The ability to travel across the world, not worry about how it will be paid for and better yet, having a source of income that pays you while you do this may sound like a dream, but it is completely possible to achieve with a blog (online business).
This is what I’m happy to report to doing full time thanks to my website (that’s me in the above picture of Lake Louise), but I want to show you how to do this yourself, with specific steps and examples you can follow to achieve this outcome.
That’s really a huge point I want to make to everyone here:
If you want to travel anywhere you need 2 things:
1) A stable income. Not just any job will do here. There’s also a second big necessity and that is…
2) You need that income to come from a source that doesn’t keep you in one place. Most people who have jobs are tied down to them. They can’t take vacations anytime they wish and they very often can’t take work with them.
But there is a way to work such that you can take it anywhere, which is what I do. This frees you from the confines of both income limits and jobs that tie you down.
Enter the whole point:
Have a website and have it be successful. When it makes money, you can access it, run it anywhere and go anywhere. And you can totally do this if you follow what I’ll show you:
This week, I want to focus specifically on the travel niche and the reason why is because a lot of people whom I help pick out their niche subjects often tend to select that particular topic.
So if you’re in this type of category, you should read this entire post because I’m going to break down how big this topic is and exactly how someone who enjoys traveling can make money while they do it, further fueling their worldwide adventures.
For me personally, I have always wanted to see the world and what’s ironic is that while I have this opportunity before me today thanks to the actions I put into making my own online business, I have been limiting myself in where I’ve been going so far, but the point here is that the knowledge I’ve attained to build successful websites can help anyone who is truly serious about traveling do this.
So how does it start?
Well you need to pick something specific when it comes to this subject:
While the topic of traveling is ridiculously popular and is an evergreen niche, it needs to be better identified if you plan to make it work. What exactly does this mean?
Well traveling in my experience has a few specific forms:
- Nature traveling (scenic areas that are generally more wilderness related). This is what I like most of all (I started a blog for this)!
- Seeing historic areas (generally monuments, old cities, famous landmarks, ect…)
- Just wanting to see the different countries and cultures. This one is more generalized, but it’s still something people who love to go places may think about.
Personally, I love the wilderness more so than historic areas, so for the sake of example, I will pick that as the reference for how I’d be building a travel site on. By all means, you can use the same reference, but on a different topic to create the same type of niche page.
A very important thing to understand:
You don’t necessarily have to stick to the above choices. Successful niche topics and sites can be made of ANY topic you wish. The website you’re on right now is a perfect example of a NON travel site that makes me money to actually…travel. Get it?
Picked one out? Good, now let’s make the site.
There are essentially 3 steps to creating a successful website in my experience. For my example on nature, we’ll do the following (and this is the summary):
1) I have selected the specific niche of nature traveling.
2) Now to name it, I can go crazy with this idea, but typically a name such as Vitaliysnatureadventures (or something not so cheesy) can work.
3) On the site, I talk about the places I’ve been, where I’m going. I add pictures there, descriptions of how to get there too as well as I sell stuff on there (camera equipment for filming is a perfect example). This is part of the way that this blog will make money.
Here is what you’ll need to do:
Compile as much information as possible on your niche, this will act as a brainstorm for content writing:
Been on a lot of adventures in your life? If so, I hope you documented it in some way. Maybe there were videos, pictures you took, journals you wrote about, blog posts you shared on social media describing your experiences, ect…
I would gather all of these things because odds are, you’ll want to share this on your page for fellow adventurers to see.
Next: Find associated keywords that are linked to your adventures.
One of the key points to ANY successful site is good content mixed in with keywords that people type in. This means that if you’ve been to any famous place, be it in nature or elsewhere, you’re going to want to make the destination of where you were the title of your blog post.
Now if you were in one or more areas, then each blog post you write will specify each location and it’s details such as:
- What it’s like.
- Where it’s located.
- Pictures and other media you may have taken while you were there.
- Tips and advice on where to go to have the most fun.
- Sharing a story about how you were there and what you experienced.
