Thanks for all your early support of Make Money Travel Blogging — it really has been amazing. I’ve been struggling to balance our main websites with some casual teaching work recently and, as this is really a hobby at this stage, it’s taken a back foot.
I have been building out a site as part of Corbett’s Affiliate Marketing for Beginners, which is now live: MatadorU Review has a review of the MatadorU writing course, with one on photography soon to follow. Let’s see how it goes, as it’s a step-by-step following of Corbett’s programme. He recommends building several of these, but I’m going to slow down on them and fit them in around other work. A great exercise in research, tight writing, and starting a small niche site aimed at affiliate earnings.
You should check out Corbett’s course if you’re new to affiliate marketing. The holiday season buying will begin soon and you want to be in position for that. I’m holding off on my review until I see how this site grows.
What analytics should a new blogger focus on? Which spell growth, and how do you handle the apparent information overload?
In this video answer to a recent question, Craig shows you the statistics behind Make Money Travel Blogging and looks at what this new site has as its strengths and weaknesses.
If you have a question about travel blogging, ask it here.
I think one of the biggest questions when it comes to making money with a travel blog is, how much money do you need?
This questions governs how much time you spend looking for ways to make money, how many sales “pitches” or pieces you need each month, and even what kind of content you create.
The hobby blogger
The hobby blogger has a day job or independent wealth. Making money on this travel blog might be nice, but there’s no pressing need. It’d be nice to cover domain costs (let’s say US$15 a year, which is a little high) plus hosting on Bluehost or Hostgator, two very fine options for a small- to medium- sized blog. (Both also have auto-installers for WordPress, which is great!)
This blogger needs to make less than US$10 a month to happily cover all his or her costs. It doesn’t matter how quickly this blogger gets paid; there’s no pressing need to cover the bills.
Strategy one: Use a few, highly targeted and commission-based affiliate networks liberally throughout the blog. Build in Amazon text links, for example, into every blog post. People needn’t be “sold” by your posts, but the cookies dropped when they click through will keep you ticking over.
Strategy two: Find one high-commission product that fits perfectly with your site and advertise it enough to make five sales a year. That’s all; five sales on a $25 commission will have you home and hosed without any hard selling or big advertising campaigns. Sell two copies of Art of Solo Travel a month and you’re covered too. How do you do this?
1. Buy the product! You could also ask for a review copy if you have an existing audience.
2. Write an honest review. If you’ve chosen your product well, it’ll be a good fit for your readers — but tell them what’s bad about it too.
3. Include affiliate links in your review; one near the start, one in the middle, one near the end. Vary the wording of the links.
4. Promote your review through links in future articles, a sidebar panel (“Popular posts” for example), and your social media channels.
Once you have your sales, you’ve covered your costs and you can stop promoting it or keep promoting it as you wish.
The budget traveller
The budget traveller is in need of some more cash, probably around $30 a day in order to cover all her costs — that’s taking into account some time in Vietnam and a week in Stockholm over the year. Around US$1,000 a month? That’s a fair chunk of money and needs some much more sophisticated and consistent sales.
Strategy one: Start with the two ideas above, then rinse and repeat. Affiliate promotions are scalable and, when the products match your audience, amazingly powerful. Sign up to affiliate programmes for your favourite online stores — ensure they’re ones your audience can or does use too — then start linking to one or two in every post.
Use both the small- and big- commission items in tandem. Run a major affiliate push — review and promotion — around once a month and ensure you’re linking back to and promoting older affiliate pushes during the year.
Strategy two: If you don’t like affiliate advertising, then try selling ad space. This might be in the form of banner ads, text links or paid-for content. Whatever you do here, never sell space forever: it’s like a newspaper — people pay for every “issue” of a paper; they can pay regularly to be a part of your site content too.
Strategy three: Where appropriate, add in other advertising income sources, like Image Space Media, Google Adwords, Kontera. Consider only showing these to “drive-by” search engine visitors using a WordPress plugin like Ozh Who Sees Ads.
Strategy four: Ask your audience for donations, through a Paypal button or subscription service. Depending on your site’s audience, you might make it lucky with this one. Some sites exist primarily on the donations from their readership … something like an NPR model with gifts for big donors keeps people thinking high.
With a reasonably sized audience, this combination of strategies to make money travel blogging can add up. The trick is balancing every money-making opportunity with your reader’s expectations of the site, and their experience.
If you keep your readership coming back, you’ll be able to find a way to stay on the road through them.
It all comes back to how much you need to make. If you do nothing else, figure out how much that is today. And if you do something else, it’s to tell us your strategies in the comments.
