How to Make Money Travel Blogging

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We’ve been getting a lot of blogging questions lately from our lovely listeners and community members, so you asked and I will deliver! 

We are going to be diving into all the ways you can make money travel blogging. 

This weeks episode and blog is sponsored by Travelpayouts because it’s my favorite affiliate platform that connects travel brands with creators and bloggers.

Whether you’re just starting out on your travel blogging journey or you’re looking to scale your income streams, I’m going to be walking you through practical steps and personal insights for turning your travel blog from a hobby side hustle into a profitable business!

What Is A Travel Blog?

Before we get started, I want to first define what a travel blog is because it’s really going to help us reframe how we run our blog as a business.

A travel blog is a website where a person like you or me shares their travel experiences, thoughts, and tips.

Where I see so many people go wrong is they enter this industry thinking that if they just share everything and anything about where they’ve been in a long form format, they are going to get readers and they are going to get traffic.

Most of the time we think this way and it’s really easy to kind of fall into this trap because we go on other blogs, we really like what they share and we think that we can do the same.

However, what we’re not seeing is how the blog got us to get to that specific post in the first place. Whether it’s through advertising, whether it’s through SEO, whether you typed in “What to do in a week in Rome” on Google and theirs was the first to pop up.

So it’s not just about writing, it’s really how do you get people to find you, and how do you get them to stay on your page and read the entire blog post.

In the world of travel blogging, traffic is everything. And then second to that, the length of time that people spend on, not only that post, but on your entire website, that is going to be the number two key performance indicator of how successful you are going to be.

Setting Your Blog Up for Success

With that being said, now let’s start from the beginning.

Before you even start thinking about monetization, it is essential that you set up your blog for success by first choosing a profitable niche and building around content pillars. This is what will help you get the traffic you need to make money blogging.

Choose a Niche

If you’re writing about a topic that no one is searching, that no one knows about, then most likely you’re not going to get the traffic needed for you to monetize.

So when you’re choosing a niche, find a focus that not only aligns with your expertise, but has a strong search interest such as luxury travel, backpacking, sustainability, solo female travel, or even a specific region or a specific city with high search volume.

Define Content Pillars

Next, you want to identify relevant pillars so that every single post that you’re going to be writing about, it falls under one or two main categories that you can go on and on and on about and really create a comprehensive blog. around that pillar.

Think of these as the main categories under your niche, like itineraries or travel tips or accommodation guides. These will help your readers navigate your website and know exactly what you are an expert at and what your blog is about.

At The Wanderlover under Travel, we have Destinations and Digital Nomad Lifestyle.

We are super specific to remote workers and traveling the world, going to places with strong internet connection with great standard of living, but also sharing what it’s like to travel full time as a digital nomad.

Keyword Research

Once we have identified the relevant pillars that you can write on and on and on about. We also want to do our keyword research.

So you want to make sure that within each pillar, there are at least 20 highly searched keywords.

You can use free tools like Google Keyword Planner and just see what people are researching about that location. You can also use paid tools like Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, or Keysearch that can show you keywords with high search volume and lower competition.

So you really want to get that sweet spot of having the high search volume, but having low competition.

Let’s say you start a blog around New York City. There’s going to be so many blogs and so many resources and so many businesses already writing about New York. It’s going to be harder to get a piece of that pie, but let’s say you really have authority and expertise in the town you grew up in and not many people know about it, but people are interested in visiting.

If you do your research and see what people are searching for, you can then optimize your blog posts to be around that instead of the other way around, instead of just writing, whatever it is that you feel like writing and hoping that you get the traffic.

We are instead guaranteeing almost in a way that you are going to get the traffic because you’ve done your research beforehand.

By focusing on setting up your blog properly, being intentional with your strategy and focusing on high traffic keywords, you will create a really solid foundation. That will get you the visitors that your blog needs to be successful.

Traffic leads to visibility and brain recognition and visibility and brain recognition leads to monetization.

Once you have consistent traffic (check out this blog post on how to increase your web traffic using SEO) and you can see this through setting up Google Analytics with your blog slash website, now you can dive into monetization.

I’m going to be listing main ways to make money as a travel blogger.

