make it as short as possible, and somewhat easy to remember, and please, buy a .com, not a .be or .travel. Dotcom domains rank much better on google. Most good domains are taken already, so you need to be creative.A domain I like is shoutmeloud.com , because is not something so obvious, so it was not taken, and it’s easy to remember. It is also a great site to find ways to make money, as they describe also in detail on this post, for example. You can buy a domain from bluehost, because you can get also hosting from them, and it’s always better to have both the domain and the hosting from the same company.
- Hosting Plan: you will also need a hosting plan, and I suggest bluehost for that, you can click here to check their offers and sign up for a plan , or in the image below:
If you really want to earn money from a travel blog I suggest you to choose the shared plan, as a travel blog does not require a lot of space, specially in the beginning, and we want to keep costs low. - CMS: you don’t need to hire a developer to set things up for you, all you have to do is install a CMS(Content Management System) in your hosting, you can make a WordPress travel blog, a Drupal travel blog, a Joomla travel blog, or use some other CMS, but I recommend WordPress, since it is the one with the greatest amount of free resources as plugins available.
2 – How to Create a Travel Blog with Minimum Investment
Any website has a natural time frame to get spread out the internet, may it be through social media, or may it be leveling itself up on how google perceives your website as relevant. In the first months of your website I do not recommend you to invest in any kind of advertisement (Google Adwords or Facebook Ads) because, it is a matter of attempt an error, and while you try different things and see how the audience reacts, your site will naturally pick up traffic and build a name.
So, to start with, ALL you need is time and devotion, plus the investment of a domain name, and a minimalistic hosting plan, you can get them both from Bluehost by clicking here. The domain will cost you 10$ per year roughly, and the hosting plan will set you back around 5$ per month (or even less), so, for the first year you can expect an investment of 10 + 5*12 = 70 USD. It should be enough as a initial investment to earn money from a travel blog.
The CMS is also free, you can install it for free from the bluehost cpanel, ask support if you have doubts.
3 – How to Generate Traffic for your Travel Blog
This is certainly the most complex and the most difficult part of any online business, how to get people to visit your blog.
There are two main ways to make people find your content and engage to your blog: one is organic search (when someone types something on google and clicks to your site) and social traffic (facebook, pinterest, instagram).
Organic Search: the key to get organic search visitors is simple, and it’s the easiest way to get free traffic in great amounts, write UNIQUE CONTENT, that is LONG (no less than 1000 words per article) focusing keywords with low competition (check Google Adwords keyword tool for that). Use a SEO plugin, personally, I use the Yoast SEO Plugin which has helped me a lot.
Social Traffic: you will need somehow to get a initial number of people to follow you, the beginning is always the worst part, after you will have to post things with attractive images as people tend to ignore only-text messages on Facebook, Pinterest and other social networks. When you engage new visitors via organic search, you need to make it very obvious that they can and should follow you on social networks, this way, they will keep coming back.
Once you have mastered this two aspects, your traffic will be set, you can then also explore the option of having a mailing list to get your content being sent to your followers on a regular basis.
4 – How to Earn Money from a Travel Blog (from the traffic you have generated)
Once you got your traffic, which is by far the hardest part, you need to convert it into cash and that is why you need a website first of all, otherwise you’d be fine with just a facebook page or a youtube channel. The wesbite will allow you to push the links and information you need to your readers so they can buy the products you are selling, and it will make you present it to your audience the way you need to get a decent conversion rate.
Here are some ways you can use to transform your traffic into ways to earn money from a travel blog:
Affiliate marketing: Like this site here you can use your travel website to get commissions from a number of travel related products such as: flight tickets, car rentals, railpasses, insurance, luggage, hotel bookings, travel guides, cameras, dating sites abroad – the list infinite.
Some of the affiliate programs I think you should consider: Amazon Associates, Booking.com Partners, Skyscanner, and others.
Google Adsense: This method is only good if you have a HUGE amount of traffic, and it pays per click and the payments are very low, but, if every little helps, it’s an option.
Writing Guides: You can write ebooks about anything, how to date girls abroad, how to eat good local food like this site or about literally anything, if you HAVE TRAFFIC, it WILL SELL.
Personal services: you can offer services like providing help to organizing trips, if you are more into the service industry and like interaction with people on this level.
Selling Products: if you move to a place with an abundance of products that have demand abroad, you can sell them through your website, like jewellery from Thailand, Thangkas from Nepal, and anything you can think of – as long as you HAVE TRAFFIC.
If you are just starting the best odds you will have to earn the first bucks are through affiliate marketing in my opinion.
5 – How to Partially Automate your Travel Blog (so you have more time to travel)
If you have made it that far with your online endeavor all I can do is to congratulate you, but there is a huge setback, probably most of your useful daytime will be entirely consumed by running the little online empire of yours, and to minimize the time consumption your blog needs, you can take some approaches to minimize the number of actual working hours you need to earn money from a travel blog.
This part is basically divided into two main points: software automation, and outsourcing.
Software Automation: you can use some plugins like this one by NextScripts to automatically repost your posts on a number of social networks (Facebook, VK, Xing, LinkedIn, Google+ just to name a few) it will save you lots of times on a work that would have to be otherwise done manually.
Outsourcing: a number of successful websites hire writers and virtual assistants to manage and expand their content, it can be an excellent solution for you from the moment that the income generated by post exceeds the cost you would have to create this unique content.
One example: if you have earned 600$ in one month, making 1 post a day, your income per post per month is equivalent to 20$ per post, it makes all sense to you to hire a writer, and give him topics to write like “Holidays in Anguilla” in which he would be glad to write a 1000 post for 7$. You still bank in 13$ but most importantly, you will have not invest a single minute of your time in it. So it is definitely a good solution, even if you want to write posts yourself, you can board in more people in your projecting, expanding the possibilities of how to earn money from a travel blog.
That is a good chunk of your information, you will probably learn more down the road, get your hosting plan from bluehost now and earn money from a travel blog. You can also check various web hosts ratings before making your ultimate choice.