This week we have a question about money. Specifically, how much money to charge for advertising.
There’s a lot of “magic” involved in figuring out what a space is worth, but I encourage you to think of it highly. Banner advertising, in particular, has a nasty reputation for screwing downwards in value year after year … even when your traffic growing. Rather than accept the lower value, I’d prefer to work with advertisers for mutual benefits, rather than agencies trying to increase their profit margins by passing down smaller percentages of their budgets.
In short: price on value, not numbers, don’t bill for under US$200/year if you can at all avoid it, and let advertisers who want to pay you $5 or $10 a month pass by.
Do you have a question about travel blogging? Ask here.
Corbett has put together the most amazing course I’ve seen on affiliate marketing. It’s got amazing detail, two fully-transparent “test” sites that both make money, details on the affiliate programmes that are working best for him, and all the nitty gritty of finding niches and building traffic.
What I like best about it, is that his techniques are not pushy, scammy or manipulative. They’re very ethical and make a lot of sense. And money.
I’ve been part of the course for about 24 hours, so this is just my first impressions. I paid US$57 to join, as I was on the pre-launch mailing list. Until 8am Pacific time on Thursday 12 August it’s staying at US$67. After that, the price doubles.
That’s 8am Pacific, Thursday 12 August.
While I don’t really like price-pressure, I’ve paid a heck of a lot more for a heck of a lot less information.
If you’re going to get into affiliate marketing, this is my best pick from the dozens of courses I’ve done. It goes beyond the information in the Challenge, Karol’s How to Live Anywhere and is more focussed in scope than the Empire Builders Kit.
Why affiliate marketing?
Why do I keep talking about affiliate marketing when so many people want to know about selling banner space? Because you can make a lot more money selling products and creating leads than you can from selling a banner spot.
Say you sell an ad space for $20 a month: that’s $240 a year, and it’s money in the bank … set and forget, then chase the advertiser in 11 months and get them to pay again. With an affiliate link, you can make money week after week, month after month — and the more you remind people about the product, the more likely they are to buy it.
Burnt by affiliates?
I’ve been burned by affiliate deals. I’ve got the links and creative, thrown it up, promoted it, and got … nothing. But that’s changing. Yesterday I made $30 on travel-related affiliate sales (and more in other places). I don’t make $30 every day, but it’s not unusual anymore. That’s better than US$20 a month, and with some of the ideas in Corbett’s course, I’m going to be building more — and more profitable — affiliate agreements and sites.
Corbett’s course: Affiliate Marketing for Beginners
Corbett’s course, Affiliate Marketing for Beginners, seems really complete to me. I’m currently listening to one interview on the site, have fixed one core mistake I’ve been making, and have been through one of the many modules. I haven’t had enough time to write a full review though — however I wanted to write something on it before the price goes up — but Andy Hayes from Travel Online Partners really re-inforced my first impressions:
“I’m no stranger to affiliate marketing – but Corbett’s course is overflowing with good information, all well organised so you can use what you need, when you need it.”
I have a few complaints, though. It’s not with the content, it’s with the format.
I need offline access! I can’t currently download the interviews to listen to on the train/bus/flight.
I need offline access! It’s a website, not an ebook, etc. Having each segment as a PDF download would help too.
Comments are distracting (for me). I love being able to ask questions, but I’m not a huge fan of seeing everyone’s questions and answers. I think this is because I know a lot of basic things (hosting, themes etc) and there’s a lot of inexperienced/non-technical people asking about those things.
More critique will have to wait for a full review, but these are my first thoughts.
A web-based format that allows you to ask questions along the way for a more interactive learning experience
Two real functional example sites that you can follow along with and see how I would do things (none of that “I can’t show you my sites for competitive reasons” stuff)
5 modules (complete intro to affiliate marketing, finding opportunities, site building, getting traffic (and sales) and advanced)
21 lessons, including keyword research, topic selection, site building with WordPress, search marketing, content development and sales optimization
Advanced topics on how to scale up or apply affiliate marketing to an existing business
The complete 100% money back guarantee (see below)
A $50 discount offer on hosting, if you don’t have a web host already
As I speed through Germany in a first class ICE cabin, I’ve just finished reading How to Live Anywhere by Karol Gajda. I’ve also just been brought complementary biscuits, but that’s another story (Thanks Eurail.com!).
The first I heard of Karol, was when he sent me a fun guest post on Indie Travel Podcast entitled, Seven Reasons Hostels Suck. Months after that, I enjoyed a lunch with him and Nomadic Matt in central Auckland.
