This is a question that has been plaguing me recently as I have begun to work through a new strategy for Todd’s Wanderings. It is also a question that is inevitably on the minds of TBC readers and just about anyone who is attracted to the bright lights of blogging.
According the 1,000-1,000 Challenge we are focused at the minimum of earning (or proving that it’s possible) 1,000 USD per month. To be very honest, this is not such a hard thing to do. Developing 1,000 visitors a day is MUCH more difficult. The hard part in monetization is deciding if you want t make more and then choosing the correct strategy for your business model.
Maybe it’s the development worker in me, but I hate developing plans without a solid set of data guiding my decisions. Recently I set off a rant about advertisers trying to low ball good, honest, attractive, hard traveling bloggers. It occurred to me that there is nowhere we can point advertisers to industry standards to back up our claims that our rates are fair and not inflated. To help rectify this situation, and to help us all in answering the question of this post I have put together a poll, along with Laurence from Finding the Universe, to help create a rate card for text based advertising and sponsored posts.
I actually have an ulterior motive for this poll. It has occurred to me over the past two years that advertising can only get you so far in your monetization strategies. If you only want to make 1,000 a month and keep your blog loose then this is a great option for you. Check out our three part series on making money with your blog for a good introduction to advertising.
But if you are looking to live off of your blog, or spend more money when traveling, than it requires a different strategy and business model. You might also have other goals with your blog and text links are a potential liability to your future growth as Google frowns upon them to the point they have permanent wrinkles. For example, my goal at Todd’s Wanderings is to help get my first book published and sold to millions of people. If Google deindexes my blog my plan is ruined.
First things First: The Survey
Please fill in our quick 8 question only Advertising Survey, and share it with others.
Click here to take the survey
This will help the entire Travel Blogging Community and we will share the results wide and far.
Second things Second
I have been thinking long and hard about what has made Todd’s Wanderings a success to this point, as well as what my next steps need to be. I have gone through a process of analyzing popular blogs, in and out of the travel world, and have reevaluated my own goals, vision and strategy. You can preview and critique my new blog design to see where I’m headed.
By now your thinking, great what good will this be for me other than making sure that Todd picks up the tab when we meet in person? Well the benefit is that I’m planning to layout my whole process here on the TBC. I want to help you build up your blogs, earn more money, and be able to take me out to dinner (drinks included) when we meet up 
Over the next few months I plan to lay it all out, build up a number of free tools for TBC readers to use, and I might even develop a more in depth course that goes into greater detail on each of the subjects I’ll touch on. I want this to be useful so keep the comments and the suggestions coming and I’ll step up my game.
Anatomy of a Successful Travel Blog
First off I want to make one thing perfectly clear: there is no one way to be successful. To that end it pays to be creative, and to establish yourself and your blog as a purple cow. But in general a successful travel blog will realize that a blog is not a business by itself. I have struggled with this concept as I desperately want my blog and my daily writing to earn money on its own. Unfortunatly, this is not the case. A successful travel blog is one that uses the medium of a blog to interact with an audience, and in that interaction develop a business.
What does this mean? It means you have to have a business plan that is linked to but separate from your blogging plan. It means that you need to have a plan to attract your audience through your blog, but then you have to have a plan of what you will do with them once they are listening and talking back to you.
Many bloggers, myself included, spend so much time focusing on producing content to increase our traffic numbers, but then we fail to take the next step. We naively assume that increased traffic will lead to increased revenue. Of course massive traffic can lead to more money, but of all the travel blogs I have seen very few actually reach the 1,000 visitors a day that we strive to meet here at TBC. This does not mean you can’t still earn money, it just means that you need a plan.
