How To Make Money On A Travel Blog?

Choosing a site for a travel blog and its competent optimization. How to choose affiliate programs and which promotion services to use. How to attract an audience to your blog.

A quality audience is real and commercial accounts, as well as influencers. This list does not include suspicious profiles and mass followers. It is necessary to divide subscribers by account type. Since this is important for a potential advertiser who wants his message to be seen by as many people as possible.

Organization, development and monetization of a travel blog

You can make money on a travel blog using both standard and unique ways that work exclusively with travel or travel content.

Creating a travel blog for making money

From the very beginning, it is important to understand that a blog is created to generate income, and therefore, a number of important rules must be followed:

• regularly publish useful information (instructions, maps with explanations, reviews of establishments and recommendations for behavior in difficult situations);
• create unique content (travel yourself or hire local guides as authors);
• Maintain a variety of content (photos, articles, interviews, tips, videos);
• do not retell information from travel guides; in travel blogs, visitors are looking for your personal informative experience of everyday life in another country, as well as a private alternative opinion about significant events or places;
• check the validity of the facts.

Skills required include: basic knowledge of web and HTML editing, SEO skills to create optimized content, good English, cross-platform and social media (YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and others). ).

The main advice for those who are thinking about how to start a travel blog: when choosing a domain name and a blog name, avoid using slang expressions, dashes, confusing and ambiguous words, as well as similarities with the already known names of travel resources. It is not necessary to indicate the style of travel and your age in the name, as they are subject to changes. Avoid pointing to 18+ content as this is unlikely to be appreciated by advertisers in the future.

Great travel blog examples

• Where Can I FLY? Travel blog
  
• Where Can I FLY? Travel reviews
  
• Travel comparator
  

One of the most popular blogging platforms is Wordpress. If you decide to host your content here, you will need to choose which web hosting to use, shared or dedicated. Free services are a good proposition for newbies, however, they always have limitations and caveats that will hold back your blog's development. It is most rational to use a common server that supports multiple sites at the initial stages of the project. VPS (Virtual Private Server) will allow you to use a dedicated sector on the server for your blog. Your own dedicated server is an indispensable thing for large, serious projects. Its worthy alternative is cloud hosting, that is, renting space per resource from a group of cloud storages. The most famous of them are Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Thus, it is impossible to say unequivocally which is better or worse: at different stages your project may be satisfied with one or another type of hosting. If you are set up serious, dedicated or cloud hosting is what you will inevitably come to.

Convenient video hosting and its search is another important task for someone who has decided to start a travel blog. In addition to YouTube, there are several alternative options, but they are all less popular:

• RuTube,
  
• Dailymotion,
  
• Vzaar,
  
• Vimeo,
  
• Metacafe,
  
• Video @ Mail.Ru,
  
• Yandex.Video,
  
• Myvi.ru,
  
• Toxicbun,
  

However, unlike YouTube, other video hosting sites have significant drawbacks: lack of monetization, tougher administration policy, focus only on the English-speaking audience, high requirements for the uniqueness of content, or low video quality. All this together makes YouTube the smartest option. You can read a detailed overview of various video hosting sites here:

• Cheapest domain name registration for a travel blog
  
• Cheapest web hosting for a travel blog
  

How to attract an audience and grow a travel blog

It's no secret that the initial value of a new blog, regardless of its topic, is zero. One of the main metrics that advertisers and affiliates focus on is the number of subscribers. At the same time, the dynamics of an increase / decrease in the volume of an active blog audience is of great importance.

There are several ways to get the word out about your new blog and increase your subscriber base:

• viral articles (warnings about danger, a selection of life hacks, materials with ratings in the style of 10 most ...);
• collaborations with larger bloggers;
• interviews for third-party large resources;
• inviting influencers and celebrities to interviews;
• exchange of links and posts;
• comments on blogs and similar sites;
• buying links and paid contextual advertising.

Methods such as runs through catalogs of links, interviews without links, answers to questions in the Mail.ru service do not bring the desired result.