During that lunch I found out he wasn’t just a start-up blogger; in the recent past he had been earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing internet marketing — a figure that staggered me, and Matt too, I think.
What was more amazing was that he had walked away from it all.
When I saw him launching a new book called, How to Life Anywhere I asked for a review copy and got through it pretty quickly.
So, it is for you?
The book is broken up into three sections: philosophy, travel and money. The overarching theme throughout the book is certainly the philosophy, which Karol calls Ridiculously Extraordinary Freedom.
Trapped and in pain?
If you feel trapped right now, then this book may just be for you. It takes shots at limiting beliefs, draws heavily from Karol’s own life examples (unhappy when earning both US$100 and $2,000 a day) and tries to gently slap you upside the head.
But if you’re stuck, you’re probably looking for a way out. A roadmap, rather than a telling-off. I’m unsure if this book will have enough detail to help you; it will definitely spur you in the right direction and there might just be a truth-coach in there that fits you perfectly.
Travel guru?
Long-term travellers, especially in the internet-savvy blogosphere aren’t going to find this useful. If you know your way around frequent flier miles, know how much it’ll cost to rent in India as opposed to New York, and can find your way around a Visa application, you’ll probably find yourself nodding a skimming this section. Earthclass mail and airfare-search aggregators? Yep. Since that’s most of you, dear readers, I’ll leave those 16 pages alone.
Want to make money?
You’re at this blog because you want to make money online. You want to focus on your travel blog. That’s good. Let’s see if this section will help.
Karol outlines three ways to make money online: creating digital products, affiliate sales through SEO and affiliate sales through CPC ads.
He outlines three strategies for making that happen: launching products on your blog, building and selling mini-sites, and “hubpages on steroids”. He also talks about consulting and other service-based industries.
Most usefully, perhaps, he outlines a 90 day action plan designed to get you earning money from within three months of starting out. Thats 90 days from nothing, so you can almost certainly cut down the running time with your existing audience if there’s a good match there.
He shows you how to get free things from companies so you can talk about them on your blog. It’s not as hard as you might imagine.
There’s nothing here that’s particularly focussed on the travel blogging niche, but there’s nothing that can’t be applied.
Notes from a hurtling train
The book is crammed with ideas, has little fluff but is quite loosely written. It has a personable feel to it, but I’d like to see the prose tightened up in a future version. If you’re a literary type, you might struggle with it; if you want to change your life, you’ll look past that and start scribbling your own notes and action plans.
There’s no one killer thing that will help you make more money with your travel blog, but people with audiences and no income or nothing at all, will benefit from it. Experienced money-makers may learn a new trick or two. I did.
How to Live Anywhere is available here. I get a cut if you buy through these links. If you want to make sure I get that commission please clear your browser’s cookies before clicking through.
And the bonuses
Every good ebook launch seems to need a bonus, and Karol has definitely delivered with a short extra called “Anatomy of a four-figure affiliate promotion (Or, why you don’t need a massive audience to make massive cash)”.
This was exciting for me, because I recently realised that affiliate promotions were the most-scalable way for us to build our travel blogs’ income.
Karol outlines three examples of affiliate promotions he had recently run. One brought in $54.60, one $387.60 and the last $1542.24. What’s best is that he shows exactly what he did in each case, with wording from his own blogs and email promotions. Pure gold from a medium-sized blog.
There’s also audio material and interviews with people who are making money online, but not necessarily making money travel bloggings. It takes some filtering and creative ideas to apply.
With 4-6% affiliate commissions possible if you sell less than 31 items a month … it didn’t seem like much. If you only make $1 a sale, you have to make a lot of sales to grab $100. On the other hand, 2 sales with a $50 commission (like some other programmes) would be an easier win!
I greatly increased the amount of backlinks we had going to Amazon: both text links and widgets. The idea was more traffic = more sales. We also published a review of 100 Places in Italy Every Woman Should Go with a simple Amazon widget, and tweeted the link several times on #traveltuesday — a virtual event on Twitter.
By the middle of July we had clocked up 10 sales; the same number of items as our total for June. The earnings, however, were smaller: US$8.31 against $11.60.
Looking through our sales results since we started the programme ($150 earned in around 3 years), I noticed two things:
It was in early July when I got an email from Chris Guillebeau, part of the Empire Builder’s Kit series. Chris is also quite skeptical when it comes to Amazon’s low affiliate percentage, but uses Problogger’s Darren Rowse as an example of someone who does it well.
Chris said I could paraphrase his lessons here. Reader Reviews Matter. Reviews written by readers had better conversion rates than reviews written by Darren.