At the core of many successful blogs are three factors that work together:
1) Find something that you love to do (I’m assuming that is traveling, exploring, getting drunk in odd places around the world)
2) Find similar people who value your expertise at the thing you love to do
3) Make sure that it’s something that people will pay for (yeah, this is quite an important part)
Travel Blogging Adds Extra Demands
The “how” is a very different thing from the topic of your blog. And this is where things become a bit more difficult for Travel Bloggers. Besides the normal blogging and business basics, we also need to be expert photographers, storytellers, researchers, writers, videographers, editors, marketers, and conversationalists. That’s a lot to ask from anyone. Oh, and you have to be up to speed on all the hottest trends in internet technology and where the kids are hanging out (what you don’t know what Google + is yet?).
Did I also mention that there are thousands of travel blogs competing for your audience, and a few smaller websites like Travelocity, National Geographic, Times, and just about every single newspaper on the planet?
Are you freaked out yet? Are your palms sweating? Have you cracked open another beer to ease the pain of what you committed yourself to?
Actually, it’s not as hard as you might think. In fact, if you have a good plan, work hard, and are talented you will have no problem
So that I don’t leave you hanging, here are a few of the topics I’ll be delving into over the next few months. Don’t worry; the structure will come as well:
- Website Design and Usability
- Branding
- Distinguishing yourself from everyone else
- Available Market and who your audience is
- Developing Content
- Providing Value
- Conversion (what you want people to do besides read your words and look at your pictures)
- Promotion (this goes beyond just the “use social media” or “guest blogging” suggestions. You need to have a strategy on who you want to attract and how you will target and engage them).
After we talk about all of this, we also have to discuss the nuts and bolts of travel blog writing, developing stories, getting people to care, and developing your voice.
Oh, and then we need to talk about the actual business blue prints that are working for travel bloggers, how to monetize, what your options are, and how to decide what works best for you.
Yeah, and you thought you had a busy schedule coming up!
And just in case you don’t believe me that anyone can earn money attracting an audience online, have a look at ShaneShane. It will blow your mind
What else would you like to learn about? Any essential travel blogging aspects that I missed?
About Todd Wassel
Thanks Todd. More great info to digest. Yes, I’m in with Google+….but oh dear,…another social medium we have to keep up with?
How do you manage it mate? Thought you’d be up all night feeding the baby?:-)
Thanks Jim, well I am up all night feeding the kid as well! To be honest there are still a million more things I want to do but there is just not enough time
I would say keep an eye on Google + and start getting a brand up on it sooner rather than later. Think about all the people who refused to switch from MySpace to Facebook…things change and for those of us addicted to change that is a good thing!
This is shaping up to be an interesting topic to read about Todd. I’m glad I found your blog via knowing your lovely wife
+ FB.
My site is in no way travel related – as it’s name suggests, it’s about the small house trend. Even though my site is nowhere near finished, over 75% of what I used to earn from working for an employer is now generated passively through LISH.
That is mostly Adsense and some affiliate sales and I could do much better, I just know it.
Will be looking forward to reading all of your upcoming info to get some ideas for my own non-travel site’s income as well as hubby’s meditation site.
Hope little Kaito is behaving himself and that Kay has recovered fully from what was a hugely lengthy labor!
Hi Kim, wow, I think you might be the first referral to my blogs from my wife!
I think living someplace is very close to traveling someplace, plus this site is also for lifestyle sites, or really anyone who find the information useful! Amazing that you are having such great results with adsense and affiliate. To be honest I have not found a good way to make adsense work on my travel blog as the content is way to varied. This all comes down to the strategy after all. For me, many people visit my blog to be entertained and live vicariously. If that is my audience then I should be selling them more of my writing not sending them to someone else. I’m working on this now with my first travel memoir. I will also have a free hiking book coming out very soon as well. My blog has opened up a ton of new doors offline, so in some cases the money is not always made on the blog itself.
Kaito is doing great, and behaving just as a small newborn should (meaning we are very tired!). I’ll give my best to Kay for you, as she is feeling better every day. What is your husbands meditation site?
What popped straight into my head when you were talking about making income specifically from your site is e-books. Some think they’re waaaaay overrated BUT if you write how you speak and your writing style is interesting and can keep your visitors on the hook, then e-books may work well for you.
