Make Money While You Travel? These 4 Tips Will Show You How
Which kind of traveller are you when it comes to your finances?
Do you:
- Save up all of your cash before you leave and hope it will be enough?
- Get trigger-happy with your credit card and let “future you” worry about the costs?
Do either of these options ring true? I bet they do.
Before you go identifying yourself with options 1) or 2), I want you to stop and consider one more possibility:
3)Making money while you travel
Is it possible? Of course it is and thousands of people are doing it everyday. Making money while you travel is a great way to prolong the duration of your vacation or extend your adventures indefinitely.
In this article, you will learn more about the strategies many other travel bloggers are using to earn an income from their blog. This income may not be the riches of a king or queen, but it has allowed many to live in comfort, while continuing to experience all that the world has to offer.
Tips for Making Money While You Travel
Create Products Like Informative eBooks or Courses for Your Readers
Everybody finds value in products that allow them to do the things they’ve always wanted — like travelling professionally maybe???
Creating a few items for sale on your blog that people will find educational, helpful and most importantly valuable, is a great way to generate passive income to fund your travels in the future.
Brainstorm everything that went wrong for you on your first time travelling abroad and create products to help fix, or prevent, those problems for potential buyers in the future.
Remember, only your Mom wants to read about the day-to-day events of your vacation. Whereas, potential buyers will be more than happy to pay you for an eBook guide about travelling on a shoestring budget through South East Asia.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most common ways to make money from a blog, and if successful, is one of the easiest.
Why is affiliate marketing easy? Well, it’s not easy to begin with and to start there will be a bit of work involved. But, if set up correctly, with the appropriate information and a call to action strategy, affiliate marketing’s “set it and forget it” system can be a great source of passive income.
In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is the system of encouraging visitors on your blog to make purchases from an affiliate.
There are a few different styles of affiliate marketing strategies that you can adopt, and the one you use will be determined by the affiliating company’s policies.
Let’s run through some of these different strategies to give you a better idea of what you can expect:
Pay Per Click (PPC) — Pay per click affiliations involve placing a button from your affiliate on your blog’s page, that pays you a commission for every click it receives.
How much commission you earn from each click really depends on the agreement you sign up for. Earnings have been known to range anywhere from $0.01 to $1.00 per click, so unless your blog has a consistent deluge of traffic each day, I wouldn’t be counting on it as your sole source of income.
Pay Per Performance (PPP) and Pay Per Sale (PPS) — This is probably the most common form of affiliate marketing to date for bloggers in all niches.
Unlike PPC affiliate marketing, PPP and PPS earn you a commission only when a visitor on your site purchases a service or a product from your affiliate. As this is more likely to lead to sales for the affiliate, commissions are generally higher than those from PPC affiliations.
The difference between PPP and PPS is that, PPP usually earns you a variable commission rate, while the PPS rate is fixed.
Before you go signing up for PPP and PPS affiliate marketing programs, it’s important you find out what the specific requirements are for receiving your commission. Your income from this channel relies on visitors to your site, clicking on a button that directs them to your affiliates page to make a purchase. This can be a problem when people are exposed to your affiliate, because of your blog, but don’t make the decision to buy until months later, or they decide to purchase from another device for security reasons. All of these factors make it difficult for affiliates to track where the lead came from. To be safe, ensure you check your affiliate agreement for stipulations relating to this before making a commitment.
An option for PPP and PPS affiliate marketing, that eliminates this lost lead possibility, can be found in chatbot technology like Waylo’s Hotel Booking Chatbot application. This handy little A.I. application can be installed on any site so that all purchases can be made without ever having to leave your blog. This eliminates the chances of losing your commission to the ether of the internet, while at the same time encouraging visitors to spend more time on your page. (Add your email here to find out more)
Pay Per Lead (PPL) — There’s another version of affiliate marketing known as the pay per lead strategy. Here your commission is a fixed fee that relies on your ability to encourage visitors on your site to click a link to a landing page owned by your affiliate, where they will be asked to opt in their email addresses and details in order to receive a special offer or enter a contest, etc.
It’s important that you be totally transparent when it comes to your affiliations. If readers of your blog feel that you are deceiving them in order to make a quick buck, you will lose all credibility and can kiss your chances of being a professional travel blogger goodbye, sayonara, adios and arrivederci for good.
Freelancing
Many travel writers hire their writing skills to online businesses and other needy bloggers in need of some quality written content.
Signing up for job boards like Upwork or Freelancer will aid you in finding potential freelance work for your skillset. Although, you need to know that the competition runs high on these sites, as often many people will be offering to work at a price much lower than you’re willing to. With that in mind, there are still some great work opportunities available from time to time so it’s always a good idea to stay in the loop.
Also, make sure you regularly check the Problogger job board, as this site tends to feature some of the more professional clients who appreciate and understand the value of your work.
Partnering with Brands as an Ambassador
Before you set off on your trip, you may want to contact a few brands that you consider to have a valuable and reliable product or service and find out if they would be interested in having you as a brand ambassador.
For example, if you were going in a whirlwind tour of some of the world’s most exciting extreme sports destinations, you could partner with a company that sells GoPro camera mounts and poles. Capture your daredevil escapades, write blogs and do what ever you can to help promote their product and provide social proof of that brands worth to your followers.
If you do choose to pursue this as an option, make sure you’re partnering yourself with a brand you trust and would honestly recommend. Promoting a product or service you don’t believe in will be seen through by your readers, and, if the product really sucks, you’re name will be forever associated with it and you will lose the trust of the readers you worked so desperately to gain.
