How to Actually Make Money as a Travel Blogger

Do you ever have that feeling when you’re travelling and you want people to know about all the great places and all that you’ve done? It sounds fun, yeah?

So why don’t I tell you how you can do that and actually get paid while you’re at it?

I’ll walk you through the process, so you have nothing to worry about.

What is blogging

I’m sure you’ve heard of this term before. And you just might have a blog of your own.

But, did you know that the blogging started in 1994, by Justin Hall who was a college student at the time?

And the term, “weblog” was coined in 1997.

So, let’s start from the basics to help you understand the entire concept better.

Blogging is adding new material to a blog based on a schedule or at random times – depending on the blogger.

There are many types of blogging and people simply love what they do.

• Personal blogs – The entire concept of blogging started as a series of online diary entries, which eventually led to the concept of personal blogs.
• Business blogs – Blogs that post content for their business. The main goal of these blogs is to get more business.
• Professional blogs – These blogs wish to earn money through the process of blogging alone.
• Niche blogs – Generally you can provide multiple or specific topics on your blog. Niche blogs are those where you post things on specific topics like – food blogging, or book and movie reviews.
• Reserve blogs – Here the content that is posted is provided by guests that wish to make their content public.
• Affiliate blogs – These blogs post content that is based on the product from other companies or businesses.
• Media blogs – These blogs are the ones that are most popular with the younger generation. They end up posting videos – making it a vlog, or images – making it a photo blog etc.
• Freelance blogs – These bloggers are paid to create content for a particular blog.

It’s like you can make a blog on almost anything that you want. And be good at it, if you know what you’re doing.

What is travel blogging

The entire concept is documenting things. At least the ones that you want to share.

When you add the concept of travelling and blogging together, it means documenting details of your trip.

The idea of travel blogging came to light in the late 1990’s.

This can also be used to generate income. The main income generation activities are derived from the site or sites that you own or manage. You can make money from the things that you put online.

How can you actually make money as a travel blogger

Here’s the thing, though travel blogging is fun – it’s tiring as hell.

It may seem all glamorous on the outside, but you do get paid rather badly. But that doesn’t mean that you won’t get paid or that you’ll always get paid badly.

It’s all on you and how you manage your foundations. By foundations I mean the following:

Step 1 – Fundamentals

• Brand and message – You need to know what it is that you’re talking about and you need to know it well. Another thing that you’ve got to keep in mind is that you portray your message clearly to your audience. They need to understand what you’re trying to say as easily as they know their own name.

• Solid content – The Internet is all about content. So for your content to stand out, you’ve got to make sure that content that you’re putting out there has excellent quality and is easily understandable.

• List of email subscribers – This is a plugin that has a list of all your leads and subscribers who will get notified once you post your content on your blog.

• Tools and resources – Think of this as a vacation that you’re taking, and all that you have to do at the end of it; is blog about it. That would entail that you carry all the things that you will probably need to make a good blog post – written, video, or images.

• Social media communication – Once you’ve established a good audience for yourself, the pressure increases (no, I’m not trying to scare you). So, what you need to do is, make sure that you keep updating your audience via your social media account.

This is where you’ll have to engage with them via comments, likes, suggestions etc.

• Your USP (Unique Selling Point) – This is something that you will need to figure out rather early. You’ll need to figure out what makes you tick – what is the thing that you’re good at within travel blogging.

You can figure this out with the help of your audience. You can do that by asking them questions, their suggestions, tell them that you will be trying something new. Based on which you can figure out your USP.

• A network of contacts – These are those contacts that can help you out in your travel, hook you up with a good discount or a good place to stay, or give you all the local details on the place that you will be blogging about.

• Media – Never ever forget to take your media kit with you. This kit will help you take all the pictures, videos, and notes that you will need to create your blog post.

Once you’ve covered the fundamentals, things are only going to get easier for you as you know what you’re doing and how things are supposed to go.

Step 2 – Paid marketing campaigns with brands and tourism brands

It’s always a good idea to go partner up with marketing agencies so that you can get the exposure that you need.

Once your blog has been advertised for a while, you will begin to get offers from tourism brands – be warned it will take time, but it’s not impossible.

These tourism brands will provide you with all that you need for your travel but would ask you to post content for their websites and market for them in a way to increase your viewership and their business – both.

Step 3 – Make money with sponsored posts

Here, other brands will pay you to post their content or experience on your blog.

You have to keep one thing in mind when you do this – you need to make sure that you understand the product/service that you’re posting about.

This only helps you explain the product better and increase your popularity among your audience as well.

Step 4 – Affiliate marketing

This is one of the greatest things when it comes to being a travel blogger. You can affiliate your blog with anything that may be related to travelling you are bound to get more views on your blog and the affiliated business is bound to get more customers.

Or you can take it up further a notch and set up your own dropshipping ecommerce website.

Step 5 – Freelance content creation

The entire concept of freelancing is – producing content for another blog, company, or website while you’re getting paid for it.

When you freelance content for other blogs you end up getting more views as they will let their audience know about your blog.

These are some of the sure shot ways that you can make money while being a travel blogger.

But, there are some more ways that you can actually make money:

• Signing up with travel agencies
• Signing up a contract with tour companies.
• TV travel shows.
• Blogger brand campaign relationship.

Now that you know all the basics on how you can make money while being a travel blogger, it doesn’t seem that hard or difficult right?

To be honest, nothing is impossible if you truly love what you’re doing.

Don’t forget to tell us what you think and share the love.