How to make money with a travel blog
5 Jun
Here’s our list of ALL the possible ways you can make money with a travel blog. Got more? Add them in the comments.
Working with your fan base
- Donations
- Create your own products
- Selling your photos
Working with third parties
- Adsense and other programmes
- Audio and video ads
- Affiliate networks
- Direct banner sales
- Publishing PR pieces
- Text links
Selling yourself. No, not like that
- Freelance writing
- Networking and joint ventures
- Consulting
The breakdown…
Donations
Does your audience know how to help you? Donations are the easiest way to engage your fans and, when used well, can also help foster community. The public broadcasting route can work well, but we find it most successful to have a target and shoot for that within a set time-period. Make sure you celebrate your success, but beware of making your audience tired and resentful.
Tools:
Create your own products
There are several styles of products one can create to sell on your site. We could break them up into physical products, digital products and subscription services. This is quite an advanced option and has the chance to take you a lot of time without making it back. Then again, when it works … it works.
Resources:
- Art and Money
- The launch coach
- Working for yourself
- How To Launch the **** Out Of Your Ebook << Highly recommended
Selling your photos
If you have a good eye, decent equipment and light touch when it comes to post-production you can sell your photos directly to your audience using a service like Smugmug. This integrates the sales process into your blog and can be themed to match it. Another route to take is the stock photo option, but that’s not really making money from your travel blog.
Adsense and other programmes
The easiest way to make very little money is to throw Google Adsense or another similar system onto your site. If you’re running a travelogue, you’ll almost certainly make under $1 a day until you hit over 500 visitors. Adsense works best with location-specific sites, Chitika with products. Basically, the more popular your destination is with advertisers, the more you’ll make per click. You have to keep experimenting. Some services, like Yieldbuild, exist that try to automatically handle this experimentation for you.
Ad networks:
Most of these services work on a pay per click (PPC) basis, but will show you the equivalent cost per thousand impressions (CPM or eCPM). This gives you a way to benchmark your ads against other offers.
Audio and video ads
If you’re working with audio and video, you have the chance to sell direct space on these publications. Podcast networks can do auto-insertion, but it’s really not recommended if you want to keep creative control over your product. You can also use popular video and audio shows to sell affiliate products.
Affiliate networks
Affiliate deals allow you to split the money a vendor makes on a sale. One of the most popular affiliate programmes in the world is the Amazon system, but commission rates are really low — normally less than 5% unless you’re (a) Sending them lots of sales, or (b) They’re promoting something special.
The highest-earning commissions are normally in the realm of digital products, for example the Art of Solo Travel: A Girls’ Guide offers a 50% commission on it and any upsells made. The other way is to target high-cost items, like airfare or luxury accommodation. Hostels are slow business unless you’re referring a lot of traffic. Affiliate networks, like those listed below, can help you find excellent matches with your audience and some include interactive widgets and RSS feeds that can make your life a lot easier.
Affiliate programmes:
- Amazon (Not recommended)
- Art of Solo Travel Affiliates
- Commission Junction
- Clickbank
Direct banner sales
You can sell space on your website directly. One of the most common ways is to sell banner advertising at standard sizes. 125x125px and 250x300px ads seem to be the most popular. You can sell by time period (one to six months are standards) or by CPM (cost per thousand impressions). For small publishers, time periods are much easier to manage.
One thing to note: the advertiser gets value from every link included, so a picture with a link is less valuable than a picture background with three or four links. Price accordingly.
Helpful WordPress plugins:
Publishing PR pieces
If your audience is targeted enough or large enough, you can make money by publishing PR pieces for companies. This could be done directly or through an agency. Sooner or later one such company will pay me to link to them here. Or am I just being cynical?
Text links
Once your site has some traction, people will pay you to link to them with specific keywords. Is it legal? Yes, of course. Does Google like it? No, they certainly don’t — and they or other search engines might knock your site out of their results if they find you’re doing it.
For this reason, exercise extreme caution when deciding if to accept TLA (text link ads) and avoid the TLA networks if you can because they’re easier to track.
Freelance writing, photography and video
If writing is your game, you can and certainly should use your travel blog to showcase your skills and pitch potential editors and clients. Either write everything amazingly or have a Clippings or Portfolio section to show off your best stuff.
Get leads:
Recommended courses:
Networking and joint ventures
Getting to know other travel bloggers can lead to potential opportunities to share in writing a book, creating a membership site or other joint ventures. “Networking” is a rather cynical term in my book, but if nobody knows you exist, nobody is going to ask you to work with them.
