4 Ways To Make Money As A Travel Blogger
Can travel blogging earn you decent cash? Yes, a high-traffic blog with monthly traffic of 10k to 100k can easily bring you a revenue of $200 to $10K. However, only a select few know how to monetize their travel blog.
Interestingly, most travel bloggers don’t make a penny off their blogs due to a lack of monetization plans and insufficient knowledge of proven strategies. While dedicating time and effort is undoubtedly important for the success of a travel blog but having a monetization plan is equally important. Adopting the right strategy allows you to scale your blog from your side hustle to your full-time grind.
Four Ways You Can Monetize Your Travel Blog
Today we have compiled a list of four ways you can transform your blog into a lucrative venture. Keep scrolling if you wish to learn more.
1. Affiliate Marketing
At its core, affiliate marketing is a passive income strategy where you earn a percentage on the sales you helped generate by posting about the products/services of a specific business. For this to work, you need to place affiliate links to various products or services on your blog and let it work its magic.
Simply put, affiliate marketing is when you recommend hotels, car rentals, travel gear, travel offers such as cash in on flight bookings, etc., on your blog. You insert an affiliate link that leads to these recommendations, and when anyone from your blog purchases these services or avails of your recommended offers, you’ll make affiliate sales. It is a fan-favorite monetization strategy among the blogging crowd.
One way to incorporate these links in your blogs is via affiliate banners, or you can also include in-text links to these recommendations to supplement your earnings. As a travel blogger, you can easily find niche-specific affiliate networks that you can join to monetize your blog.
2. Ad placement
For an average blogger, ad placements can account for nearly 30 to 40% of their total income. However, ad placement is not possible without first joining an ad network. But for most ad networks, having a sizable audience and blog traffic from socials and SERPs is an important criterion for acceptance.
It’s important to remember that building an audience is a slow process; blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. You can only be a successful blogger if you are willing to put in the hours to make it work. After all, blogging isn’t some get-rich-quick scheme. When starting as a travel blogger, it’s possible your blog may not even make it to the first page of SERPs, and your blog may need more audience. But if you stick to it, you can certainly profit from ad networks.
For newbie travel bloggers, Google AdSense is the best ad network out there, as there is no traffic requirement. Google AdSense places ads on your blogs that are relevant to your niche, and each time these ads get viewed or clicked, you earn a small commission. Furthermore, AdSense allows you to customize ad placement and its appearance, which can significantly boost your click-through rates while also giving your audience a non-intrusive experience on your blog.
3. Sell your own products
For bloggers looking to monetize their blogs, selling a digital product is a no-brainer as it’s a one-time effort that you can sell indefinitely. Furthermore, you only make a small commission off ad placements and affiliates, which can be sizable, but in the end, it’s still a small cut of the total profit.
You get to keep a hundred percent of the profit when you sell your services or products on your blog (excluding some nominal fees). This is a major reason why many travel bloggers sell digital assets like niche-specific e-books, downloadable travel guides, planners, and more.
Many bloggers use Canva to create their digital products. Although it has a free version, the premium version is where things really start to shine.
To start selling your digital assets, you can begin by curating an email list. This will help you reach every person interested in your content, or you can directly list your digital products on your blog.
4. Sponsored posts
Another way to supplement your income is by writing sponsored posts on your travel blog. Sponsored posts are reviews about a business offering on your blog that the business pays you to post. You can write sponsored posts for travel businesses and their offering, such as travel gear, tour groups, hotels, flight bookings, etc.
Essentially, these companies are paying you to market their products or services seamlessly on your blog in a way that speaks with your audience and gets them to make a purchase. You usually have freedom of expression when writing these sponsored posts since you know your audience better than anyone else. You can also market your services by reaching out to relevant travel businesses and proposing to write a blog post highlighting their offerings.
Bottom Line
Although monetizing your travel blog is not easy, the efforts pay off well in the long run. Remember, success as a blogger comes slowly, and you must commit to blogging to see any positive results.
Moreover, you need to know your way around blog monetization and establish a plan to reap financial success. Consider these four ways to transform your blog into a money-making venture.
