Monetizing A Travel Blog — Week 1
Struggling
A step by step, week by week, progression of monetizing a travel blog from scratch. If you’re new please check out Iteration 0 for an explanation on this series.
Overview & Updates
- Experiments leading to 33% improvement for IG Followers
- Failure to monetize personal outreach for consulting services
- New short term goal
- Medium partner program
- The struggle & why housesitting helps
- More damn courses, books, software, KanBans, & data
1. 33% increase in IG followers
Semi-significant Results:
Current IG Followers: 112
Last Week IG Followers: 84
Experiment/Hypothesis
Traveling to a new country & posting tags specific to that country will yield more followers than traveling to a new city in the same country you have already posted in.
Experiment 1: Posting multiple pictures of Southern Spain and targeting different cities. We had been there for about 3 weeks then.
Results: In about a weeks time we yielded almost a negative return as we went back and forth between 85 and 80 followers.
Experiment 2: Traveling to Portugal and posting 1 picture targeted to that country and area.
Results: Immediately yielded 8 followers. After a few more posts, the followers teetered off, but at the end of the week yielded a 33% increase in followers! Yes, this is small, but we believe that if we continued to cross borders that we would see a much higher increase in followers than we would if we tried to target different niches within a specific country.
If you are curious about any other experiments I ran, please feel free to ask :)
2. Failure to monetize personal outreach for consulting services
It was a reach, but what the hell; I decided to reach out to people I knew to see if they were interested in my help to get them going. Although they were interested in help, they weren’t interested in the idea of it costing money. I mean, it makes sense, but I figured I would give it a shot anyways. I’ll be adjusting my short term goals by building value through content creation and building a community to better understand my customer segment.
3. New short term goal
Old short term goal: Get 15 paying customers
New short term goal: Double my following in one week
4. Medium partner program
If you post on medium then you are probably pretty familiar with this. However, if you are not, Medium has rolled out a program that helps people posting content earn revenue. Check it out!
5. The struggle & why housesitting helps
I have found that if you increase the amount of travel you do, that the more opportunity there is for your time to be tied up in things outside of what you thought traveling really was. I have found that having a home base for a few weeks is really helpful when I need to settle down, do my job, and work on projects. Currently, we’re housesitting in Casablanca for two weeks to get our budget back in order and our work done! Otherwise, we couldn’t find the time of day or internet connection to get what I need to be done :/
If you’re planning on traveling and working remotely, then please keep this in mind in the beginning. Do yourself a favor and look into housesitting or Workaways as they are a perfect means to not only save you money but give you time to catch up! Anyways, this is no easy feat as a part-time gig but I promise I’ll keep playing around with experiments and ways to monetize this thing!
6. More damn books, software, KanBans, & data
Courses Taken this week
- Khan Academies Intro To JS: Drawings & Animations
Books Used This Week
- Scrum by J.J Sutherland
Software Used This Week
- SquareSpace — Website creation
- Canva: Logo & ad design
- Google Sheets — I hope you know what this is
Current Data VS Last Week’s Data
Current Short Term Goal: Double my following in one week
Last Week Short Term Goal: 15 paying customers
Current Medium Followers: 8
Last Week Medium Followers: 6
Current FB Followers: 50
Last week FB Followers: 46
Unchanged Data
Paying Customers: 0
Blog Income Total: $0
Income from affiliate program: $0
Income from ADTB Products/services: $0
Income from advertisements: $0
Other:$0
Another Damn KanBan Board (upcoming projects)
Cheers!
IG — Another_damn_travel_blog
FB — Adtravelblog