Relevancy Matters. This is obvious: the tighter the audience’s connection with the product, the more people will click and buy.
It’s All About the Holidays. People buy lots of stuff between the start of November and end of December. Be ready for it, and promote during this time.
Sell Items that Aren’t for Sale… yet. Look for pre-order offers for upcoming products your audience will be excited about. You can still earn a commission when they buy.
If You’re Blogging, Build Amazon Links into Legacy Content. Use links throughout your archives to engage with people browsing or coming to your site via search engine traffic.
Use text links liberally when promoting affiliate offers. For sales, banner ads perform poorly when compared with text links. It’s just true.
I keep forgetting to get people’s permission to use their names, but I have been asking around. Travel bloggers I’ve spoken to who claim to “do quite well” with Amazon all had two things in common:
Traffic of 10,000 people a month or more
A prominent post on cameras, laptops or backpacks
No-one I spoke to is making good money selling guidebooks or DVDs through Amazon.
My conclusion:
To make more money from Amazon:
Build more links, especially in your archives
Talk about high-ticket items
Focus on the crazy Christmas season
Update: I was contacted by an ex-staff member of Amazon and told the “lift” begins in September. Therefore, it’s important to have your “holiday” reminders start up in October.
Our final earnings from Amazon in July? US$22.92 minus a $3.47 refund from last month, totalling $19.45. We might be going somewhere with this.
I’d love to hear your experiences and ideas in the comments.
I’m not sure if I’m going to get a more ridiculous offer this month, but $10 for ~10,000 organically-driven, targeted views sounds pretty ridiculous to me. And that’s not taking into account growth over the coming months…
Travel bloggers, let’s not race each other into poverty. Turn down stupid offers (and yes, $1 for ~1,000 views is bad; hell, $2 for ~1,000 views is as low as I’d be interested in going).
Ridiculousness
On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 12:51 PM, x (y@z.com> wrote:
Hello,
I found your site while searching Google and have found your website
information and advice to be a very good fit for our visitors. As such, we
are interested in buying advertising space on your home page
http://www.indietravelpodcast.com/
Our budget is within $10/month. If you are interested, please send me your
rate per month and PayPal information.
If we are happy with your price we will send you the link details that you
can place on your website and we will make the payments to the PayPal ID
provided.
Thanks for your time.
Regards,
x
Reply:
Hi x,
I’m afraid advertising at this price isn’t really the style of thing we’re interested in.
When you have a budget of $25+ a month, let me know and we can discuss advertising on some of my other sites. If you have a budget of $80+/month we can talk about http://indietravelpodcast.com.
I’m sure many of you will have heard of Matt Kepnes, aka Nomadic Matt. He makes $7,000+ a month from his collection of travel blogs and sites.
His book, Make Money with your Travel Blog, was a real turning point in my development as a money-making blogger and, if you haven’t read it, I am about to highly recommend it: you should buy it today.
I’m recommending you buy it today for two reasons:
1. On August 1, the price is jumping from US$27 to US$37.
2. I’m trying to sell 75 copies of Matt’s books before August 31. Then he’ll send me an iPad, which I’d like.
I’ve just received a newly-revised copy of the ebook. He’s using the designer I hooked him up with and it looks smoking hot.
He also offers to send you the addresses of guaranteed-to-buy-space advertisers if you have an existing blog and audience. With this list you can make your money back. Without this list, you can make your money back using his other techniques.
Can you get all this information free on the internet? Of course you can. It might take you a few years to figure out though. And I’m not going to be able to get enough info on MMTB in the short-term.
And for 27 bucks
But, I want to make it better. And I want an iPad. If you buy Nomadic Matt’s book using my affiliate link, you’ll get:
The book from Nomadic Matt
which includes information on SEO, advertising, article marketing, keyword research and a list of advertisers.
plus:
My own 40+ minute audio “critique” of the book, with areas of expansion and difference.
If you buy before August 1:
A one-year free membership to the advanced segments of Make Money Travel Blogging when I launch it.
I hate hard sells more than you do. But I think this is worth more than $27. If it’s something you’d like, then:
1. Clear all the cookies from your system. There are instructions here. This ensures I’ll get the commission when you buy the book. Ensure your browser accepts cookies though!
3. Forward your receipt to me – craig@indietravelmedia.com. I’ll send you the recording and keep your address on record for the additional bonus.
Is this book for you?
You’re reading this site, so probably, yes.
When I re-read the updated version I spent an hour making tweaks across my sites and I’ve read the book twice before. I think I read it a few years ago while it was still a draft too. Even “experienced” money-making bloggers might learn some tricks.
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