How to Travel and Blog for Money: Turn Your Blog Into Cash

Learning how to travel and blog for money is a dream.

I wrote this post to help travelers make this dream a reality and to do it as efficiently as possible.

Most people want to travel the world to experience new things and learn about different cultures, but few are able to create a lifestyle based on travel.

Want to learn how to travel and blog and earn money while you’re at it?

Or do you have a blog and need to turn it into a cash machine to finance even more trips? Then continue reading this article.

How to Travel and Blog for Money?

We analyzed the websites of various popular travel bloggers, and now we’ll take a closer look at how they do it.

If they can do it, anyone can. 

As it turns out, creating a travel blog is remarkably easy but not many people earn money from their blogs. They simply write about their travels.

And writing about your travels is great but if you could get paid to do it, that would be even better.

There are thousands of travel blogs out there that do not bring in a single cent.

Why? 

It’s simple.

They didn’t turn their blog into a business.

And that’s where we’ll start, how to turn your blog into a business.

Turn Your Blog Into a Full-Time Business:

In simple terms, a business is anything that brings in cash, and there’s no reason a travel blog can’t be turned into a business.

So if you already have a travel blog that gets a decent amount of traffic but you haven’t been able to earn money from it, this section is for you.

With just a few simple changes, a travel blog can be turned into an excellent source of income.

If your totally new to blogging, check out our guide to blogging.

1. Promote Affiliate Products on Your Blog:

Not sure what to promote?

One solution would be to head on over to Clickbank and hit the “Travel” section, or click this link.

And there’s a list of products that you can promote. Make sure you research whatever you promote and that’s it’s something beneficial to your website audience.

Travel guides tend to do quite well. 

Product Reviews Work Great:

One thing that you can do to bring in some commissions would be to write a review about one of the products in the category mentioned earlier.

Then, include an affiliate link at the end of the review and use a grabbing call to action to encourage your viewer to click on your link.

If you write a detailed and unbiased review, and if the product is legitimate and helpful, most people will click the link, and you’ll earn some fast affiliate commissions.

In fact, that’s one simple strategy that you can use to turn your travel blog into a source of income.

You don’t need to be a “Sell Out” but the simple act of publishing a review between your regular posts can bring in a lot of cash.

Target Travel Related Products with Amazon:

You can also target travel related products and link them to Amazon Associates. Although Amazon has lower commissions than most affiliates (between 4% – 8%), Amazon tends to convert more sales.

And that’s cash you can use to fund even more travels! 

On that topic, there are other – physical – products that you can promote as an affiliate too.

For example, consider reviewing a travel backpack from Amazon, or any other travel related product, and include your affiliate link.

For more information on how to make money from Amazon, read this article.

Take a look at the products that you use during your travels. Can you promote them as an affiliate? I’m sure you can! 

2. Collect Email Addresses from Your Blog:

In other words, build a list. If you haven’t heard this before.. The Money Is In The List..

Building a list in the travel niche is easy because there are a lot of people who are eager to learn more about different countries and vacation ideas.

But a lot of travel bloggers fail to build a list and they miss out a lot of potential leads.

How to build your list?

Give away a free eBook, service, or something to get sign ups.

If you don’t want to write an eBook, one idea could be to compile your most popular articles and turn that into an eBook.

Or even a simple call to action such as, “Subscribe for more travel stories!” can be enough to build a list.

The point is that you need to collect people’s contact information so you can send them your articles later, and those are people you can send your promotional posts as well.

So don’t forget to collect those leads! We use Thrive Architect to collect all of ours and they’re awesome!

3. Advertise a Service from Your Blog:

The bloggers who make a full-time income from their blog offer a few different services, the money comes in from a few different streams.

Besides promotion affiliate products, it’s also a good idea to offer other services.

What can you do?

Well, one idea could be to offer a freelance writing service. 

Since you already have a blog about your travels, chances are your writing skills are decent.

There are a lot of other bloggers and websites that need decent travel writers and their editors are always on the lookout for more article ideas.

Create a new page on your travel blog where you offer your services as a writer. This can be all it takes to bring in some clients and cash.

And you can always outsource when the workload gets too stressful using services like Fiverr.

But you can offer other services too, it all depends on your skill set.

4. Write a eBook, Sell it Online!

Writing a book is probably the best way to make money from a blog because it establishes you as an authority and also brings in a nice stream of cash.

Most travel bloggers have a book for sale, and if you travel a lot, it shouldn’t be difficult to come up with some book ideas, as you have plenty of stories to tell.

If you’re going to write a book, I recommend giving it away for free for the first couple of weeks to build a list and collect feedback.

You can choose to either publish the book on your website directly, or use Amazon’s self-publishing service.

If you want want to use Amazon, read this article about how to make money selling books on Amazon. 

5. Network with Other Bloggers:

There are tons of travel bloggers that you can network with to send even more traffic to your website.

How do you network with bloggers?

It’s simple.

• Follow them on social media.
• Share their articles.
• Leave comments on their articles.
• Get in contact with them.

You can even write articles and link to other travel bloggers, it’s an awesome way to network and make new friends.

How can you benefit from networking with other bloggers?

Well, if you do online favors for them, they’ll likely return the favor, and that means more traffic to your website.