The basic rules for the promotion of any, including travel blog, include the following:

• publication of seo-optimized unique content (to search for popular queries, you can use the word selection service Wordstat from Yandex, one of the most popular services for checking the uniqueness of text - Text.ru);
• post materials regularly and evenly, gradually increasing the amount of content (search engines have a negative attitude to both the lull and the sudden surge in blog activity);
• competent promotion with purchased links (on reputable donor sites with a large audience);
• social media support;
• regular promotions for the audience (repost contests, like times, prize draws in the comments).

One of the ways to develop a travel blog is through display advertising. Thanks to it, information about your blog will be displayed as advertisements on three major sites:

• Google Display Network;
• the Yandex Advertising Network;
• On the MyTarget platform.

At the same time, you can adjust the parameters of the target audience by region, age, preferences and many other parameters. A display ad bid is a cost per click that directly depends on the parameters of your ad campaign. By tracking user behavior, you can add new ones and remove ineffective ones.

How to monetize a travel blog

After your blog has gained a sufficient number of active audience, you should think about its monetization.

Proven and effective ways to generate income from travel content include:

• writing books;
• promotion of your own branded products;
• cooperation with brands and reviews of goods / services within the framework of advertising integrations (hotels, taxi services, ticket resellers, cashback services);
• sale of photographs;
• master classes and trainings for novice travelers;
• built-in banner ads and built-in ads on video hosting.

The passive income of a travel blogger includes discounts in hotels for honest reviews of services, providing goods for reviews.

When choosing how to make money from a travel blog, many are considering affiliate and sub-affiliate programs. The most popular travel bloggers include:

• Travelpayouts (includes an airline ticket search engine - Aviasales and a hotel selection service - Hotellook);
  
• Skyscanner, Buruki - flight search engines;
• HotelsCombined (RoomGuru), Booking and Agoda - selection of hotels;
• Admitad, GdeSlon, Doubletrade (multifunctional partner networks).

The lucrative travel brand partnerships not only generate income, but also advertise for your blog.

The main problem with affiliate programs is that they only work if the system detects a click on your link. However, cookies are only stored for 30 days. In addition, the user can get information, and then go to the advertiser's website in a different way. In this situation, partner networks that pay per click, such as Skyscanner or HotelsCombined, can help. Thus, the main disadvantage of affiliate programs is the low level of earnings with the general ease of advertising.

Another fairly popular way to monetize your blog is through display advertising. By allocating and selling places for banner ads on the pages of your resource, you allow third-party resources to provide information about yourself to your audience. By clicking on the link, users increase the advertiser's traffic, and the blog owner receives a monetary reward.

There are the following types of display ads that can be placed on a blog page:

• standard format banner in any part of the page;
• flash banner in the upper right part (the most conversion and popular);
• topline - stretch at the top of the page on the first screen;
• pop-up - pop-up windows;
• sidekick - a banner that disappears when you hover over it with the mouse (refers to aggressive types of advertising);
• rich-media - pages that overlap the main one (may cause negative reaction and is not recommended for frequent use).

Few people are looking for advertisers on their own these days. Most of the owners of Internet resources use the services of large networks that automatically add ads to the selected parts of the pages and customize the rules for their display. The most famous network offering display advertising services is the giant Google Adsense.

In addition to the obvious advantages of display advertising in a travel blog, there are also disadvantages of using it:

• low level of involvement of users who have long been accustomed to advertising noise on the network;
• lack of control over the content of displayed ads and presented companies;
• reputational risks (in the event that the user sees an advertisement for a product, service or company to which he has a negative attitude).

All this is covered by the ease of connection and the ability to work in automatic mode.

It should be noted that recently, display advertising has become much less profitable for site owners. This was facilitated by the development of blocking services, a low price tag and an overabundance of information on the Internet.

There are several options for generating profit from display advertising on travel blog pages:

• subscription fee for the rental of advertising space on the site;
• CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions);
• CPC (cost per click);
• CPA (price per action when the user, having gone to the advertiser's website, must make a purchase or order a service).

It makes sense for a blog owner to combine several options for cooperation with advertisers at once.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can travel bloggers create unique content that stands out in a saturated market?

Travel bloggers can create unique content by focusing on niche travel experiences, offering