Travel Blog for Beginners: Life of Adventure, Analytics, Affiliate Links and Anxiety

 
 
At last! You finally decided to become a travel blogger. Look at you! Welcome comrade to the world of blogging. Where heartaches and flip-flops get tossed out of the window and packed in the same suitcase the very next day.

Before you start updating your Linkedin profile and broadcasting to your network of friends that you’re ready for the new adventure, just step back for a bit and think about the houseplants and your cat (or mutt). Don’t be alarmed. That isn’t exactly the issue here.
 

Travel Blog: Where To Begin

 
What I am about to say is the part that nobody tells you when starting a travel blog. The act of traveling is the easiest part. The most difficult however is lying on a flimsy mattress, three time zones deep in some cheap hostel accommodation at 1 a.m. doing arithmetic enough to make an accountant weep.

A few flights up, a group of raunchy Australian students in their gap-year having the best night of their lives while you cower under the glow of a ghostly laptop trying to rack up more virtual traffic oblivious to your mother refreshing the page every five minutes on the other side of the globe. 

Remember the posts you saw of travel bloggers aboard private yachts or pampered at a spa in a 5star hotel somewhere in St. Lucia? Golden hour. The champagne at 36,000 feet. Magical cliffs. Parasols and sun loungers on the beach and palm trees swaying gently in the Caribbean breeze.

Let me be perfectly candid with you —  this is not quite what the blog brochure promised. You didn’t skip the fine print, did you?

Well, that may well be true for some people, the fortunate few who simply have that sort of luck. But for the rest of us, you just have to get used to spending most of your time squinting at Google analytics dashboard, fumbling and fussing over keywords, back and broken links that at times hint of broken promises.
 

 

​From the ridiculous to the sublime. As a travel blogger you get to live two versions of reality. Here’s a photo of me discreetly stashing food into my bag as if I’m preparing for an episodic humanitarian crisis when traveling. There’s me again in the second photo having a moment and basking in the brief illusion that I have become the sort of person airlines like to occasionally spoil. – Flying Baguette

 
Will this trip fund my next post? Will my next post fund my trip? Suddenly you become a poet and a philosopher. Take delight in that comrade. For the better part of the year, you’ll turn sentences into prose in no time, learn the secret art of seduction and click bait, and become an expert describing midnight trains, room service, new hydration face masks or perhaps the pint of beer from the newly opened pub. 

In blogging, there is also a kind of loneliness. You will likely feel alone. Hurray if you still have your houseplants and your cat (or mutt) to keep you company. In every step of the way, you are going to “put yourself out there.” Such in the same way a message in a bottle does. 

How Travel Bloggers Make Money (Monetization 101)

 
Occasionally a fellow blogger comes along. Equally sleep-deprived and financially feral. When they start telling you how they discovered Travelpayouts and Drive, it’s only natural to be skeptical, as the last thing you need is someone trying to sell you an online course on “manifesting abundance.”

Truth is, if you are new to blogging (or already started blogging but still hesitating), sign up for it. NOW.

Any established blogger or old timer will tell you it’s how you turn website traffic into a potential income. You get commissions on bookings made through your links from affiliated trusted travel companies (Viator, Booking, Get Your Guide, Agoda and the likes). Using the platform’s powerful tool called Drive, more like a butler service for websites in my books, allows you to both optimize and maximize what could be your potential earnings without doing the hard sell. Your personal virtual butler can even create and recommend a travel experience summary (from hotels to car hire to activities) to your readers.

Old links and travel-related keywords (or moments) are turned into passive revenue links while keeping the site free of flashy popups. At times, the benefits can feel like discovering your landlord secretly slipping goodies under your door. 

It won’t solve all your financial woes, I should stress. Nothing solves the problems of a person who freely quits his respectable corporate job and makes a living writing and creeping around hotels armed with a collapsible container, for the purpose, one gathers, to stash bread and pastries served in a buffet breakfast.

But signing up comes with up to a $100 USD welcome bonus. Don’t expect to fund your planned retirement on the Amalfi Coast just yet, but it is something to get you going with your blogging adventure or convince your mother that you finally landed a proper career.

For the evangelical folks who feel constantly leery about a blogger’s nebulous job and those who lower their voices when uttering the word “blogger” as though it were an unexplained rash, get them all to sign up. A TikTok account, an Instagram page or a YouTube channel containing one blurry video of a casserole will also do with your referral code in it. Every successful referral convert earns you up to $600 USD. The closest this industry comes to a pension plan! 

Travel Blogging is not for the faint of heart. It is 90% toil and 10% inspiration. It can be lonely at times and every travel blogger needs a trusty companion. Mine has paws and offers no editorial input yet reminds me that in travel blogging, puurrr-sistence is key. – Flying Baguette
 

Sign-up for Affiliate Links and Programs

 
Remember that blogging is 90% toil and 10% inspiration. Also remember that none of these affiliate platforms like Travelpayouts are made exclusively for top tier bloggers alone. They are built for us mere mortals. Those who’d already made it and the ones still cowering in the glow of a ghostly laptop trying to rack up more virtual traffic and hoping the next post is the one.

If this is you dear comrade and fellow struggling scribe, here’s the room key to the penthouse. I spent an embarrassing amount of time looking for it myself. ✍🏻
 

>>  Join Travelpayouts through my link <<

Learn more about travel blogging and meet real travel bloggers behind the blog:

>> CONFESSIONS of a CONNED Travel Blogger

>> BLOGGING in the TIME of PANDEMIC