How to make money traveling

How to monetize travel traffic

If you often travel abroad or within your country and at the same time keep your blog on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, other social networks or even on your website, then you may have thought, how can I make money from this?

This short note is devoted to the answer to this question.

How many subscribers do you need to make money on a travel blog

To earn any meaningful money, the number of subscribers must be in the thousands. And preferably tens or hundreds of thousands.

Otherwise, you will have to wait quite a long time for both the first commission and the first minimum payout.

In fact, it all depends very much on the characteristics of the audience. For example, if you are subscribed by people who are not going on any trips, and your videos are watched like TV after a hard day, then it will be more difficult for you to promote flights and hotels. But at the same time, you can try to offer this audience something different.

For me, travel notes are an attempt to try something else besides the main line of activity (IT). My travel traffic is relatively small – around 500 people on two blogs. That is, the total number of visitors is 10-15 thousand people per month (it depends heavily on the season).

My modest income in recent months is as follows:

Of course, not much, but because of this I will not stop traveling )))) In addition, development (which is expressed in the creating of content) continues. By the way, in my case, this is not the only income from travel blogs, I also receive income from contextual advertising, which is more than the numbers shown above.

How to make money advertising airline tickets and hotels

I work with Travelpayouts, which have collected many affiliate programs for any needs of travelers. For example, affiliate programs that I am connected to:

• Aviasales (search for cheap flights)
• 12Go (tickets for public intercity transport: buses, trains, ferries, taxis)
• Hotellook (comparison of hotel prices with the possibility of booking hotels)
• Airalo (eSIM of any country)
• Discover Cars (car rental abroad)
• Booking.com (hotel booking)

In total, there are dozens of programs in Travelpayouts, more examples:

• Tripadvisor
• Trip.com
• Agoda
• Expedia
• BikesBooking.com
• Kiwitaxi
• Go City
• Hostelworld
• GetTransfer.com

Different programs may have slightly different rules and requirements, but generally the bottom line is that if you are not involved in cheating or anything illegal, you can cooperate with almost any of these programs.

Registration in Travelpayouts: https://www.travelpayouts.com/?marker=160488

How to make money with Travelpayouts

Select the services that are most relevant to you so that you can promote them, for example, various offers for the purchase of air tickets or long-distance transport.

In your Travelpayouts account, request a connection to the selected affiliate programs – for some this is done automatically, and for some you need the approval of a moderator who will check your blog.

After approval, various tools will become available to you. If you develop blogs on social networks, then you can use, for example, a link generator. Widgets are good for site owners (you can see an example of such a widget at the bottom of the article).

In your travel records, add your referral links to travel planning services, hotel reservations, air and bus ticket purchases, and so on.

For example, you can see how I do it in the note “Travel guide to Ko Samet island. The beaches of Ko Samet”.

There are widgets for buying bus and ferry tickets, as well as a widget for booking hotels.

Conclusion

The secret of success is in the number of subscribers (followers, visitors, traffic). While there are few of them, you should not particularly count on earnings. But at the same time, you should not despair either, especially if you travel primarily for your own pleasure (as you should do!). Just keep creating useful content.

Affiliate programs like Travelpayouts are not the only way to make money from travel. If you manage to develop yourself into a major blogger, then cooperation with direct advertisers becomes more interesting.