How my travel blog encouraged me to study and live in a foreign country
My experience of making a living in Prague by consistent writing
You can make money on a travel blog, regardless of your readership numbers. Even blogs with 5,000 visitors a month can monetize their content. And, as your viewers grow, so does your income.
I moved to the Czech Republic in 2010. During that time, I earned more from my blog than the average salary in the country. That’s why, after I graduated from university, I didn’t need to look for a job — a constant pain for many students.
Beginning: Learning From Mistakes
While finishing school in Russia, I decided to go to a university in the Czech Republic. Around that time, I started a blog dedicated to moving to a different country. I was the only writer and wrote about immigration, study, how to get a student visa, what documents you’d need to enter a university, how much money you’d need for living, and much more.
It was not difficult to create the first website — I used WordPress as it was the most popular CMS, watched a couple of videos on YouTube, and set everything up myself in just a couple of evenings.
Of course, it was a regular WordPress blog with a free theme, but that was enough to get me started. I can’t call myself a web developer, so later I passed some tasks to professionals to solve complex problems (for example, clean the site of viruses and fix security issues) or, for instance, bought a template on ThemeForest.
Once I realized I didn’t have a large enough audience to monetize the content, I gradually switched to a standard travel blog. Once I made the switch, I posted articles on how to get around Prague, where to book a hotel, and other similar topics. More people look for information on how to travel on their own, and not specifically for how to enter a university in a foreign country.
It was at that time that travelers became my target audience. Over time most popular articles were:
- How to get to the airport in Prague for free.
- Tax-free shopping in the Czech Republic.
- How to get a refund on a Czech Airlines flight.
- Where to stay in Prague: Best places to stay.
- How to use public transport in Prague.
One of the main things I use when deciding on content is the Google Keyword Planner tool. With this, you can see what people are looking for through the search volume, as well as see the average ad costs for specific queries. Using this information, you can easily estimate how many people will be interested in your content, and, hopefully, rank high in Google search results.
From there, I created targeted articles and mostly gained traffic through search engine queries. I have always added keywords to articles, and also always tried to make the article better than the competitors’ one that was in the first position at SERP.
The last one is a universal recipe for how your article will have a chance to take a high position on Google. So far, organic traffic from search engines was always the priority traffic source for me. Here is a statistic for the last ten years:
I then used my knowledge of highly monetized content to create new websites about different countries and cities — Budapest, Italy, New York, and others — there were 12 sites in total, but only three that earned me substantial income.
In hindsight, I would recommend making only one website and incorporate various countries and subjects. That way, it’s easier to distribute your marketing budget and monetize one place, rather than five. There are some advantages to using multiple sites. You get better diversification and have more opportunities to sell some of them in the future, but generally speaking, managing one is going to be easier starting out.
Personally, it took me over a year to reach the 500–600 monthly euro mark; however, after two years, I reached a stable monthly income of over 1,000 euros. That’s a good wage for living in Prague, especially considering that some days I only spent 20 minutes working on the sites, giving me plenty of time to study.
The cost was minimal, about $10 per year per domain, and hosting was about $60 per year. I used only one account to host all websites, however, I bought unique IP addresses (around $12 per year for each), as hosting many websites on the same IP is risky. If one IP address gets banned, your entire network of sites can lose search traffic.
Moreover, link buyers preferred sites with unique IP addresses — in this case, the same buyer might purchase links from 2–3 websites at once. Of course, there were more costs such as content creation, graphics, and links. However, this could be counted as an investment, not costs.
How to Monetize Your Blog
Income depends not only on the amount of traffic you bring in but also on its quality and the tools you use. For instance, earning traffic on transactional searches is higher than simple informational queries when looking at cost-per-action (CPA) marketing.
Much of it depends on how products are integrated into the material. It’s important to run tests to learn what works best for you. Below are some stats from one of my travel blogs, taken over four months (June to September of last year). In total, the site received 190,000 visitors and I earned $1,800.
CPA networks
In 2011, I tried a new monetization tool: affiliate programs. I started working with Travelpayouts, an affiliate network focused on traveling. Affiliate programs work on CPA models. All affiliates are awarded when their visitors make a purchase. Things like buying a plane ticket and booking a hotel are included, as well as purchasing insurance, and basically any other tourist service.