You’d just need to find your own spin on a travel e-book that sets you apart from all of the others – your unique selling point that no-one will find anywhere else but on your blog. You said in your earlier message: “many people visit my blog to be entertained and live vicariously” … there’s your biggest hint. Write what your people want and bring your travel tips to life with your personal voice while keeping them in stitches and making everything real for them! Use pictures, video guides, audio, all sorts of technology.
I’ve got an e-book in the making too and it’s a nerve-wracking task when it’s a first one
Scott’s meditation site is very much a work in progress http://www.wildmindfulnessmeditation.com/ as I’m the webmistress there too, alongside of my site. He provides the content and I launch it and, thus far, we’ve had precious little time to do anything much with it, just the bare bones.
Scott has been the Meditation Teacher/Buddhist Chaplain at the Max/Medium prison here in Tasmania for the last 6 years and his interest in meditation spans back to before I met him, starting 15 years ago. It’s his passion so he’s looking at developing this beyond teaching at the prison and we hope to start a Meditation Retreat Centre (for all belief systems, not just Buddhist) in the coming years before we get too old and crotchety!
Would love to see more family pics of Kaito, Kay and yourself on FB as time goes by. Enjoy your little boy, tired as you may be.
We’re at 30 weeks gestation this week so we only have 10 weeks to go til our little girl turns up – exciting times!
Hi Kim, well I don’t want to give away all of my secrets just yet! But yes, I am moving into the ebook and maybe even the real book realm. Actually I first changed Todd’s Wanderings into a more professional site to develop a reader base for my book on walking a 1,200 pilgrimage in Japan. As I learned more about travel blogging and put in the effort to find readers I realized that I could also monetize along the way. But now I’m going back to my roots as I get ready to finalize my book. I imagine that there will be a number of other books as well, some guides, some travel narratives, all revolving around entertaining.
We have lots of pics of Kaito up on facebook! find me there and I’ll friend you on my personal site. you can also find some pics on the Todd’s Wanderings fan page (see the right sidebar).
Good luck with the meditation site. I’m a closet mediatator (honest that is a word) myself
I made a blog because it enjoys writing and share stories about my trips to many people. Could perhaps be useful to them.
Alex
Great idea about the standard rate card.
Now, uhm, that video. What the hell was that?
Hey Andy, thanks. Please pass along the rate survey to other travel bloggers so we can get as much data as possible.
You didn’t LOVE that video? I have to say it has changed my whole strategy for online promotion
Just a little fun while I’m sleep deprived!
I will keep reading this blog closely, as I’m really interested in the direction it’s going. My question though is, would you care to define what ‘easy’ means in your suggestions that making 1000 dollars per month is easy?
I would be ecstatic if I could make that sort of money, but at this point from what I’ve read and seen on other sites it doesn’t seem like it’s easy. Looking forward to more detail about that!
Denise
Hey Denise, well by Easy, I may have been a bit tongue in cheek. But to be honest it does not take too much time. Most travel bloggers can earn this in 6-12 months if they work hard. But of course the quick money comes at a price. In this case the easiest way is to a) increase you Page Rank and b) sell text links on your site. So if you have a PR 4 you can sell about 5 links on your homepage for a total of $2,000 for a year. If you then sell links on your posts at 200/year each then you need to sell 50 of these for a full year each. You can increase your prices if pages or posts have PR of their own.
This is the “easy” money. Of course to get on the radar of advertisers takes some work. And of course this is a dangerous game to play with google for your main site.
The easy part is that if you have set up your blog correctly, have an audience, are getting links, and have developed relationships then these opportunities are not hard to find. But as the numbers show it is hard to scale this up past roughly 1,000 a year. So the question in the post is, are you ok with this, or do you want more? Is your other income dependent on your main blog, and if it is then having text links puts that in jeopardy. Unlike others, I do not think it is unethical to sell text links (and I consider myself to be a moral kind of a guy). But there are costs and dangers associated with it that need to be understood if this is going to be your business plan.
Hi Todd,
Thanks for answering and sorry for not replying earlier. May I suggest you add an ‘email me when new comments are submitted’ button somewhere? I sort of forgot I had to check back for your answer.
