Monetizing your travel nowadays is much easier compared to how it was in the last ten years. In the past, creating and maintaining a website was expensive, with the costs going to thousands of dollars. Start a blog and monetizing was even more difficult.
PayPal had not yet caught up, email marketing was not flexible like it is right now, and Stripe did not exist. Today things are different; sites offer many incentives in a bid to monetize them. For instance, the pirate treasure chest is about adventures in Scotland which encourage people to travel to Scotland.
Today it is easy to create, maintain, and make money from your travel blog. There are many platforms you can use with WordPress being the most popular. However, just because it is easy to make money online, it does not mean that many travel bloggers earn money from their blogs.
How to make Money from a Blog
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Selling Ebooks
Ebooks are some of the best blog ideas that make money online. Selling ebooks is one of the best ways of making money from a travel blog. The most significant advantage of selling ebooks is that they are easy to create, and their prices are affordable to most people.
Another advantage of selling ebooks is that there are no costs of publishing or republishing newer editions. Ebooks also give you the chance to know if your audience is interested in what you are offering.
You do not need a lot of traffic to sell your ebooks. You just need to understand what your audience is interested in and put that information into an ebook. Ebooks are a great way to earn money from home.
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Sponsored content
Sponsored content is also a great way to make money from your travel blog. Sponsored content takes many forms, such as placing a link, mentioning someone or a company in a blog post, or hosting a blog post that has been paid for.
The content can take several forms, such as:
- A sidebar link
- Including an advert in a newsletter
- Guest post
- Sponsored review
While it might be an easy way to make money online, it is not recommended as a long term investment. It will eventually make your blog look spammy. Google can also penalize you and lower your Trust Flow, your DA, as well as ranking lower in Google rankings.
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Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the common ways to make money. Affiliate marketing involves marketing other companies’ products, and you get a commission once you push a sale through. People in affiliate marketing work the same way as salespeople.
The best thing about affiliate marketing is that you do not have to come up with a product. You just need to piggyback on a product that is already there and sell it to your audience.
What you need in affiliate marketing
- A niche
- A great product
- An audience
To make money online through affiliate marketing, you need to come up with blog posts related to your niche so that you can link the posts to the product you want to market. Some of the best affiliate sites include Amazon affiliate, Rakuten Marketing, Clickbank affiliate, and ShareASale, among others.
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Destination campaigns
Destination campaign is whereby your marketing is based on requests from tour companies, hotels, or tourism boards.
When starting your travel blog, it is most likely that you will not receive any pay, but issues such as activities covered, food, accommodation, and flights will be covered. However, as you continue blogging for those companies, you will be compensated for your efforts and the time spent on such trips.
As for compensation, you can discuss with the companies you are blogging for and negotiate terms of payment. You will also agree on a trip rate or a day rate for each project.
Examples of destination campaigns include iAmsterdam or Paris Tourism.
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Advertising
Advertising is one of the best ways to make money online. The ads displayed in the contents of your webpage play a significant role in boosting your income. Google AdSense is the best-known player globally.
If your blog is not in English, you can use other companies such as sClick in Czech or Yandex in Russia. To make decent money through ads, you have to invest in increasing traffic
You can also go for custom ads. Your blog needs to have a lot of traffic to attract custom adverts. Companies will approach you and request you to place their adverts in your blog posts for a fee.
In such a case, you will deal with the companies directly, which implies that you will earn more money compared to contextual ads. You will not lose commission to intermediaries.
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Photography
Photography is also another way you can make money online. You reach out to other platforms, travel websites, and travel blogs whereby they can pay you for your contribution to their platforms.
Many travel bloggers make money online through traveling and sharing their experiences with such platforms in the form of photography.
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Consultancy
Once you are an established blogger, you are in a position to offer educated opinions on travel destinations. Offering travel consultancy services is one way to make money from your travel blog. Consultancy can take a wide range of services, including advertising, marketing, and strategy or content development.
You should know that those are services that you will have already learned through your travel blog posts.
Final thoughts
You might have always have wondered about how to make money online? As we have discussed above, there are many ways to make money from your travel blog. The main thing you need to understand is that you should know how to attract people to your site and offer solutions to their problems.
You should also try different methods to monetize your travel blog so that you will know which works best for you. Most importantly, keep your blog updated so that you can increase the chances of making more money.
Do you have plans for starting a travel blog and make money from it? Feel free to share your thoughts about other ways you can monetize a travel blog in the comments section below.
Author’s Bio
Thomas Quarry is a data scientist, real treasure hunter, established travel blogger, and an experienced destination campaigner. He has traveled to more than 25 countries all over the world and gained tremendous experience in travel blogging.
