8 Ways to Make Money Travel Blogging + Action Steps

Last Updated on August 1, 2022

To truly make money from your blog, you must first devise a strategy for how you will make that money in the first place. The most important thing in order to make money travel blogging is to have a plan in place with complete action steps.

You need to know what you will be doing for the next six to twelve months in order to genuinely bring in that initial five thousand travel blog income. Let’s go over three ways to make money travel blogging and how you can develop the action steps you need, in order to bring in that travel blog income!

I started blogging when I was 18 years old.  I was sitting in my lounge with my flatmates when we were talking about travel blogging. I had watched a documentary about Gala Darling, who’s a Kiwi that was a blogger living in the USA.  Her story inspired me to start one of my own.  I hated working for other people in mindless jobs (like being a pizza girl when I was 16), and I wanted to be my own boss one day so I started Anita Hendrieka.

It wasn’t a travel blog at first, but more of what I am thinking, loving and making.  It was a DIY, lifestyle blog with absolutely no direction and really bad spelling/grammar.  I cringe to even think about it now.

When I left NZ at 19 it was still live, but later on, I started writing about my travels and decided that it was a bit hard to do DIY stuff when your travelling so it became Anita Hendrieka – the travel blog.  It wasn’t until 2015 that I started to take it seriously and after months of work, I started to make money off it.

Nowadays, it’s one of my full-time businesses as well as being a Blog and Pinterest coach.  I wanted to be my own boss ever since I was young; having a business I could call my own was my ultimate life goal.

Being flexible is key.  You have to be creative about how you can make money because there are no rules and no handbook about how to run your blog and make money.

How much do travel bloggers make?

This is a loaded question that actually doesn’t have an answer to. You could earn anything from $0 to $1,000,000+ if you wanted to. There is no limit or yearly summary because YOU ARE IN CHARGE! That is both a pro and con to owning your own travel blogging business.

It’s not like a regular job where you have that security of the same paycheck coming in every month. With travel blogging, it’s up to you how you want to run your business and how much you want to make money from it

8 ways to make money travel blogging

1. Sponsored content / Brand partnerships

This is where you would work with aligned brands and get paid to promote their services or products. When it comes to working with brands, there are a variety of options available.

When I’m not writing about my own adventures, I sometimes get paid to write articles. Sponsored content is when a company pays me money and asks that in return they would like credit within the article as well mention of their business somehow during it.

If you do decide to work with a brand, make sure that both of your values align for the best results!

2. Advertising

Ads on my website are one of the biggest ways I get paid as a travel blogger. The $ amount that I get paid really depends on how many people I can bring to my website each month (and also where they are from in the world). If you’re just starting out, I would wait until you get over 10k pageviews per month before applying to programs like Adsense or Ezoic. Once you reach 50k sessions per month, I would highly recommend applying for Mediavie which is the advertising network I am a part of.

3. Affiliates

Affiliate links are links that I spread throughout my website that I receive a commission for when you buy something from that website.  Some affiliate programs I recommend are:

• Booking.com
• Viator
• Agoda
• Safetywing
• World nomads
• Etsy
• Amazon

My Pinterest Keyword Vault is one of the many products I sell

4. Digital Product

This could be a printable, eBook or something else that your reader can download themselves. I sell my own courses for bloggers and business owners that want to grow a blog.  Products are one of the best ways to earn money from travel blogging as long as you have a great product that solves a problem for your audience.

5. physical product

A physical product is a tangible item that relates to your travel blog and solves one of the problems for your audience. The most common items used as products are t-shirts, hats, mugs with logos on them or souvenirs. The options are endless here!

6. Reviews

Reviewing hotels, restaurants or activities can be a great side hustle for travel blogging looking to further their income. I went to the Polo Bar in London and tried their companies and cocktails and in return, I did a review on my website for them.  Travel bloggers will charge for this, but maybe if you’re just starting out you could do it as an exchange to get some great testimonials under your belt.

7. Press trips

The #1 ream money earner usually for travel bloggerss is when a tourism board or company pays accommodation, food and plane fare to a location they are wanting exposure to.  Some press trips are paid and some are not.  When I started travel blogging, the press trips were not been paid because i wanted to open the door and get some experience. But these days I do charge because this website is valuable and is my full-time business.