So it’s always a good idea to look for other bloggers and network with them.

You can also write guest posts on other blogs for even more exposure. 

Design Your Blog for Max Conversions?

So we mentioned four ways to make money from your website, but now we need to learn how to boost conversions so we can turn your website into a full-time business.

For maximum revenue, aim to complete all four of the tasks mentioned earlier, as that not only will make your website look professional, but it will also bring in a lot more cash.

Here’s some other great tips…

1. Pick a Clean and Responsive Theme:

With WordPress, it’s easy to find responsive themes, and many of them are free too.

In fact, the default theme sometimes is enough for small-time websites.

Wealthy Affiliate (Worlds #1 Online Internet Marketing/Business Training Center) has an amazing website-creation service, and all their themes are super slick and responsive.

Their website builder SiteRubix has several cool functions that improves your ability to rank your travel blog posts naturally in search engines like Google, YouTube, Bing, etc..

Feel free to read our review of their website builder – SiteRubix for more details.

2. Build Awesome Opt-in’s and Landing Pages:

You’ll find increased sales and email opt-in conversions when you’ve got a set of powerful lead-gen tools.

For me personally, I’ve tried Lead Pages, ClickFunnels, and Thrive Architect. The best value and results have come from using Thrive.

Plus you can create what’s called A/B tests and get statistical data for what sales forms covert better.

Check out our Thrive Architect review right here.

3. Make Sure The Most Important Parts of Your Website are Seen FIRST!

In other words, the areas of your website that you want to draw attention to should be the first thing that people see when the page loads.

For example, if you wrote a book, the cover of the book should be on the top right sidebar or within the main menu at the top.

It should be visible as soon the page loads. Something like this…

Likewise, if you want to direct people to your sign-up form, keep it somewhere near the top of the website.

The top of the website is the “Hottest” area because it loads first so it’s the first thing that people see.

Also, Optimize your Website from Day 1:

Travel blogs usually include a lot of pictures, and those pictures take up bandwidth.

Edit your pictures before you upload them and crop them to reduce their size.

You can also use image compressing tools to further reduce the size of pictures to increase website speed.

Read this post to learn how to find and optimize all your website images.

Travel Blog Tips To Dominate Your Niche:

Most bloggers either write about the first thing that pops into their head or the last trip they went on.

Though that strategy can work, it also leaves a lot to chance.

It’s like traveling without a map, internet access, or basic common knowledge of where you are traveling to, hear me out. 

Maybe you think a certain trip is interesting but other people might not have the same opinion.

Smart Bloggers Research Keywords:

It’s much better to research article ideas, and one way to do that is to use my favorite keyword research tool.

Look for keywords that are not so competitive and have a decent amount of traffic, even if the traffic is in the double digits it could be worth it.

But don’t worry! 

You can still write about your last adventure.

But now you can find keywords to include to bring in even more traffic.

For example, let’s say that I just went to Thailand and I wanted to write an article about my trip for my travel website.

First, I’ll head over to Jaaxy and create a free account. 

Then, I’ll type in a generic keyword, such as “Things to do in Thailand”.

As you can see, immediately we see a few good keywords to target.

In fact, all these keywords are decent, and it should be easy to get our article to the top results of search engines like Google.

Personally, I would target the fourth result, “fun things to do in Thailand”.

Why? The QSR (Keyword Phrase Competition) is low at 57 and the SEO score is 92 (The Higher The Score, The Easier To Rank).

Need more keyword research info, read this post to understand the simple subject of keyword research.

So now you can go ahead and write about your trip, but now you have some keywords to include.

Location Keywords Rank Well:

With the next post you create, narrow it down to the specific city or area that you visited.

Finding a very specific keyword to target is awesome because – most of the time – there’s no competition, and you can easily dominate the search engine results.

So it’s always important to drill down and find a really specific keyword to target in your articles.

Easy, right? 

So if you go ahead and write an article targeting the keyword above, that will bring in more traffic to your website.

That’s targeted traffic that will convert into sales if you followed our four tips mentioned earlier.

Or use the same method I use with every post I create to rank content quickly. It’s my Free eBook on how to target traffic, place keywords, and dominant your niche.

One of the things I love most about travel writing is that you can include a lot more detail in your articles because you have been to that place.

You have a lot of material to work with and you can also include pictures to enhance the reading experience.

In other words, everything you need to make fun and interesting content is right in front of you. 

And people love fun and interesting content.

With this strategy, it’s possible to satisfy that craving for adventure while also making money at the same time.

Blog and Traveling for Profit Conclusion:

We discussed a lot of points in this article, but the main takeaway is that if you want your blog to make money, then you need to treat it like a business.

Thankfully, turning a blog into a business only requires a few small changes, nothing drastic.

You can still maintain you creative nature, while making money. Not a bad thing.

What can do you do to earn more? Change your site to bring in more leads and improve conversions?

And if you haven’t started a blog already, then don’t worry, it’s not too late! It also has never been easier to setup a website!

Don’t wait for someone to steal your ideas… You can start working on your new travel blog in the next few minutes.

Thanks for taking the time to read this article about how to travel and blog for money. I hope you enjoyed it.

Until next time.