These are all ways that I monetize regularly using my travel blog, as well as what I’ve learned from other people in the industry.

Affiliate Marketing

The first way to make money with travel blogging is affiliate marketing. This is one of my favorite passive income streams that blogging opens up the doors to.

And I am just so grateful that by investing your time and energy into blogging you are able to make passive income.

How affiliate marketing works is you recommend products or services you genuinely use and trust.

So in the travel space, this will look like booking sites (e.g. I’m an affiliate for Skyscanner) or travel insurance (SafetyWing) or camera equipment or travel essentials (E.g. E-Sim Cards). And you earn a commission when someone buys through your link.

As you can see, you really need to have that traffic coming in to make sure that a percentage of that traffic converts into customers.

The key to success with affiliate marketing is you need to be on top of all your platforms, links, analytics, and payouts. From the beginning, there are so many affiliate programs out there, and it’s very important to have streamlined systems to track performance. What can get super tricky is if you’re part of multiple affiliate programs, it can be overwhelming to manage and track them all separately.

So personally, I use and recommend Travelpayouts. They partner with over 100 top travel brands like Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Viator. have one dashboard for tracking and linking and they combine all earnings into one single monthly payment. It’s your all in one travel affiliates manager and you can sign up even if you’re just starting out.

I will include this link for you to learn more and get started for free.

Once you have all of your links live, linked, and running on your site, you just need to focus on getting more traffic and making sure that traffic converts, but the links are all there for your customers to click on. It’s really set it up once and you see monthly payments coming in month after month after month.

Some tips for affiliate marketing is you can optimize for SEO and just write an entire blog posts around an affiliate.

So you can write articles like best travel backpacks or top hotel booking sites, and just naturally include affiliate links there.

The other tip is to use multiple platforms to distribute your affiliate links. So you can put them not only in blog posts, but also include them in newsletters and even social media.

On your Instagram stories and just include a link to an affiliate, or you can add it to your links in your Instagram bio. There are just so many ways that you can get these links and start sharing them immediately. 

Sponsorships

The next way you can monetize your blog is with sponsored posts and links. Sponsorships are a great way to make money, especially if you have that traffic coming in, brands will pay you.

Similar to how brands pay creators on Instagram or TikTok brands will pay you to write about their product or service or location in a way that feels authentic to your audience. 

This reminds me of basically having like your own travel magazine people are going to pay you to write a review or share your experience at the destination or with their product or service.

You can then include your affiliate link or based on your conversation with the brandiIt might be a link to a website or their website on top of Sponsored posts where they’re paying you for the entire post.

You can also make money through link building. If you have the traffic, some travel companies might reach out and want to include a link in your travel post that you have already written before.

You can charge on a monthly basis or you can charge for a permanent link, but companies want backlinks.

Companies want their visibility on other people’s websites because it gives them a higher authority if Google sees other travel websites linking to them. So you might even start getting inquiries in your inbox of, Hey, can you just include this link and I will pay you.

Now you might be wondering, how do I attract these sponsors? And what can I do to get them to pay me to be featured on my website?

My first piece of advice is to create a media kit as soon as you can. So include your blog’s traffic, statistics, audience demographics, your niche about you, your other social media platforms, if applicable, you want to get this created as soon as you can, because it makes you look professional.

And then you want to pitch to relevant brands. You want to email as many companies as you can to get your name out there. Even if they don’t want to work with you today, you’re going to be on their radar.

As your blog grows, you’re going to be nurturing that connection. So reach out to companies that align with your niche.

Whether it’s airlines, tour companies, or outdoor brands. If you are just starting, I would recommend going local because you’re going to have less competition there and more chances of success.

Don’t be afraid to just put yourself out there. Honestly, the worst thing that can happen is they don’t respond or they say no, but don’t let the fear of making that introduction or the fear that you don’t have enough readers or you don’t have enough traffic.

Don’t let that deter you from even starting. There is truly no better time to just start pitching and getting your name out there then now.

Advertising

The third way that you can make money by travel blogging is through advertising. Ads can be a solid source of passive income, especially once you have steady traffic.

Ad networks like Mediavine or Raptive or Google AdSense allow you to earn money each time someone visits your site and views or clicks on an ad.