Keep in mind that all these things should be included in EVERY single blog post you write, with each element reflecting each location you’ve been to.
For example, to put this into a reference, let me use a popular nature location I’ve been to numerous times: Kaaterskills Falls. I have so much information and media on that location that writing a blog post that has all those elements above would be easy, but let me describe how I would do it:
I’d first look up keywords for this location. And look at this, it gets some searches:
With over 3,000 searches a month and my personal experience in seeing tons of people there every time I go, this is certainly a hot destination. But unfortunately, the keyword itself has a ton of competing pages (286).
What I would do in this case is find a longer term with the original name of the destination to perhaps find a lower competing example and while there’s plenty, I’ll stick to the following one:
Well we went from 286 competing pages down to 1, but unfortunately we also went down to 24 searches a month vs over 3,000. However, fret not because by writing a blog post whose title has this whole term above, you will still rank on Google for and possible show up for the other main term which gets over 3,000 all thanks to LSI (What is this?).
But I would go with this term because here, you’re at least guaranteed a faster, better chance at getting 1st page rankings and then riding that to a better LSI ranking in other terms. So having this keyword, I will now choose my title.
Now it’s very important that your title not be dull. For example:
Now aside from the title, once you write the body of your article, it is important to add all the information I mentioned, not just what the title says. There’s many things I can personally write about this location that would easily bypass 2,000 words.
How much you write on your blog is up to you, but certainly try to write as much as you can on each location you’ve been to.
Does this mean that if you’ve been to 100 different locations all pertaining to the niche topic, that you should have a 100 blog posts? Yes absolutely. And each should follow the same type of pattern as the example I just pointed to, meaning:
Find a good keyword for the location and write as much as you can about it, add pictures and other media when and where you can.
Ok so, how does one make money off this blog?
Here’s the beauty of this whole thing, usually niche topics rarely span into other niche topics when it comes to what you can sell, but when it comes to traveling, there’s a bunch of options available.
For example, in nature exploration, I can sell:
- Tickets to these places (Planes).
- Cameras to film the location. Tons of options here.
- Monetizing off ad revenue on the site. See my Mediavine post to see the potential there.
- Gear to put on when people go there (maybe it’s super cold?). And the gear itself here can span into everything you can imagine, from shoes to coats, ect…
Some of the products you can sell in your example can go as far as high ticket if you look carefully enough and only if the niche choice allows for it.
In addition to your actual travel blogs, you can do review pages on the products you used and provide affiliate links to where they are sold and give you a commission, such as Amazon.
Marketing your website beyond just blogging:
While blogging about EACH location you’ve been to (And go to in the future) will bring about a substantial amount of visitors overtime, you can and should look into the following 3 places:
1) Social media. Create a Facebook fan page of your adventures. See examples like “Outdoor Project” which basically does the type of stuff I’m recommending here.
2) Make YouTube videos. If blogging was a huge traffic source, then YouTube may come close or even surpass it. Make videos of yourself going to these locations and put them up on your site (this adds to the already awesome pictures and other media you have). And it’s so easy these days to upload YouTube videos and attract traffic from there and you don’t even have to be good at it (Case study on YouTube).
3) Use Pinterest. Personally I have never been a fan of it because my niche site’s topics have never been friendly with it, but nature traveling (and the other types) is very much relevant to this social network because it’s very visual. Basically make a Pinterest Board and upload your images there, linking to your blog posts.
4) Instagram. Ever since I wrote this article, I actually DID start a nature travel site. And one of the ways I’ve been marketing it is by doing exactly what I’ve written about here as well as posting images and videos of my adventures on Instagram. It’s been pretty awesome to see the followers build 🙂
Summarizing all of the steps to create your successful business & travel the world:
Everything begins with picking out the right kind of travel topic (remember, niche oriented) and then making the website.
- Then it’s about gathering all the info you can on each place.
- Then it’s about blogging about each place using the keyword strategy I indicated and promoting products.
- Then optionally, as I said, use the extra marketing avenues (the 3 above).