Consulting
Use your blog to build up your “expert” position and offer your readers one-on-one time to help them with their dreams. This ties in especially well if you’re offering it alongside products like digital books or a membership class.
Great examples:
Post updated 19 June, 2010
Your turn
Got another way to make money through your travel blog? Have a killer service we should add? Shout out in the comments.
You’ve really covered the bases with making money on blogs. It isn’t easy, that’s for sure. I find that advertising income (and readership) is attracted to quality content, so concentrate on that first.
Craig, thanks for the info. You’ve given me new income ideas to consider.
This is a fairly thorough list. I’d add that there’s no point to trying to make money with your blog via ads or affiliates until you’ve built up your readership a bit as well as a reputation online. You touched upon photography in a header here, but didn’t give much information about how one might sell their photos via their blog. I believe there are services that handle all the logistics for you (can’t name one off the top of my head, but surely someone else will know), and all you have to do is point your readers toward where they can purchase the photos they have loved on your blog.
Great list. I have to say I do use Amazon; yes, the commissions are pitiful but their system is FAR easier to use than most, plus they have an enormous inventory, so I’ve integrated their guidebooks into my platform without much hassle. It’s a small revenue stream, but hey – it pays for our hosting and what not
@Donna – Thanks. That’s the point of the list, I guess. Some people are going to have more success with some aspects than others. We’re experimenting with most of these techniques, and I wanted a place to share what’s happening, what we’re discovering and help grow the travel blogging niche.
@Gray – Good point! You can either sell stock photography using services like istock.com (or places like Getty if you’re that good) or sell directly from your website. I’ll do some research and add some of those options in.
You’ve covered a lot here. I’ll be thinking about ways to monetize over the next few months, so this article will come in handy.
Thanks!
Good stuff Craig, and tempered with realism. I think you went too far to the negative with Amazon though. They start at 6% if you’ve signed up under the right program and it quickly climbs to 6.5% after 30 item sales. If you do really well, you get 7%—I hit that level several times a year and it’s pretty easy during holiday shopping season. Amazon sells practically everything, so you can link to them for a lot of different products. And if you take gift certificates, you can get a payout at $25, which is much lower than many other ad programs.
Hi Nancie, glad to hear it. I’m hoping this will become a useful learning space for everyone. And give us all a good excuse to talk shop
Tim, Thanks. I’m going to check out my Amazon settings! Will check and update the post.
You mention e-books, but people also make old fashioned print books out of blogs (Julie and Julia??). You can also build your expertise and then teach courses or get paid for speaking gigs.
I make more off of Amazon than the other affiliate ads. In my case, affiliate display ads have been getting lots of free advertising, but I have not made a dime. I’m taking them all down in favor of direct sales of display ads.
Hi Vera, great to see you here.
Some excellent points on digital > print, but I’m sceptical about people making “real” money from it. Do you think it’s possible? We’ve found the margins get small quickly!
I’m having to re-think my Amazon affiliates programming now! We make 4% if we make less than 7 sales/month, 6% after that… Here’s my copy/past from Amazon:
1 – 6 items 4.00%
7 – 30 items 6.00%
31 – 110 6.50%
111 – 320 7.00%
321 – 630 7.50%
631 – 1570 8.00%
1571 – 3130 8.25%
3131 + 8.50%
This is really quite small, especially consider it excludes lots of items. For you, especially Vera, Amazon makes sense as you run a book/movie review site. I wonder if there are travelogue-style travel blogs making good money from it.
we don’t make much money from amazon, but we do from a few other affiliates. i think it is what matches your niche best!
I’m trying several of the mentioned revenue streams on my travel blog. Thanks for compiling the list!
I find it hard to make an income from travel photos: When sifting through photo stock services’ statistics you will find that illustrations/graphics and photos of business meetings are running nicely…
Any hints on useful stock websites for travel photos?
Hi Walter, not yet – but I’m hoping to explore this more in the 2nd quarter of this year. (Stock film as well.) Stock is more something I’ve heard of others making money on. I know some people are covering bills with selling prints, etc but it seems like a lot of work.
I’ve tried istockphoto.com but they haven’t accepted my photos so far. They have very high quality requirements (which a good thing, I guess…)
I’ve also enabled the Getty Photo option on the photos in my Flickr gallery. Trouble (i.e. additional work) with that is that you have to tag your photos properly in order to be found in topic searches.
That work pays off also with search engines and the according image search feature (which brings even more traffic to my travel blog than Google standard search…). But it IS a lot of work…