Believe it or not, press trips are sometimes really hard because you’re getting pulled left and right doing endless activities and seeing sights whilst trying to write, still finish work for other companies and keeping up with your website.  It’s kind of like going on holiday but you still have to work full-time.  Time is VERY valuable, which is why I believe all press trips should be paid.

This is my number #1 pick for making money travel blogging because I get to go to new locations that I might have not thought about before and get to pursue my hobby, travelling!

8. Freelancing

Freelancing is something that I have been offered to do because of my travel blog.  I used to write for websites like Hostel Bookers, Hostels.com and cheapflights.com. I basically get paid to write an article that they will put up on their website and not mine.  It’s great to get your name out there whilst getting a regular income!

How to ACTUALLY make money travel blogging – The action steps!

In order to make money from any of the above, you must be very clear about your blog’s niche. Spend some time figuring out your niche if you don’t already know it. Simply being in the tourism niche or the fashion niche is far too broad to succeed these days. You need to be more niche than that.

In order to find your niche, you need to know the following:

• What makes your blog unique from others? What makes YOU stand out from the crowd.
• What are you good at?
• How is your blog for and what do THEY need? What problems can you solve for them?

Now we have gone through different ways to make money, what are your three possibilities? How would you like to make money travel blogging? List those first.

Income stream #1 –

Income stream #2 –

Income stream #3 –

Now let’s plan the action steps!

Let’s imagine that you want to get started making money through affiliates.

Now you need to figure out the exact actions steps that you need to take in order to get that first sale. What’s the process of earning money from an affiliate? For example:

1. First and foremost, you must join affiliate programs that you align with and think your audience would love.
2. Secondly, you need to create a series of three to five blog posts completely focused on affiliate products that you know your audience is already searching for.
3. Third is to include those affiliate links with the blog post and publish.

That is an example of a process. You can go a lot deeper than that and there are other things you will need to put in place, in order to make that income. But if you want to learn more about that, then you will need to join my blogging course, The Blog Machine.

Let’s get back to the affiliate income process. Perhaps you want to devote more time to growing your email list so that you can insert affiliate links inside your emails to earn money because you know that publishing blog posts and waiting for them to rank can take time.

I would like you to sit back and consider what are the three action steps you need to take in order to grow that email list, and include affiliate links.

How are you going to get from here to there if you don’t have any action steps in place? This is my secret to success, to plan ahead!

Setting your goals is really important, but you must also take action to achieve them. And that’s exactly what I want you to do when it comes to planning your financial future for your travel blog. Make sure you know how you’re going to make money and what actions you’re going to do.

Travel Blog Media Kits

You don’t have to worry about this as much if you are new but I do want to briefly educate you about media kits because if you do want to work with brands, you’re going to need one.

What is a media kit?

A media kit is a template you will hand out if you wanted to work with businesses. It essentially tells the statistics from your website.

If you’ve been blogging for a while, say two years, I would definitely put together a media kit if you truly want to pitch to brands and work with them.

Here’s a media kit template that I created that you’re welcome to use. Some key pointers to have on your media kit would be:

• Social media followers, whether it’s Instagram, Facebook, a Facebook group etc
• Monthly visitors page views and users
• Who’s your audience? Are they female or male, what is their age? Where do they come from? What are the top three to five countries?

That is also important for brands to ensure that you are a good fit for them.

Make connections at World Travel Market

If you’re in the travel niche, you need to know about World Travel Market. It’s hosted in London every year and it’s a fantastic convention for networking. You can connect with a lot of tourism boards and brands directly at this convention. Networking is incredibly important to make money travel blogging as sometimes it’s all about WHO you know!

Before you want to make money travel blogging remember to make sure you plan ahead. Create your financial strategy and how you want to make money, it’s really important. Otherwise, you might just say, “Oh, I want to generate money from affiliates ” only to look back six months later and wonder, “What steps have I taken to actually do that?” when you haven’t made a cent from affiliate marketing.

How do you want to make money travel blogging and what are the action steps that you must complete in the coming months to accomplish that goal? Let me know below the three ways you’re going to make money with your travel blog.

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