How To Make Money Traveling in 2024

Do you like to travel? Did you know you can make money doing it?

It’s still a mostly untapped market because most people don’t know how it works.

You can even write your travel expenses off on your taxes, such as your flights, hotels, food, excursions and more, but you need to be intentional about it.

This will be your new business. Here is a great article that explains more about how you can write these things off on your taxes, but the way you can do this is by… 

Starting a travel blog.

If you like to travel, why not write about it? Are you good at writing? It DOESN’T matter.

I am not a great writer and I make six figures every year with my blog. You see, with blogging, you write like you talk, it’s very conversational.

I have learned how to be intentional with my writing and my blog now runs on autopilot. 

In this article, I will show you how to do the exact same thing and make money for years and years to come. If you rather watch, check this video out.

This post contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission, at no cost to you, if you make a purchase through a link.

How to make money traveling

Let me show you how this works.

Step 1: The first thing you’ll want to do is your Research.

Now that I am telling you to start a travel blog, you need to know what other travel blogs are out there, you’ll want to know:

• What social media platforms are they using
• What kind of articles are they writing
• Understand how they make money (Ads, sponsorships, affiliate marketing, selling products, etc.)…we’ll discuss this shortly.

You can start by doing a quick Google search for “Travel Bloggers” to see what comes up in the search results.

Step 2: Decide on a niche. This will help give you purpose and help you build a core audience.

Who do you want to target with your blog? People, who travel alone, their significant other, friends, or families?

Whatever it is, think about it, and let that be the reason you’re doing what you’re doing because the only way to make money blogging is by helping people and you’ll want to build an email list of “your people”. So it’s important for you and them to know your purpose. 

Stick with me, because I’m going to show you how this all works.

Step 3: Create your website. I wrote a step-by-step guide to help you get started from scratch. You can check that out here. 

Step 4: Once you create your website the next question is how are you going to get traffic to your website, and the answer is…Google.

Yes, Google. 

Think about what pops up in the search results when you search for something, it’s blog articles.

Because I have many of my articles showing up in the search results, this is how I’m constantly getting traffic to my website. And because people are constantly searching for things on Google, I’m constantly making money (which I’ll talk about shortly).

The way I do this is by finding out what questions people are searching for on Google.

There are a couple of tools you can use to do this but I like to use Kwfinder (I LOVE this tool, try out the 10-day free trial for KWfinder).

This part can be tough, but it’s necessary. I did a video on how I do my keyword research that will help you but I’ll give you a quick example in this article.  

So say for example I wanted to go to Seattle. 

I need to be intentional about this trip in order to write this off on my taxes, so I used Kwfinder to see what I could possibly write about when I go to Seattle. 

Using the kwfinder tool I put in, “things to do in Seattle” and I found that the competition is pretty tough. 51/100 means that it is going to be hard to rank on the first page of Google for a new site like mine (You want to be on the first page of Google in the #1/#2 spot).

I want something that is easy to rank for, so I want to look for something that’s 29 or lower. 

“KD” stands for keyword difficulty, which means how hard or easy it is to rank in the search results on Google for this specific keyword/question. 

Scrolling down I found an easier keyword they suggested and it was “things to do in Seattle at night”.

1,000 people search for this question every single month on Google and it has a keyword difficulty of 23 which means it would be good to write an article about this and I could get my article to show up in the search results on Google.

You do have to write your articles in a certain way for Google to pick up your articles, and I did a video to show you how I write my articles to rank on Google. So when you’re ready to write your article be sure to watch that first. 

Ok, so now that I have something I could write about, I can plan my trip to Seattle. Remember you’re intentional about this entire planning process so you can use this trip for business.

So, in my intentional planning, I could plan a trip to Seattle, and do different things at night that I could document on my blog. 

I would even notify the owners of the places I plan to go to give them a heads up that I want to write about my experience and possibly add them to my top 10 list of things to do in Seattle at night (so I can get the royal treatment). 

You want to think of this as a side hustle at first, your full-time job will fund this but the idea is to get to the point where you will no longer need your full-time job.