My primary income is not dependent on my website, and in my case, I would be ecstatic if it could just pay for my travelling (as in, holidays, not long term travelling). I LOVE my day job and I love keeping travelling as a hobby and as something that relaxes me and makes me forget about everything. Getting 1000 dollars a month from advertising would achieve this. I do have a PR 4, and I have been approached by some advertisers who ‘ran for their lives’ when I suggested 100 dollars for a link in one of my posts (and I even said I would keep it on indefinitely). Thanks for being so helpful…I will wait and see what happens.
Hey Denise, good point about the “comment follow up” option. I actually forgot that I hadn’t installed that plug in here! I’ll get right on it. As for advertisers running, yes, some of them do that
But others don’t. It is just a matter of finding the right relationships. I have actually stopped taking new advertisers recently and am contemplating not using them anymore as I pursue a new monetization goal with my site. In fact here at TBC I have set the goal at 1,000 specifically for those who want to earn travel money and not necessarily become a full time travel blogger (I like my normal job as well). But I want to cater to the whole range of readers, and I think if whether you want 1,000 a month or 10,000 the fundamentals are very much the same.
Just filled in the survey. The standard card rate is a great idea. I disagree with you that reaching 1000 visitors per day is much harder than earning $1000 per month. In terms of traffic my blog is well above that number for a long time while it took me much longer to reach the earnings part of the 1000/1000 challenge.
Hey Robin thanks, and I guess what is easy for some is hard for others
I’d love to hear a bit more about your traffic strategy and how you did it.
I might change my mind in the future, but for now I think it’s unrealistic to assume I can keep up with everything I need to do online to raise that kind of income and still have a life. $1000/month, eh? Right now, I’d settle for a few more followers to get feedback on videos and stories.
It is true that it does take quite a bit of commitment to build a blog to the point where it earns money. Also, earning money is not everyone’s main goal. For me it became something of a side goal while I’m pursuing the publication of my first travel book. At the moment I’m thinking of dropping my current monetization strategy to focus more on the book. In the short term this will reduce my earnings but in the future I hope it will increase. Either way, I think you are on the right track with putting your efforts into your readers. This should always be the main focus of a travel blog.
Good luck! You really freaked me out
But I bet, most of us, travel bloggers, want to earn money this way :/
To the Other Repliers to This Post re: Easy or Not Easy to Earn $1000 per month with Blogs/Websites:
I thought this too at first however it’s sometimes also about the niche you choose and how niche-d down it is. If your niche is large and general, then you may struggle to attract the advertisers/income you desire and it will seem less easy.
If you ‘niche down’ — example, my niche is “small houses” and it’s a largely unknown trend but still meets a need for a whole lot of people in today’s uncertain markets — you’ll find advertisers and sources of income that very specifically address what people are looking for.
THEN your income will be more targetted and will come more easily. My website’s not even finished yet (and it’s been around since Nov 2008) but still I make USD$1500 per month (growing by $200-300 every 3 months or so) and I have barely touched the site in months. Mostly very targetted Adsense however my affiliate sales of e-books are starting to make a real difference to this income and it’s here in the e-books and affiliate marketing, rather than Adsense earnings, that I see more potential for income growth.
For me, the *hard* bit was learning about website creation (I don’t have a blog), html, SEO, linking, the importance of this and that etc etc that was hard and time-consuming BUT it all pays off making the earning a more simple/easy thing to attract.
From what I see in people that contact me from time to time is they REALLY want to earn $XX online however they don’t want to learn all the necessaries. Can’t have one without the other!
That is very true Kim. Often in the travel blogging world we have very a very wide niche or we have a niche that people don’t want to pay for (backpacking anyone?). But just because advertising might not work well (adsense only pays my hosting bills) there are plenty of other ways to earn money. E-books, affiliate marketing, and others that we’ll get into.
