Why do we seek to make more money? I’ll tell you why, because money buys freedom. Freedom to go where we want. Do what we want; when we want. If you are like me, you love to travel. You’ve got wanderlust and you got it bad. Simply put: Money finances our wanderlust and traveling makes us happy. Here’s one thing many people don’t know — you can actually travel and make money at the same time. This article is intended to introduce you to one way to make money traveling by travel blogging.
Travel blogging can be done anywhere in the world where you have a laptop and an Internet connection. And it can allow you to make money simply by sharing your travel experiences. Here are a few key considerations to establishing a profitable travel blog:
* Choose a travel topic with the widest market appeal. A blog is like any other product, to determine if it will be successful before you start you must first determine if there is market demand for the information the blog will provide. There are a number of ways to do this. The easiest to is to research the popularity of keywords related to the travel topics you want to cover with your blog. Goggle and Overture have good free keyword research tools. You can find them from any search engine. Make sure that your related keywords are searched at least 10,000 times in any given month. This number is a good minimum threshold.
* Monetize the blog. You won’t make any money with your blog unless it is monetized. There are three primary ways to monetize a blog: advertising revenue, affiliate sales and sales of your own products. If you are just starting out, you probably won’t have any products of your own so its best to start with ad revenue and affiliate sales. For the beginner, Google’s AdSense is a good starting place for getting good contextual based advertising revenue. For affiliate sales there are many travel related affiliate products at Commission Junction and Amazon’s Associate program. There are many, many more programs you can use to monetize your blog but I recommend these because of ease of use.
* Build readership. A blog without visitors makes no money. Period. First, your blog should contain good content updated frequently. That’s what keeps readers who do find you coming back for more. Next, your blog should have RSS feeders and the ability to capture the email address of visitors who want to optin to your newsletter (that you need to establish) or site updates. There is a decent free blog optin service offered by FeedBlitz. Next, promote your blog by including a reference to it in your email “sig file.” Also, readership will naturally increase as you post more. Each time you post most blog software will ping (notify) the search engines of the new entry. The more quality pings you receive the higher your blog will appear in search engine rankings. The higher you get the more traffic you generate. The more traffic you generate the more money you’ll make.
These are the very basics you need to establish a profitable travel blog. If traveling and making money appeals to you consider starting a travel blog.