A lot of successful travel bloggers make a fairly decent income from their blogs. Some even manage to travel 365 days a year, where blogging and online projects enable them to make money while travelling. So does this mean that writing a travel blog can give you free vacations and fund your globe trotting adventures?
No, it doesn’t. Yes, you can make money by writing a travel related blog, but the key question is how much.
It Can But Will It?
Of course it is theoretically possible to pen a successful blog that earns enough to pay for a holiday or covers your tightly budgeted backpacking journey across the world. But that requires a great deal of ability, dedication and effort to get the blog popular first.
A well-written travel blog that has been nurtured for some time to build a decent readership can certainly cover most of the costs of a short getaway, or help to supplement a backpacker’s income, but to think that you can start a blog in order to give you free flights, hotels and spending money is a little far fetched.
Blog for the Right Reason
To get a blog off the ground and into the realms of being a top travel blog, a lot of passion is needed to fill it with awesome content, as well as to love, engage and connect with readers. If you think it’s an easy way to make money, you’ll find it hard to persevere when you only earn a few dollars a month.
But if you do it because you love to write, share stories, help people discover things, or to meet new people online to exchange travel experiences and knowledge, you’ll be starting your blog on a firmer foundation for success. As the saying goes, “Do It for the Right Reason”, and “The Money Will Follow”.
Ironically, the person who starts a blog to make money will normally fail at it and have a miserable time doing so. In contrast, someone who blogs because they love to create content and share their travel findings, will do it more naturally, have fun doing it, and may end up making more money along the way.
Passion before Money
So, while it is possible, try not to base your travel blog’s goal around money. Income may be one of the secondary reasons to motivate you to blog, but it shouldn’t be the primary objective, especially at the start anyway.
And even if you have your eye on the financial benefits of travel blogging, you shouldn’t set such lofty aspirations as to have it pay for all your travel expenses. You’ll only end up being disappointed.
Investment & Expectations
However, all this depends on how much you are willing to invest into your blog in the first place. For example, if you have additional help (such as paid writers) to assist in content generation, or a sizeable budget for advertising and promotions, you’ll be able to grow your blog more quickly than someone who is doing it all themselves.
At the same time, a lot also depends on the scope of your travel itinerary, and what you mean by “pay for your travel”. For instance, some backpackers try to stay with friends for free, where most of their daily costs are quite meagre. In this scenario, it may be possible for a blog’s income to cover simple food and living expenses. But if your travel costs include hotel accommodation, then it’s a totally different picture.
Unlikely but Possible
All in all, it’s probably fair to say that the answer to the question of whether a travel blog’s income can pay for your trips, is no, it definitely can’t pay for all of it, but it depends on how much you invest into the blog in the first place, your competence in writing and Internet Marketing, what your travel preferences and requirements are, and how long you intend to publish the blog before expecting it to fund your travels.
Indeed, there are many stories and examples of people who do manage to live off their blog, but they are the outliers and what you may not know is that they’ve put a lot of effort into honing their skills as a writer and invested hundreds or even thousands of hours into their blog for it to produce a decent income.