The most important part is to be creative. For example, with people traveling all over the world, a blogger should start an video advertising service that uses certain products at famous places all around the world. Viewers will be attracted to the destinations and then learn about the product. yes, people are free to steal this idea as I won’t be doing it. I thought about it, but decided it was not in line with how I want to spend my time while traveling
Here are some examples of successful sites related to travel that make their income almost purely if not entirely FROM these sites:
http://www.outback-australia-travel-secrets.com
http://www.viequestravelguide.com
They use the SBI model, as I do, and they have provided Case Studies and updates each year or so on how their sites are going now:
http://case-studies.sitesell.com/#TRAVEL
I’m going to go ahead and mention that dreadful acronym – SEO! Please can you include something about that? How it works, meta descriptions etc as part of making your blog successful? Really looking forward to following this Todd =)
Happy to include SEO. Although to be fair, SEO is a tactic and not necessarily a strategy
I’d encourage you to check out previous posts here on SEO, as well to look at anything in the forums by Mike Collins, he has been doing an amazing job of sharing his SEO knowledge with everyone. Also, I have in my possession a very good SEO for travel blogging e-book by Andy Hayes (he commented here as well). I’ll be doing a review of this and many other resources available to help you sort through what is good and what you can save your money on. One thing that I have learn (despite liking to do everything myself) is that a few well place investments in e-books launched my timeline forward. On the other hand, I have bought many other e-books that I have just not used.
I agree with Todd on Andy Hayes eBook. I have been doing SEO for years and I certainly learned a thing or two from him. He narrows it down for Travel Bloggers without making you feel like you need to go back to university.
Great post, looking forward to your suggestions. I have been travel blogging for a couple of years, but I recently started a self-hosted website (end of February), and apart from June, that has been a quiet month, now I’m back on track with about 1000 visits per day, sometimes a little less sometimes a little more.
I’m really working on the content, researching, traveling and writing a lot, as I want to update every other day. I’m investing a lot of energies on it and I love it, so you guessed it, I’ll be closely checking out your next posts!
Nice numbers Angela. I really think that writing more is one of the best ways to increase traffic to a blog. Of course not all of use can write everyday (or want to). I have been experimenting with, 2,3,4 and even 1 postings per week to see the results and how it affects my returning readers.
True, I see a big difference depending on how often I post. When I stay a week without posting the hits absolutely plummet. And they don’t come up instantly when I start posting more often, it usually takes a couple of week before figures go back to normal. Just checked yesterday’s stats and had the nice surprise of almost 2000 visitors. I’m posting often and just to avoid numbers to drop again I’m scheduling some posts to be covered during some summer travels!
Todd, outstanding discussion going on with this. I really like the case study you provided and am going to spend more time reading that. I would love to check out Andy’s ebook as well. I think I looked at it a while back but never followed up.
I look forward to more strategies but I think the biggest keys for those that write quality content (any hack can create a site, sell links, and make lots of money for crap – right Mike Collins?
are patience and perseverance.
i wish i hadn’t pushed play on shane shane. why oh why did i push start? yuck.
For me i always say : Sky is the limit !
Great tips, interesting reading and comments. ShaneShane cheapened your content of
what you wanted to get across as a legitimate helpful blog.
Hi Sue, sorry if ShaneShane didn’t speak to you. I’d rather have a bit of fun than stick to the just analysis and insight. And at the end of the day I stand by the addition of ShaneShane. The point is that there are a lot of ways to make money on the internet and building a platform is one of the most import ways for travel bloggers. If ShaneShane can do it, than there is hope for us all!
I love that I found your site. I started my blog for me and my GF in the first place and hoping to take my family and friends along for a ride as well. At the moment our Mum’s love it who pass it on to my Gran’s who tell their lawn bowling buddies. Unfortunately that means I get 2 views as Mum usually prints it out. never mind.
Anyway really want to hear more and so I am looking forward to it. Would love to make £1000 a month. But as another poster said, I am more in need of a mentor or something first I think who would give consistent feedback. Something along those lines would be ideal for a lot of people if you want to look in to it?
Cheers
FourJandals
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