How To Make Money As A Travel Blogger

How To Make Money As A Travel Blogger

Travel blogging is one of the most popular blogging niches on the internet. People LOVE to travel, but not everyone has the resources or guts to explore the world. Instead, they live vicariously through badass travel bloggers who take on new adventures every single day!

If you start a travel blog, you can share everything from breathtaking photography to thoughtful vacation hacks. You’ll probably have no shortage of post ideas (if you do, let us know), but the real question is: How can you make money on your travel blog???

Making this blogging thing a full-time gig is the dream, right? That way, you can travel as your career! To do that, you need a good monetization strategy, so here are some of our top ways to turn a profit on your travel blog:

How To Make Money As A Travel Blogger

How To Make Money As A Travel Blogger

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the absolute BEST WAYS to make money off of ANY blog! If you’re not familiar with affiliate marketing, it’s when you share special product or service links (called affiliate links) on your blog or social media posts. And, when your readers make a purchase using that link, you get a cut of the profits! Cha-ching!

In general, you can begin affiliate marketing when you have around 1,000 followers. So, your blog can get monetized ASAP. Lots of travel-specific companies have their own affiliate marketing programs, especially if you want to advertise things like your must-have travel insurance, your go-to car rental places, or your fave hiking gear brands. However, you can also affiliate market using huge affiliate networks like Amazon Affiliates or ShareASale, which have all sorts of products that could work for ANY blogger!

For travel-specific affiliate advice, check out this post on the best affiliate programs for travel bloggers. Affiliate income could be your ticket to making travel blogging a career!

Brand Collaborations and Ambassadorships

Brand collaborations and ambassadorships cut out the middleman of the affiliate network and connect you directly with your favorite brands. Though these are definitely harder to get, they usually offer bigger & better payouts! 

With brand collabs, you (or your blog manager) work out a deal with a brand and they commission a custom social media or blog post that features a specific service or product. You then make a sponsored post that matches their specifications and, in turn, you get paid! 

Ambassadorships are similar to collabs, but they refer to an ongoing relationship with a brand. So, instead of individual one-off posts, you’d post more regularly for their brand and provide them with user-generated content for their own ads. If you have a brand you really love and believe in, collabs and ambassadorships are a great idea!

Group Trips and Tours

A lot of people are stressed out by the idea of planning a trip. Or they’re simply too intimidated to go at it alone. In response, some travel bloggers plan big group trips and then sell passes on their websites. So, the reader can go on an exclusive girls’ trip or a small group tour with their favorite travel influencer. How freaking cool? Count us in!

It’s a great way to meet people, connect with your followers, and, honestly, make a lot of money! Your presence alone will warrant a pretty good markup, so this is an awesome way to make a profit if you’re willing to put the work into planning it! 

Reviewer

If you want to get paid to travel, relationships with brands are ev-er-y-thing. Instead of affiliate marketing, you could write restaurant, venue, and accommodation reviews in exchange for free bookings or commission checks. (Here’s more on writing hotel reviews!) 

Start by reviewing places for free and build credibility as well as a good following. Once you have a solid portfolio of past work and your brand kit shows why your brand is worthwhile, reach out to your fave companies and see if you can get discounts, free stuff, or a paycheck to review their products and services!

Ad Space

Blogging in itself can be pretty profitable, especially if you display tasteful ads on your website! If thousands of readers flock to your blog every month to read your posts, you can monetize those visitors by allowing an ad network like Mediavine, SHE Media, and Ezoic to add targeted ads to your web pages. (Here are our fave ad networks for small brands.) 

To do this, you need at least 10,000 monthly page views, a good standing with Google AdSense, and a dynamic brand. Just make sure you’re always thinking about your readers and their user experience. Don’t overdo it with pop-ups and intrusive ad placement. You should strive to make passive ad revenue without annoying your readers!

eBooks or Books

Whether it’s a memoir, a how-to book, a self-help story, or a travel guide, books and ebooks can be another reliable source of income for your travel blog. This works best once you already have a loyal following (even if it’s small) because they’re almost certain to want to buy your book, making the time investment totally worth it.

So, if you have content that deserves to be in the long-form format, consider writing a book! You can sell it digitally on your website at basically no cost, or you could print a few thousand physical copies and ship them right from your house. 

Digital Products

Beyond books, there are TONS of other digital products you could sell! Planning tools, packing lists, destination guides, travel journal pages, and more can be sold as printable downloads. Since these are relatively inexpensive and don’t involve shipping, you can usually sell A LOT of these to your followers! 

