While travel blogging is simple, it’s not easy to make a living from blogging. You can travel the world, save money, and then write about it on your travel blog. It’s a different story to learn how to make money blogging about travel.
Travel is full of experiences, and there are many places to share your travel stories. Friends and family love to hear about the adventures on the road. Thanks to social media, they can share their stories with friends.
This is how a blog grows. Google searches are a great way to increase traffic. A talented blogger can also help boost the reach of a blog’s site, provided that the content is of high quality. This information is crucial when you plan how to make money blogging.
Some bloggers will eventually see the potential of blogging and decide to make it their profession. However, it is not a business. It is a media company. Many new professional bloggers don’t have the funds to invest in their businesses and are limited by their talent and time.
Time is now critical because it can be very difficult to manage a business while on the road. After a few months, they must give up and start to earn money somewhere else, such as writing, virtual assistants, social media managers, or going back to their old jobs.
It is possible to make a living from travel blogging still. If you’re hardworking, willing to work longer hours than the typical 9-5 job, and are open to taking on other responsibilities for many years, you can make a living as a travel blogger. It takes 3-5 years to make it pay off, and you must be passionate about what you do. It’s more than just travelling the world.
It is hard work! It would be simple if everyone could do it.
Travel Dudes was supported by many incredible people and played a significant role in creating this new industry for professional travel influencers. Travel Dudes has evolved to be a leading Social Travel platform. Fortunately, a great team manages it.
We have built up a large audience over the years, reaching more than 4,000,000 people each month through the site and its various channels. Although we don’t have a travel blog, we still blog about our travel experiences and share them with the world. We are a media partner for the highly successful ambassador campaign, but we also run our social media campaigns.
We just recently completed an amazing trip to Slovenia, Ljubljana. We knew we were doing something special when we arrived, but it took us a few weeks to prove it. Now that we have completed the campaign, we can share the results of our report.
I’ll share with you the reach and engagement from our 7-day campaign. These numbers are impressive, but there was something that made this trip unique. It was the first time that a campaign was run by four travel bloggers who were focused on creating and sharing content for one site.
This is not only a new way to travel blog professionally but also a step back.
Are you ready to take a step back? Is that true? Why?
Let’s begin with the first step.
One videographer produced six videos. One team member was responsible for writing 28 articles (included many links). The other person’s job consisted of organizing the campaign, ensuring that all social media channels received enough content, and devising a strategy.
Each member of the team uploaded photos onto the server. Our social media manager then shared these to ensure that every post and photo receives maximum exposure.
Sharing something online is not enough. Each site and channel has a strategy. This is to ensure that we deliver great results. This alone will not be enough, however. You also need quality content. This is an important concept to know when you want to make money blogging about travel.
We created our itinerary to get the content that we wanted. Although this one was full, we decided what content we could handle and what we should promote. All this was done in partnership with Ljubljana Tourism Board who believed in us.
We had their help and suggestions to make a suitable itinerary, keeping in mind the overall message they wanted to promote. It was a campaign, press trip, or blog trip that promoted a destination.
We had the freedom to choose what activities we wanted and set our food budget even to pick the restaurants. This allowed us to create inspirational content using our voices.
We were mostly on our own most of the time. We did have all the guided tours. We wanted to make the trip as natural and comfortable as possible. We only did what other travellers could do and experience. We usually had only 1-2 guided sections per day but still had plenty of time to explore the region and city ourselves.
There was not a single holiday. We were very busy and only got a few hours of sleep each night. We had lots of fun and enjoyed the trip to its fullest. My private holiday would be similar but not as jam-packed.
These are the key ingredients to success if you’re looking to make money blogging about travel.
Stats & Numbers
Views 524,086 (Twitter and Facebook)
Engagement 70,769 (Twitter. Facebook. Instagram)
Clicks 50,879 (Facebook).