In the end, you are trying to create a website that is so rich in it’s content that readers will absolutely love to read and watch where you’ve been and the more of that you add to the page, the more visitors you’ll get.
As such, you will be able to sell more of the things that you personally have had with you and use that to fund any future adventures, which by the way will (and should) be used for future blog posts and videos to attract even more people to your ever growing blog.
This is how you create your own travel website. Can it really fund you that well? Well experience has shown me that yes it can if you write enough and are passionate enough about your topic.
Now keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be an actual travel blog which funds you, it can be a blog that is not related to it at all, but is still used the same way (in terms of marketing) to make money so you CAN go around the world.
This is what I do, and in 2017 I’ve started to REALLY put all of this to use. Before, even though I had a good website and was doing pretty well, once I started traveling to one place, to another, I really started to understand how amazing this opportunity is and that I should fully take advantage of it.
If you are ever had the dream to see the world, understand that through normal circumstances, it is very difficult to do, with the restraining job hours and traditional approaches, few people get to live this type of experience. Fortunately though, with an online business, it can go with you and that flexibility (among other very comfortable perks) makes putting the time into making it totally worthwhile.
Update: I decided to start a travel site.
There was one thing I didn’t really mention before in this article, but I actually travel to many nature spots and have recently had my fellow internet marketers push me to start my own blog on this.
It is still in the midst of growing in Google (the website is called The Nature Seeker), but the idea I have is note just run it through the tips I gave in this article, but also do display advertising on it through a company called Mediavine. Once there is enough information on how it’s doing, I will be posting an update and link to an article showcasing if it’s working so you can also implement the same tips on your travel site or blog.
Also another update is that if you need to see examples of already successful travel blogs, here is one. This person gets over a million visits to the blog via Pinterest and makes money from selling her own guides and products on the blog itself.
If I had lots of opportunity to travel, I would chose the wilderness/nature option. I’ve wanted to see the different types of natural scenes around the world. But, off course money and any source of income is my current problem and restriction against traveling anywhere, seemingly anytime soon.
I’m really interested in coming up with suggestions/topics for a blog posts and your examples are very helpful. I’m most concerned about running out of ideas to discuss on a blog post. Each time you post, that’s one idea that’s been used up. That was very interesting to learn: although the visits go way down, with a longer keyword, you might actually have a very stealthy way to get ranked to the higher keyword; I just learned sometime that I didn’t realize and it’s something I’ll try, as I need more content for a new blog post.
Hi David, with regards to restrictions, you will find that the more financially free you are from an internet business, the less problems you’ll have traveling in general, and it seems we have the same ideas in mind on what type of site we want to have.
That being said, let me quickly comment on the issue you mentioned regarding running out of ideas. The fact is, you can absolutely find new fresh ideas constantly if you utilize the following 2 methods I talked about here, this will really help you keep your site coming up with new content all the time.
But even if you do have used up 1 keyword for example, it’s never a bad idea to make an updated post targeting the same keyword. If for example, I was writing a case study and that case study targeted a keyword, I could write an update on the study and how it turned out, but target the same and/or similar keyword and link the post back to the original. This will interlink to the previous post, provide better SEO across the site and help it continue to grow with more content.
What a delicious dream travelling and working online would be for me. Where do you personally travel right now? I am interested for sure. It would be my dream to travel the world on a train and sell my services online. And when I was done with the train, I would next take a boat around the world and back. Do you know what kind of Internet either of those journeys would require while traveling and working online at the same time? Let me know. Thank you, Scoots
I’m sure there would be Wifi available in just about any area you’d travel through using popular travel options (trains, boats, ect…). As of right now I am aiming to go through 2 potential areas in the eastern most area of Canada or through a mountain range on the eastern part of the U.S. In any case, I have my laptop handy with me to take the work with me 🙂
This is great advice for an aspiring travel blogger like me.
My husband and I started a travel blog a little over a month ago and are really enjoying the process. We have come up a couple challenges though. Maybe you could shed some light on how to work through them.