How To Make Money As A Travel Blogger

Press Trips

To go on a press trip, you need to contact a city’s or country’s tourist department and present your brand kit and your travel goals. Then, try to sell them on the idea of using you as a marketing campaign for their destination! Once they accept, they get busy helping you organize all the details & you get ready to do your favorite thing ever – travel! 

They’ll tell you where to stay, where to visit, and what to post. It’s like a brand collab on steroids, because you’ll be providing a lot of sponsored content and your whole trip will be like a work project—but, hey, that’s a small price to pay for getting to travel for free or for a profit!  

Monetized YouTube Channel

Travel influencing is something that works well as a blog or a vlog. YouTube has thousands of travel vloggers who have millions of followers. And, unlike your blog hosting service, YouTube has its own monetization system that allows you to make money right on the platform after you hit a certain amount of subscribers! 

This is an AMAZING way to make money because after the video is uploaded, you really don’t have to do any extra work to generate a profit. Of course, you have to have a pretty good following before you can make it a career, but it’s possible when combined with a search engine-optimized blog!

If you’re unsure of what search engine optimization is, read this post and consider our SEO services. It’s the MOST effective way of reaching a huge audience and curating a loyal following quickly! 

Merch or Original Products

Whether you have a good idea for a travel tool or an aesthetic brand vibe that deserves merch, you can sell real products on your blog. This does take some initial capital, warehouse space, and a year or two of development, but it can happen! 

And, if your products are high-quality and people use them/wear them, it’s like a marketing campaign in itself! Your followers represent your product, people notice and ask questions, and then you gain more readers and more buyers. It’s a solid system!

Vacation Planning and Consulting 

Again, people hate planning their own trips; it can be soooo time-consuming, and not to mention STRESSFUL. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it can be super overwhelming to plan for all of the knowns and unknowns. However, if you’re a travel blogger, you’re probably pretty good and planning . . . and you probably know the ins and outs of lots of popular destinations. So, monetize that skill by offering travel planning and consulting!

A blog combined with a travel planning company is honestly so smart because they both promote each other really well. If you have the time, passion, and skills for planning and consulting, add it as a service on your website!

Online Courses

If we’ve established anything so far, it’s that most people don’t view travel as simple. They want to have the courage and skill to chart their own course. But there are often things holding them back. Consider developing a course (or ten!) on a challenging travel process that your readers can go through at their own pace. 

It could be as broad and lengthy as a guide to international travel or as niche as an airplane car seat how-to. Once your readers see the true value in your online courses, they will begin to curate passive income that you can use to drive other parts of your business!

Public Speaking

People love to hear from successful travel bloggers. It’s inspiring. It’s empowering. And, it’s super interesting. Depending on your niche, you may be able to land public speaking gigs that allow you to connect with more people, find more followers, and get paid!

These gigs aren’t exactly easy to come by, but keep your eye out for local business events, public conferences, open meetups, and even school motivation programs. Be proactive about offering your services until you become well-known in the industry—then the gigs will come to you!

Photography

Destination photos are a HUGE part of travel blogging. There are few people out there who don’t love to look at beautiful pictures from all over the world and dream about what it’s like to be there. Believe it or not, you CAN sell your own travel photos to a few different people and places:

  • Stock image companies
  • Followers for personal display
  • Magazines and editorials for featured photos

To make sure these photos are great quality, invest in a quality camera and good software. Even consider taking a photography class. If you’re already really good at photography, consider making travel photography your niche! You could then sell your own photography course and even destination travel sessions for your followers. AND… you can find other photography blogs and post ideas for inspiration in this post!

Travelling as a full-time job

You can make traveling your full-time job by becoming a blogger! 

Being an influencer or blogger is often laughed at—like it’s not a super lucrative way of building a career. The truth is, you can make great money using a blog and social media! And, while doing it you can inspire people, help people, and even support a big cause. There are so many reasons people start a blog!

Once you have your travel brand figured out and you know how you want to present yourself, you just need to develop a killer monetization strategy. Once your blog has started providing you with regular income, you’ve made it. Now, your brand is pretty much unstoppable and the whole travel blogging better look out!!!
For more travel blogging tips check out our post “How to Write a Travel Blog” and other articles on the InfluencerSEO blog. We have all the info you need to do this influencer thing the right way. So, what are you waiting for??? Let’s travel the world!

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