Video views 37,882
Estimated Earned Online Social Media Value: > EUR 110,000
Views represent the number of people who made our Ljubljana content available in their timeline. So those numbers are NOT Opportunities-To-See, but actual views.
These stats were directly sourced from the original websites where they were published. We looked at each post’s stats and then compiled the data in a spreadsheet. We didn’t check the views of other posts or replies, but we only looked at the shared images. The actual result should be even higher.
Our report includes all content, as well as each post’s reach/engagement. Our client can then see the real numbers and can look at them.
The large engagement had a positive impact on the Earned Media Value.
It isn’t easy to comprehend and realize the solidity of this result, particularly when you compare them to the cost of the campaign.
We are pleased to provide a detailed description of our promotion and our results.
The Earned media value is the result of reach and engagement through social media. It was calculated using an algorithm that compares our reach with the paid media values (Paid Media Valu) on social media platforms. These advertising prices include a mixture of post types (image, video, and external/internal …)links) and are also based on reach and engagement. It’s possible to achieve a solid result like this.
The Paid media value represents the cost of advertising to reach and engage with customers. This value is much lower (around EUR40,000), and in our case, even more than the actual campaign costs. The Earned Media is based on that but includes factors like the trust an influencer has built up, the Word-of-Mouth-Marketing, and The Owned Media, the work to build up the channels and audience. The Earned Media will increase if the Paid Media grows, particularly in the travel industry.
How to make money blogging about travel: Understanding the numbers.
This is a much simpler comparison. This is a far simpler comparison. It was not just that someone may have seen their advertising banner during a football match; they could also have interacted directly with them.
A “stadium” was filled with 524,086 people. We showed our content to them, and 70,769 people interacted with the product. This is what you can imagine Adidas paying for it!
The digital world is full of numbers that are difficult to grasp and understand because they are so large. We also have digital value, which is very low compared to traditional media costs. Many media companies are struggling to deal with the situation they created by selling services online at lower prices than usual.
It was common to pay more than $100,000 for an advertising page in a newspaper or magazine with around 800,000. This means that you won’t know who viewed your ads and will not tell who opened them. Digital prices cannot be even remotely close to this.
Digital media companies offer a much higher value and exposure than traditional media companies while not hiring a professional team. A YouTuber, travel blogger, or another influencer who has a large audience should theoretically pay 20-50 full-time experts to run their business. This is only an idea. Only a handful can afford a virtual assistant, and even fewer can afford additional help. Digital prices are too high.
Does digital media need print advertising prices? No
Digital media doesn’t need to advertise at such high prices. Digital media does not have expensive printers, which can easily run to over EUR1million each. Distribution is also much cheaper in the digital marketplace. Developers and servers are all you need. Whether it’s digital or print, the costs of editors, writers, etc., will not change.
Each publication should offer its content for free, even if they have to charge slightly more than what they paid for print in the past.
Each publication should offer its content for free, even if they have to charge slightly more than what they paid for print in the past.
Is there a need for the industry to pay more? Yes.
The industry wants exposure. Digital exposure is now possible, but it is harder to make a living online. While the options remain plentiful and affordable, the quality of media content is already declining.
A publication could send 2-3 people to produce quality content for a magazine that had a circulation of approximately 20,000. Twenty employees still managed the magazine.
Professional travel bloggers must do this all by themselves while still reaching a larger audience and being on the road creating content and sharing it. Who is a professional blogger? It’s simple to create a name for yourself and buy followers and readers. This is a completely different topic… We are proud to say that we only work with organic reach.
We were happy to take a step backwards with our Ljubljana campaign. Traditional media had not been able to handle a trip like this. A team of three people worked together to produce far more content than usual. The content was also of high quality and higher quality. Each person could focus on only their specific type of content. This allowed us to raise the professional level of travel blogging. Each person was able to focus on one site.
We took a step forward, but we also went backwards.
We had to work hard to learn how to make money blogging about travel.
It takes hard work to become a travel blogger, but you will succeed if you persevere!