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Want to live the dream and make money while traveling? You can do just that with a travel blog! If you don’t have one, then I recommend getting started on WordPress. We have a non-technical guide to getting started on WordPress here. That will tell you what you need to get started, even if you have no experience whatsoever running a website.
Once you have a travel blog up and going, you can then get started making money! There are a number of different ways you can do that. We’ll go over them here.
Affiliate Marketing
One way to make money as a travel blogger is through affiliate marketing. This is where you put links on your website and then when a sale is made, you get a percentage of the profits.
There are a number of major travel websites that have affiliate programs. These include Expedia, Hotels.com, Intrepid Travel, Kayak, TripAdvisor, CheapOAir, etc. You’ll have to apply to their programs and get accepted, but it’s not an incredibly hard process or anything. And if at first you don’t get accepted, you can always apply again in a few months. I have applied for affiliate relationships and gotten turned down only to get accepted later.
You can put your affiliate’s banners on your website and make money when someone clicks on the ad and makes a purchase. Or you could mention your affiliates in your blog entries and make it a link. So, for example, let’s say you take an Interpid Travel tour. You could review it and then put an Interpid Travel link in your review.
For more information on how to get started with Affiliate Marketing, see our Affiliate Marketing Guide.
Google Adsense
Don’t want to bother applying to individual affiliate programs but want to make money from ads on your website? Then Google Adsense may be your best. You have to apply for an account but once you get approved. Once you get approved, you can put Google ads on your website. Google will run the ads yourself so unlike with affiliate marketing, you won’t have to bother with putting up specific ads. Then, once someone clicks on your banner and make a sale, you make money!
You won’t make as much per sale as you would with affiliate marketing, but you might end up with more money. I think Google Adsense works best if you get a lot of traffic. If you don’t get as much traffic but you do have a dedicated group of followers, affiliate marketing might be better for you because the profits for each individual sale will be higher.
Sponsored Posts
So sponsored posts are another way to make your blog profitable. This is when a company pays to put a specific blog entry on your website. In some cases, they will write the blog entry for you and all you have to do is put it up on your blog. In other cases, they will pay you but you will write the blog entry.
If this is something you’ll like, you can go about making these relationships a few different ways. You could contact companies yourself. Or you could put a page on your blog where you give your contact information. Travel companies may then come to you with this opportunity!
Guest Posts
Similar to sponsored posts, guests posts is a way to earn money. You could let other travel bloggers write posts on your website for a charge. They would due it to gain exposure on your travel blog with your audience. They would also do it to get more backlinks to their blog which improves SEO. People can submit their blog posts easily if you get the USP Pro Front-End Forms plugin.
Make Your Travel Blog Into a Membership Website
If you have a good following to your travel blog, your readers may be willing to pay something extra for your best content. So what you could consider doing is charging for memberships for your website. You could make some of your content password protected so only members could read it. They then could pay a small fee each month. Depending on how many readers you have, this could be very profitable for you.
You may want to make some of your content available to everyone if you do this. That way, people can find your content and if they like what they see, they’ll want to read more. And then they could buy a membership! You also could consider making parts of your blog entries available to everyone (enough to get people hooked!). Then, they would have to pay to finish your content. You could keep trying to advertise for the memberships on your website, too, for the readers who continue to just look at your free material. Offer your members extra things, too, to entice readers who aren’t paying extra to finally open up their wallets. This could be free downloadable travel checklists or early access to your travel photos.
In order to do this, though, you will need to be able to accept payments for monthly recurring payments. We go over some ways to do this with WordPress here.
Offer Courses
If you run a travel blog, you’re a travel expert, right? Well, your knowledge is very valuable – and people could learn from you in a course format! For example, you could run courses on planning itineraries, what you’ll need in order to travel abroad, how to plan and finish long distance hikes, etc. You can do this in WordPress with LifterLMS.
Sell Digital Downloads
Another way to essentially charge people for your travel content is through digital downloads. You could make some of your best content or blog entries cost. You could also write travel guides for specific areas and charge for these. You can easily make a PDF from your Google Docs; I go over that here. You can charge customers for payments with WPSimplePay.
Buy Travel Products & Resell As Your Own
If you want to sell multiple products, it can sometimes take a long time to come up with that much material. But you can increase your product offerings without as much work if you purchase PLR products. PLR stands for Private Label Rights. That means you can legally buy content and then resell it to your customers. This would also be a great thing to buy if you are running a membership website and you wanted more material to justify the membership cost. You can get great travel PLR material here.
Conclusion
Having a travel blog can be a profitable business venture. It can allow you travel the world the way you want while financially supporting yourself. So try one of these or a combination of these ideas to make your dreams come true!
