How to Make Money with Your Travel Blog

The wall street journal published an article about professional bloggers, saying that they make between $2,000 and $10,000 a month in ad sales. This is of course from working 40+ hour weeks and with a well established blog. Making that kind of money with your travel blog won't come over night, but there are a few ways you can start making money with travel blog until the six figure advertising checks roll in.

Make Money With Your Travel Blog - Ads

The majority of any money earned on most travel blogs come from selling ad space. High traffic blogs can charge just as much as much as some high traffic websites. When starting a blog, you won't be able to fetch top dollar, but there are a few ways to get advertising on your website.

The easiest way to start getting targeted advertisements on your travel website is to sign up with an affiliate program site such as Commission Junction. Commission Junction lets you sign up for various affiliate programs that are geared to your travel blog. Once you join several affiliate programs, you can start adding their banners to your travel blog.

You won't get paid outright for ad space by posting these banners on your site. The way affiliate programs work is that you get paid an incentive. These incentives could be $1 for having visitors click through and sign up for the news affiliates newsletter. Other affiliates might give you a percentage of the sale from the visitor that came from your travel blog.

When starting out, affiliate ads wont pay the bills, but they may earn you enough to at least pay your web hosting fees. With time and hard work, your blog traffic will increase, your affiliate profits will increase, and you may even be able to recruit some paying advertisers.

Make sure to have a link on your travel blog for advertisers. You can post the cost to advertise on your travel blog, or you can just post a way for potential advertisers to contact you directly.

Make Money With Your Travel Blog - Sell Products

Another way to make money on your travel blog is to sell products. You obviously can't host a web store on your travel blog, but what you can do is recommend products. Using an affiliate program such as Amazon, you can refer your travel blog visitors to items you recommend on Amazon.

Being a travel writer, you could review items such as, travel books, travel gadgets, luggage, and anything else travel related.

In your travel blog, all you will have to do is add your affiliate link to the product on Amazon. Then, hopefully, people will read your travel blog post, click on the Amazon link, and purchase it.

Again, this isn't huge money, but it's a start.

Make Money With Your Travel Blog - Donations

Don't be ashamed to put a donate button your travel blog. You never know when someone might feel generous. If your travel blog becomes popular and readers find it helpful, they might just share some internet karma.

Paypal makes it very easy to add a donate button to your travel blog. A few clicks and some copy and paste an you there. What have you got to lose?

Make Money With Your Travel Blog - Market Yourself

If you do more than just write a travel bog, tell people about it. Are you working on a travel related e-book or have a tour guide service? If so, try adding information about your services in your travel blog. This can be a good way to reach people in your target market.

Just make sure not to go overboard with your self promotion. If you travel blog appears to be nothing more than shameless self promotion, you won't get steady readers. It is ok to make a blog post about your services every once in a while or when appropriate. Just use your best judgment when it comes to posting promotional information.

If you have a travel website, you can always post a simple text link at the bottom of each post. This way, readers who only know about you from your blog, can easily navigate to your travel website.