Many long term backpackers and budget travelers choose to document their journeys around the world through travel blogs. It’s an excellent decision for many reasons; you learn from fellow travel bloggers, meet others who are share your passions, and occasionally are offered free travel.
One logical step for many who write travel blogs is monetization. The allure of traveling the world and funding these travels through a travel blog is huge.
Imagine this office view on a daily basis.
One important fact to remember is this: You won’t fund your travels solely through a single travel blog – at least not right away.
Nonetheless, a travel blog is a start and one of the many different ways you can develop an alternative income source to help fund your trip around the world.
Here are five ways to fund your travels around the world online.
1) Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is a multimillion dollar industry online that presents an excellent way for you to fund your travels around the world.
The idea is relatively simple – and something you see online daily.
Click through links on travel websites pointing to airfare search engines, hostel booking sites, or many other products are very often affiliate links. The owner of the website is paid a small portion of referring sales.
By developing a simple and focused website which offers products that other people want and search for, you have the chance to make a passive income online.
This Affiliate Marketing for Beginners Course details everything you need to know about starting up your own affiliate marketing website.
The course is especially beneficial for travel bloggers as everything you learn will directly benefit your travel blogging future. You’ll learn keyword research, WordPress site development, content authoring skills, and heaps of information on Search Engine Optimization. Corbett gladly answers questions you have throughout this online and multiday course.
If you’re serious about making a passive income online, this course is absolutely invaluable.
2) Freelance Copywriting
Chances are if you’re writing a travel blog, you have a keen interest in travel writing. Many travel based companies don’t specifically employ a travel writer to create content for their websites. Instead, they work with content generating companies who employ writers to produce travel pieces on request.
While you won’t fund your retirement (or nightly stays at the Hilton) from these assignments which are paid per word – anywhere from three cents to twenty-five cents – it’s a great source of income if you already enjoy writing and research, specifically about travel. An hours worth of work can easily bring in $25 – $50.
Check out listings on ProBlogger.net or Online-Writing-Jobs.com.
3) Sell Text Links
Many companies are in the sole business of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While Google doesn’t specifically disclose its search engine algorithm, it’s understood that one factor which benefits a website is the number of links pointing towards it.
If your travel blog has a Google PR, chances are you’ll be able to sell travel related text links on your website to travel companies looking to boost their rankings in the search engines. This monthly stream of income is an excellent and common way to monetize your travel blog.
Matt at NomadicMatt.com offers heaps of advice and details on how to make the most out of selling text links in his excellent eBook – How to Make Money With Your Travel Blog.
4) Paid Blogging Opportunities
Not interested in taking writing assignments from a copywriting company? Would you prefer to write what you want, when you want?
Then consider making extra cash through paid blogging work that can be found online.
I’d be pulling the wool over your eyes if I said that these options were readily available. They aren’t. Yet through continued interaction with the travel blog community, you stand the chance of stumbling across a golden opportunity. I was fortunate enough to win a competition run by the Flightster.com blog some months back and now contribute to their rapidly growing travel website.
You’re fortunate enough to be reading this post.
Check out Travel Generation for an opportunity to be paid up to $50 NZD for posts featuring your travel stories, tips, and experiences backpacking around the world.
5) Diversify Your Interests Online
These income sources take time, commitment, research, and most importantly – diversification.
One thing that each of these revenue streams have in common is they won’t develop overnight. If you want to make steps towards becoming location independent and living the lifestyle of a digital nomad, you have to diversify your interests online.
While most of these income sources won’t make you rich, they will allow you to live an alternative yet satisfying life.
Do you have any tips for earning an income online? Leave your advice and feedback in the comments section below.
![Creative Commons: [Satbir]](https://www.backpackingmatt.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Discover.jpg)
Backpacking Matt 
Thanks for sharing these excellent tips… useful for people new to the world of travel blogging like myself. I’m happy sharing my photos and the stories behind them for now, but at some point in the future I’d like to be the person on the beach with the laptop!
@Retrotraveller Thanks for the compliment – very glad you’ve found the tips useful. The photos are a start! As long as you’re happy doing what you’re doing, that is all that maters.
I’m pretty sure this is the first time that I’ve seen info on blog monetization presented so clearly and succinctly – thanks for sharing these tips!
@Naomi Thanks for the compliment, much appreciated! Good luck with your ventures.
Matt I’d love to see more on affiliate marketing, it’s a term thrown around a lot but I have no idea how people actually make a go of it.
@Ayngelina I was new to it until about six months ago. I’m still far from an expert, yet I’ve really enjoyed getting into it. The guide I referenced is filled with advice and well worth the $77 in my mind. It takes time – both initially and then moving forward, but well worth it in my mind.
Thank you for sharing these most helpful tips…you’re completely right about affiliate marketing– text links…well, I hear they actually drag down your SEO, so I haven’t really ventured into this although I’ve received offers. But it sounds like this might be a great way to sell ad space. THANK YOU for the tips, Matt!
Charu
@Charu There is no question that Google frowns on selling text links, it completely invalidates their algorithm. Yet in moderation I don’t think you see much for SEO penalties. Matt’s book offers great advice on the topic.
Thanks for these tips. I’m brand new to the blogging world and this helps tremendously.
@Mike Welcome. 🙂 Good luck with everything. Feel free to send any questions my way!
Thanks for these great tips Matt! The furthest I’ve gone into affiliate marketing is through Amazon’s affiliate program where I just link to an item that I mention. Would be great to expand furhter!