Our specific niche is to show how to travel virtually for free through using credit card sign up bonuses. We have been able to do this for the last few years and are extremely passionate about it. When we learned about affiliate marketing, and that the bloggers we follow make money every time we click on a link on their website to apply for a new credit card, we wanted in.
We’ve since learned that it’s difficult to get applied for affiliate programs with banks like Chase, American Expess, and Citi. Most of the credit cards we promote that offer great travel benefits are issued by those banks, but we can’t get approved until we get more traffic.
So my question is, how do we monetize our site in the mean time without it feeling like a bait and switch. All of our content is aimed at teaching people to travel for free and now I feel like the only option I have is to add affiliate links to travel companies that charge quite a bit for their services. See my dilemma? You have any thought for how to overcome that? Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
Hi Kendra, you bring up A LOT of excellent questions, and I will try to answer this as a whole first, then get into more specific details on each question you bring up:
First, you and your husband need to specify the niche topic on your blog. You are aiming to get people to sign up for credit card offers for which you are going to get a commission of. But the question is, what kind of niche audience benefits from your offers? Here’s some ideas that I personally thought may work:
There is a niche audience of people out there who look for credit cards with the best bonuses, perhaps cash back, perhaps more travel points, ect…
If you have a website that specifically targets credit cards that offer different types of bonuses and review all the different types there are and provide links to the ones you believe offer the best rewards and bonuses you can get more traffic.
But keep in mind, you really have to be amazing at this and by that I mean VERY knowledgeable on the credit cards you’re reviewing and be so knowledgeable that you will be able to relay the information on which ones are best for customers in a very simple way.
Here are some things you can do:
Look at the same people whose blogs you mentioned who get paid for sign up clicks (I’ll talk about how they do it in a moment). See how they are marketing and use the style to your advantage. I’m not saying to copy them, but I am saying to use the ideas that are working to their favor and utilize it in your own style on your site.
Look at people on FB who are in this niche. I think there’s a guy who made a whole brand out of this and his nickname is the “travel points guy”. The point is, he makes a living showing people how to use points on their cards for free flights and free stuff. Use the info he provides to maybe come up with your own content ideas for this.
Now onto the blog owners who get paid. They are likely either using adsense advertising or more likely just utilizing a form of affiliate marketing where they send people to free sign up trials to credit cards which they get paid for IF the person signs up there. You can certainly do this too.
I would hold off on looking at affiliate promotions for now, because as you said, they are not going to approve you unless you get traffic to your site. So the goal would then be…to get traffic and for that, I’ve given you a lot of ideas to start with, beginning from the niche choice, to content ideas and utilizing them.
Focus on that first, get the content up, get the traffic, then re-apply to the affiliate program. Make absolutely sure this is a niche topic you guys want to go with because it may be a difficult one to work with unless you two know a lot about it.
Thanks for the helpful tips.
We actually are quite knowledgeable in it and plan to keep going with it. We have a combined six years of experience with it and have personally used most of them and know their ins and outs. We help a lot of our friends out with this in the offline world, so we figure why not do it online and make a business of it.
We want to create a page where it list all the credit cards we use and provide links so people can sign up for the cards. We were thinking that since we haven’t been approved yet, we would just provide the links from other bloggers that already have been approved. It’s pushing profitability towards others, but we’re not losing anything since we’re not approved for the links yet anyway. Also it will provide more value to our visitors as it closes the loop on what they need to do to get the cards they need.
At first glance, I think it foolish to push readers towards other people’s affiliate links, but all things considered, it’s really the only thing missing from helping our readers seal the deal on getting sign up bonuses. Where it would provide value to our readers I think it makes sense to see someone else make money off of it until we have sufficient readership to get approved.
Does that logic seem right to you?
Hi Kenda, you can certainly provide external links to other sites and their affiliate links, but I would honestly focus more so on getting the initial content up and running and when the rankings and organic traffic start to hit, then to re-register for affiliate programs again.
Keep your content mixed between reviewing good credit cards, the bad ones and linking them to the good ones (bad credit cards also get traffic searches, believe me), and talking about the general idea of using rewards points or whatever bonuses credit cards offer through various articles.