So, how would you make money from this article? Affiliate Marketing. 

Affiliate marketing is how I make the most money on my site and it’s my favorite way to make money. 

Affiliate Marketing is when you refer a product or service to someone using a unique referral/affiliate link. If someone makes a purchase using my unique referral link I earn a commission. 

Let me give you an example. For a travel blog you want to sign up for Travelpayouts because they are the only travel-focused partnership platform that has over 100 travel affiliate programs like booking.com, TripAdvisor, GetYourGuide, Rentalcars.com, and a ton more. 

Be sure to sign-up today as they are offering a limited-time-only sign-up bonus of $25! Click here to join.

Once you sign up you will have access to apply to all the different affiliate programs in their network. 

For this article I would scroll through and see if there are any programs in their network that I could promote. I saw that GetYourGuide was a part of their network and this would make for a perfect affiliate opportunity.  

GetYourGuide is a platform used for booking tours, excursions, and other travel activities around the world. 

If people are looking for things to do at night, I could use GetYourGuide in my article for any tours or activities they have available. 

If someone clicked on one of these and booked a tour or activity, I would earn a commission. 

And if someone is searching for things to do in Seattle at night, they are actively looking to do something, so the odds of them clicking on one of my links and booking a tour or activity are very high.

Do you see how that works?

The idea is to find articles you can write about that can rank on Google and monetize the article through affiliate marketing.

It’s a total win-win, I’m giving people ideas about what they can do in Seattle and I get paid for it. 

So, I’d go back to Travelpayouts and join the GetYourGuide affiliate program to get my unique affiliate link to put in my article. 

Another bonus is once I start showing up in the search results on Google for “things to do in Seattle at night” I could show that to local places in the area and propose for them to pay a monthly fee to be listed in my article. 

I do that on my website and this one company pays me $1500 a month to be on my site because I have their targeted audience’s attention. This will take you some time to do but I want you to know of all of your options.

Here is another article on how you can best use GetYourGuide for affiliate commissions.

Another way to monetize your blog articles is by using social media. You could do an Instagram reel and TikTok video showing the best snippets of your trip, and write a caption along the lines of…”OMG best trip ever and it only cost $700 (or any amount), check the link in bio to see how I did it.” 

That would lead them to another blog article you write breaking down the costs of your trip, the places you stayed, the flight you took, etc.

So, before I take my trip I would use the programs in Travelpayouts to book everything so I could write about it from my own personal experience. The best way to be successful in affiliate marketing is to promote things you KNOW have worked for you. 

I could use Cheapoair to book my flight, Booking.com, Agoda, or Tripadvisor to book my hotel room and rental car and I could use GetYourGuide for any activities and these are just a few to name. 

Do you see how this works?

So, if someone used any of the links in my article so they could do the same kind of things I would earn a commission. 

I recommend taking some time to look at the programs in Travelpayouts to give you ideas about what you could write about and think about ways to promote these different services. Here is a whole video series on best ways to use Travelpayouts.

As your blog grows you can then put ads on your website and this is how I make money on autopilot.

Because I have ads on my website I make money from people just reading my articles and through affiliate marketing when they make a purchase. It’s the targeted consistent traffic I get from Google that allows all of this.

You could do the same thing, to see all the ways you can make money blogging and more on how I do it you can check this article out here.

So do you get how all this works? 

• Find easy questions that people are searching for on Google related to travel
• Answer their questions through your blog articles
• Monetize your blog through Affiliate marketing
• Use Social Media to help bring traffic to your blog

Ranking on Google with a new website could take 6-months to a year so you definitely want to treat this as a side hustle until you can get consistent traffic from Google. 

The more articles you write related to travel, the more Google will identify you as a travel resource and this will help to get your articles to rank faster and higher in the search results.

Are you ready? 

To get started, sign up for Travelpayouts so you can get grandfathered in with their limited-time-only sign-up bonus.

After that, if you haven’t done so already, get started on your website so you’ll be on your way. Click here for our step-by-step guide.

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