@Aaron That’s a great start, and the furthest most bloggers get. Corbett’s course goes into the concept further with great advice as I told @Ayngelina. Happy to answer any questions you have!
Thanks for the article with these great tips, Matt! I’ve already put a few into practice and will do more after reading your advice. 🙂
I write a vegan travel blog and recently wrote & published my first EBook “How To Travel The World As A Vegan” http://www.traveltheworldasavegan.com
@Maria Thanks – good luck with your eBook!
Great tips Matt and all well proven ones at that.
@Chris Thanks for the comment mate, hope all is well in London town!
#6 write an ebook!!
@Matt & @WanderingTrader Great advice — you two have definitely figured out that market.
DAY TRADING!!!
I didn’t know there were so many opportunities to monetize a personal blog. Excellent tips!
@Zablon & @Aston Glad you found the tips useful, good luck with your online endeavors!
Thanks for breaking this down – great information for someone trying to make a go of earning income from a blog.
Great tips! Some of which I used. After I started a website, I found applying to writing jobs online to be much easier. I had an online resume potential employers could look at for their reference. I even had websites offering me work just based on reading my site. Just another tip, somewhat along the same lines, I think you have to accept work that isn’t always “travel writing” related. It pays the bills in the mean time while you keep applying to travel writing jobs. And on that note, I also found with my career of travel writing online, you have to apply to everything. Even if you don’t think you meet all of the requirements, just apply. You never know who might say yes.
@Suzy Thanks for the tips – if anyone is a success story of freelance writing, it’s you. I agree on not turning down offers for writing unrelated to travel – despite how unexciting it might be. Safe travels to Ireland in March!
I’ve been blogging for more than three years now and I’m proud to say that my single travel blog is now paying for my lifestyle – travel, home, etc. But… and this is a big BUT… it took me three years to get to this point. Three years of hard work. Three years of pushing toward something that I had no way of knowing if it would ever work out.
Now that I’m here, it’s easy to look back at all the moves I made and see what I did right and where I went wrong, but the learning curve was GIGANTIC.
And that’s where some of these ideas that you present, while they are familiar to me and many others online, are so far out of the realm of most people that even trying these tactics is almost surely going to be a huge waste of time.
Today, when people ask me for advice on how to travel and make money at the same time (online or off), I usually tell them to 1) stick to something that they know and then 2) figure out a way to do that “something” from anywhere in the world.
If you can figure out where you want to be, it’s pretty easy to reverse engineer your lifestyle, your job, your everything… so that you one day (hopefully soon) can actually live that dream lifestyle you’ve always imagined – travel, work, money, friends, etc.
It is possible, but it takes a lot of work. Especially at the start. And more than anything, it takes a lot of SMARTS.
Don’t waste your time with too many things you are totally unfamiliar with. Instead, start with what you know and work backward from there, taking the steps from where you are now to that lifestyle you’ve always dreamt of for yourself.
Such a great post, Matt. Glad you’ve been able to take advantage of some of this stuff.
@Lauren Thanks! They’re all different things I’m pursuing … @Darren had a great point though, while I think it’s important to diversify your interests, make sure you have one key focus as you’re going along.
Wonderful tips!!! These will help a lot of travel bloggers for sure.
Thanks for some ideas here. Affiliate marketing is harder than it sounds. I guess you need to push what you are selling hard. Like @Ayngelina I’d love to hear more on how you get this to actually work.
@Stephen It’s certainly not an overnight, get-rich quick approach – though none of the five are! The affiliate sites take a significant amount of research to prepare and it takes time until you start seeing income. I’ll maybe do a follow-up post in the coming weeks, but feel free to drop any questions my way via email!
Great tips Matt. I’d also recommend learning how to build niche sites. Start off with a niche that you’re familiar with. You’ll need something that you know a little bit about, rather than going full steam ahead with at topic that you have no clue about.
A great place to start learning about niche sites is this site called The Challenege (Challenge.co). It’s 100% free and they even provide you with the best free tools on the net to use during the process of the challenge.
Once you find your niche, you’ll be well on your way to setting up your first niche site. It’s far from an overnight process, it’s a lot of work to get it set up. Once setup though, you can use different tools to turn it into a more automated blog/site and you may be able to create yourself some passive income while traveling…
@Ryan Thanks for the advice on checking out The Challenge. You’re exactly correct – earning money off a niche site won’t happen over night, however if you commit the time in advance you can earn a passive side income.
Thanks for the great advice here Matt! I definitely would love to be able to earn even a modest passive income from my blog, one of the reasons I started doing it so early in our adventure of becoming digital nomads.
I am going to go back to school this fall for photojournalism so weve got a few years staying put and doing some limited local travelling. But i also know it takes time to build a blog readership and potential income, so here i am!
Definitely learning tons from nomads like you…and i thank you for all your advice:)
@Stephanie For a straight up passive income, you’re better off building up some affiliate sites. While these take work to get going, they then begin to earn a passive income requiring no upkeep. A travel blog is more or less a second full time job (or at the very best a part time job) as you’re keeping up with your followers, adding content, and seeking out advertising sponsorship all the time. Well worth it in my mind though! Good luck on your endeavors!
This is so useful I am bookmarking this page.
@Ted Thanks. 🙂
Great article! Blogs certainly do not make you rich over night, but with a little perserverance and hard work, it does begin to pay off. The biggest advice I could possibly give is “don’t give up!” It takes time to pick up speed, sometimes months, have patience and work hard and you’ll be working from a beach in no time!