I think you’ve got a great niche topic here and you may even find some credit card companies will offer you their own extra bonuses for being a great affiliate for them.
A very comprehensive post indeed. I really like the way to appeal to the person who wishes to travel and provide an affordable and possible way to do so. The information is sound and possible to anyone who truly desires to be independent of the daily grind of traditional work. I will take your advise and look into the travel industry and approach this with a positive mindset. Great article. I will come back for more.
Hi Ralph, keep in mind, you don’t have to focus only on a travel related niche, you can just internet marketing to start a completely different niche website, but use it’s profits for travel, that’s the main point I was trying to make in this article. I am still building my own travel site, but I am using profits from existing, non related travel sites to fund my adventures 🙂
Great advice here.
I have my own website which is aimed at people interested in the island of Rhodes in Greece. I live on the island and wanted to provide information to people without really selling them a holiday.
I have picked up some great tips here. Things like videos and utilizing social media. I want to make money off the site of course, but not to be in peoples faces.
Lots of information picked up here that will assist me with my direction!
Thanks 🙂
Chris
You may want to start targeting keyword terms that are more associated with overall Greece and places to visit there, then link it to the island you live on Chris. This will attract a greater, but still relevant traffic to your site (tourists going to Greece).
You provided and nice road map for starting and developing a niche site. I liked how you narrowed down travel into a more specific niche like nature travel. Also, I never realized that travel would be considered an “evergreen niche”, but when you think about it, it makes sense. It was also cool how you showed how to use keywords to drive traffic to your site. Great post!
Wow, I never realized this niche has so many avenues for fun and selling.. You have to enjoy and be outdoors at time, so that while your having your time there, you can take your business to the next level, Thats what its about, lifestyle and enjoying life to the fullest.
Ever since I started my online business journey, a travel blog has been my passion, though until now I haven’t ample time to start one as such. Having stumbled upon your website, I feel inspired by all the detailed guidelines you mentioned here. I will be visiting this site regularly once I am really committed to starting my own travel blog. Thank you so much for sharing your invaluable experiences. Keep op the good work!
This article is extremely thorough, I had never even thought about a travel niche before today. You go extremely in depth about how to monetize this niche.
One question though – isn’t “the” a stopword? So if the keyword was “great falls elevation” and your title was “great falls. the elevation was so high!” wouldn’t that keyword not work ?
It would Alex 🙂 I actually explain why you don’t have to worry these “stop words” as you said in this article. This would alleviate your keyword hunting worries.
What a great idea and article! You make it very easy to read with some very helpful tips, even to follow with other niches.
I am hoping to get things rolling more with my website and start making an income with my affiliate links. I love to travel but don’t have the time or money but hope to some day.
Great job and I wish you all the best!
Thanks for a great read, again.
I actually have a travel blog where I promote travel insurance, a training course on how to run a travel blog business, and house sitting opportunities.
All of them are affiliate partnerships. Its very enjoyable to blog about your adventures. You are giving very good advice here.
Wow, I’d never realized the potential of having a travel blog. It would definitely be a great idea for those that love to travel.
There are so many locations to write about, not to mention countless products that could relate to it as you mentioned here. That is one thing I didn’t think about before…each area would have different products that would be helpful for people traveling to know about.
I especially never thought about clothing being related to a travel blog, but I can see how it would definitely work after reading this.
Very good advice in my opinion on the social media sites you’ve recommended here. In Facebook using a Fan page would be a great idea and also checking to see if there are groups to join about travel may help as well.
People love watching videos, so YouTube would be a great way to get people to learn about the travel blog. I also see there are a lot of beautiful photos on Pinterest from travel blogs and many of them have thousands of followers.
After reading this and thinking more on all the potential it could have, I might just start a travel blog myself some day…right now I already have too many niches, but I’ll be keeping this in mind for the future.
Thanks for sharing this! You’ve definitely done an excellent job of explaining how this works.
Thanks Sharon, but one thing I will say is to not have “too many niches”, just one. If you make it work, then trust me, you won’t need the others and/or will know if they’ll work too.