This is also known as display advertising because that’s where you’re going to see banners, that’s where you’re going to see pop ups. or however those ad networks operate.

You give them the advertising space similar to how they might pay for a billboard ad. Instead of paying for a physical billboard, they’re paying for space on your blog.

I see this a lot with not only travel blogs, but recipe blogs. You may have noticed if you search for a certain recipe, there are just so many ads on those recipe blog sites, and that’s how they make money because the more people see the ad, the more people click on them, the more the ad network will pay you.

Google AdSense is the easiest to sign up for. There’s no minimum traffic requirements, so you can technically start advertising like when you first go live.

However, don’t expect to be paid a lot, especially because they’re known to have the lowest ad revenue. RPMs. So they’re just known to pay out the lowest.

Do your research, but know that the more traffic you bring in, the more potential there is for display advertising, and the more you’re going to be getting paid passively through showing ads on your website as you grow.

Obviously, you want to balance user experience and you don’t want to completely bombard your reader with ads because that can be super distracting.

Avoid overwhelm and place them strategically in high traffic areas like your header, your sidebar within content blocks, and try not to have too many pop ups.

The next two monetization strategies I’m going to share are not directly linked to travel blogging. It’s more the opportunities of having a frequently visited website. So by combining all of these, you’re going to have amazing sources of online income streams. 

Digital Products & Memberships

The next way is through digital products and memberships. So creating digital products allows you to share your knowledge and experiences with readers.

This can be in the form of eBooks, itineraries, or even memberships subscriptions where readers get exclusive content. Obviously this depends on what your blog and website are about.

For example, your blog posts can be just one article in a magazine and what you’re selling in your ebook or your comprehensive travel itinerary is an entire magazine edition. You are giving a lot more that simply won’t fit into a blog post.

You can also offer printable, downloadable itineraries, right? So digital products where people get a physical product in exchange for a few dollars.

Memberships are also a great way that I personally love where you can curate a community around a topic that your readers are all a part of or that they’re interested in.

So you can offer premium members access to behind the scenes content or travel guides or live Q and A’s and just give them more than what a blog post can offer.

Digital products are also a great way to introduce passive income because if you already have the traffic. You can monetize not only with advertising, but charge upwards of $10, 20, 50, 100 of additional income to capitalize on that interest.

Services

And then the last way, which is one of my favorite ways to add additional income and to monetize your website is through services.

As a travel blogger, you can offer retreats, tours, workshops around the world, or whatever one on one or one to many offers that you feel aligned with offering.

Once you’ve established yourself as an expert, you can offer personalized services like travel advising, retreats, workshops, guided tours.

And this is a great way to make money while connecting directly with your audience and with the people who are visiting your blog.

Of course, you really want to think, do you want to offer something in person or do you want to expand on your online offers? And depending on that, And depending on your expertise, you can offer services related to your blog niche like adventure travel retreats or social media coaching for new bloggers.

Then you want to promote directly to your audience. So not only on your website, but use your email list, use your social media. To announce and continuously promote these services to people who already follow and trust you.

You can even write an entire blog series about these amazing offers, but as you can see, you have everything in front of you at your disposal.

You have the website, you have the traffic, and now you just want to think outside the box of new ways that feel aligned for you to be bringing in that extra income from what you’ve created.

Don’t get hung up on just one of these monetization strategies. As you grow, you’re going to learn more and you’re going to be expanding.

My goal for you is to have every single one of these monetization strategies in place so that you can have all of these online income streams to sustain your business and be profitable.

And so there you have it from niche selection and driving traffic to monetization strategies. I hope this episode has given you the insights you need to make money with your travel blog.

Remember, it’s all about providing authentic value and connecting with your readers. That’s really going to help you turn your passion into running a really successful six figure, seven figure online business.

Thank you so much for joining me today on the Wanderlover podcast or blog and thank you again to Travel[ayouts for sponsoring this episode.

If you are a new, aspiring, or seasoned travel blogger or influencer, You need to be on this platform if you’re not already. And remember if you enjoyed this episode, please take a second to rank us on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. I am sending love to you all have a fantastic week, and I will see you in the next episode.

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