Integrating an affiliate program into my current workflow was easy. All you have to do is write articles on topics that make sense — things like “How to get to the airport in New York” — and place ad links leading to offers, such as taxi and transfer services. Someone who is checking out this information has a high conversion potential, as they are most likely interested in booking a transfer or a plane ticket.
Adsense and Other Advertising Networks
My blog also uses contextual advertisements. Ad blocks automatically adjust to visitors’ search requests or an article’s context within the realm of travel.
The blogger receives income for these ads, which contain payments for clicks and calltouches. The most popular network is Google Adsense — to join it, you just need to have a good web design and at least 50 visitors per day. Some bloggers have Google Adsense as the principal source of their income.
Selling Links
For SEO purposes, optimizers buy links on websites. They may be temporary (some optimizers “rent” a place on a page) or permanent (an optimizer buys placement for their ad on a page for all of the project’s life).
Once those links are set up, the blogger receives small, but regular, income from the rental links. The payment is much larger but happens only once. This link is manually placed in accordance with the rules of the exchange through which the ad order had appeared.
That said, the trend of selling and buying links is gradually going down. A year ago, the same projects gave 2–3 times more income than today. The golden age of selling links is over, but, perhaps, it is for the best. Earnings based on traffic quality encourages website owners to make better, more helpful content.
Selling Websites
Another source of income is selling websites. For example, in 2017 I sold one of my websites for $4,000.
The price for a website is usually based on the potential income that a new owner may receive over a two-year period.
Go Offline
I believe that people are going online more and more, however, you can use your travel blog for offline income as well.
Two years ago, the U.S. embassies temporarily closed embassies in Russia, so Russians were forced to travel to other countries to obtain a U.S. visa. I run a small business for this and helped people get U.S. visas in Prague and Ankara. This business operated for about six months and in the best month generated ~$10,000 in net income. I gained most of the customers from my blogs.
You can come up with a similar service to make money if you have an audience, and the ability to solve their problems.
Nevertheless, I still think more people are going online and this global trend will just continue. Even the coronavirus has accelerated this process. For example, people who used to prefer to buy a tour through an agency are now buying online — it is not only safer but also just more convenient and faster.
Summary
1. Don’t write about yourself and your hobbies — instead, figure out who your audience is, what they like, and write for them. This was my mistake at the beginning and my first two years were a failure. It would be really hard to monetize very personal content.
2. Look at the commercial interests — they will bring you money. There are topics completely void of commercial success. For instance, there is nothing to monetize in the article “How the public transportation system works in New York.” Maybe you’d be able to promote taxi services there, but there is a more direct way for that.
That’s why, before writing an article, you have to understand what you want to sell or how exactly you will monetize each piece. Check out frequent search requests through Google stats. When a person Googles “cheap air tickets Miami-New York,” this means they want to buy them. A request such as “what district of New York is the best to live in?” allows you to monetize through rental services.
3. Delegate as much as you can. Find copywriters and designers that know how to create cool content that can be monetized without much input from you. That will give you more time to focus on monetization.
Increase traffic, solve your readers’ problems, conduct experiments, and use the various tools available to you for monetization.
Well, all of that sounds good, but how can someone make money on a travel blog in 2020, when barely anyone is traveling?
Despite how much the travel niche has suffered this year, it’s a long-playing niche with huge potential, and I believe it’s going to be great again — it will just take some time. I’ve had many projects in different fields: travel, software, finance, cooking, and medicine, but out of all my projects, only software and travel survived.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the average cost per click in travel via context dropped sharply. Earlier, where the average click cost $0.70, it became $0.30 and sometimes even $0.17. But now, as we can see in the graphic below, the PC rate in Adsense for travel recovered to pre-coronavirus levels and has even surpassed it.
One reason for that is because people can still travel, even if it’s within their own country — especially in places like the U.S., Russia, China, and more. The local travel niche is on the rise and bloggers have to adapt to this. Local travel in some countries is going through the roof, for instance, the last statistic from the Czech Republic shows that in the third quarter of 2020, hotels had more local clients than ever before in history!
There are advertisers that sell local tours and excursions. Many tours and activities platforms have launched online activities, for instance, Airbnb, GetYourGuide, or Musement companies are selling virtual experiences. These are all places where bloggers can earn money. It’s important to adapt to this new reality, but, at the end of the day, people still love new experiences and many of those come from travel.