Very good post! This article got me motivated to work hard on this. Thats exactly my dream to travel and work at the same time, I always thought it is impossible but as I get more and more into the online business I noticed that it is indeed possible!
How long did it take you to be at the point you are right now?
Well if it’s based on this formula, then I’d say about a year.
I have been thinking I would like to make a travel website. I am concentrating on another topic at the moment and have limited time.
I actually live in an area that is a tourist spot and very unique. I wish I would have thought of it before I picked the niche I have. I like it a lot too though.
I also have a lot of videos of places I have been and could have used those also! Maybe I will in the future when I am able to not run around so much! It takes time to work on websites.
If your current niche topic is one you like, stick to it Cynthia. You will ALWAYS have new niche ideas come up constantly when you focus on one and every time it happens, you will always think that the new one is the one worth pursuing, don’t make that mistake, stick to your first one, and then move onto the travel one.
very informative review Vitaliy, I found lots of material inside that I can use and implement on my website. The idea of “traveling niche” is wildly popular and one can find it in run these days. however, I like evergreen places a lot and would to travel once in a while. Here you have mentioned free monetize tips for the website traffic and that is good though but we should consider Google Adwords”too to get traffic if one can afford to.
I’m not omitting Adwords Ankit, but you may have problems with them if you decide to run an affiliate website with links.
I’ve always wanted to make a travel website but always hesitated. I have no clue how to code or make a website or anything of that. I had no idea it was so easy and can done so fast. This gave me a lot of hope that I can do this.
I like the idea of making Youtube videos too.. that’s seems like it can be fun.
Is there any software or equipment you recommend picking up to make Youtube videos?
Thanks for the post, I learned a lot!
YouTube offers easy ways to make videos. Personally, I kind of do it the more complicated way, through Camtasia (a video program), but I think there’s free ways you can do it, anything from recording yourself or something through a camera phone to using programs that record the screen on your computer.
Awesome article! I myself love to travel a lot and having my own online business so I don’t need to worry about expenses and income sounds like such a relief! Although I must ask, is having your own online business really an effective way of gaining an income, how long does it take, also how about the ranking, how fast does one usually rank on for example Google? I really love the idea of earning income from my own business, but worry a little about the ranking! Still very good article, really an eye-opener!
All great questions Mark, and I basically answer them all here, do check it out!
This post is extremely informative. Since we have been struggling to get our Travel/Relationship site up and running, I’m glad I found this post. I also really like your idea of connecting with Pinterest. That is the one social media site I have never thought about connecting with and I see the benefits of doing so. Thanks so much for your great info!
As long as your travel site can show some really beautiful images, it won’t hurt to share them on Pinterest.
Hi Vitaliy,
I love how informative and educational this site really is. The travel niche is something that really interests me as I have lived in a few countries and have now embarked on a new plan to change countries every year!
Just one thing though, just how profitable can a travel blog make?
Well, considering that, for example, the nature travels, one of the things you can sell is cameras and they can range up to $1,000’s, the average commission for JUST that may go well into a $100 or more.
Aside from that, selling hiking things, all products pertaining to the niche can also add up. I don’t have a specific or estimate amount for this niche, but it would not surprise me if it not only paid for one’s trips, but also provided a steady income if they have a central location they live in.
Really interesting article about travel websites. I am part of a travel business but had never thought to build a website around travel so given me lots of ideas!
Do you find that your travel website has generated a lot of business for your travel opportunity?
Also, what are your opinions on using other people’s travel reviews (with their permission) if you haven’t traveled much but are wanting to build up your business?
Sarah, as I said in my post, I do not have a travel website. Regarding using people’s travel experiences, it’s better to use your own, but if they consent to and are willing to share their pictures and thoughts on where they’ve been and you know they won’t rewrite the same content elsewhere, it’s fine.
You can also feel free to share other people’s experiences on a Facebook page as a way to build up your fan base there. But keep in mind it may often involve you linking to their site/s and/or other Facebook pages to give them proper credit.