Making Money Travel Blogging

Remember when I wrote that post about the (un)truth on making money travel blogging? Well that was 2.5 years ago and things have changed a fair bit since then.

Firstly the bad news. On top of all the struggles that bloggers face trying to surface in an overcrowded sea of information, Google is pro-actively working towards removing the one source of revenue that many small and medium-sized bloggers relied on to keep their blogs going: which was cash for links.

Why? Well there are plenty of reasons Google is against this, some more legit than others, but the bottom line is that Google doesn’t want companies spending their advertising budget with small websites/bloggers just so that those companies then appear (un)naturally in Google’s organic results. It’s understandable… those advertisers are not interested in traffic or “eyeballs”, only SEO effect and increasing their website’s visibility in Google’s search results. And of course Google wants that companies get their traffic by investing their money directly with Google on adwords. (Google argues, coherently, that companies who purchase weblinks are cheating in the search results. Although this moral superiority is also a major convenience for them, bearing in mind that if they can control their own search results exactly, with more accuracy, they can for example tweak them time and time again to force more companies to pay for their traffic via Adwords…. or so a cynic would argue at least).

Whether you hate or love Google (or a bit of both), one thing is for sure as Google’s monopolisation of the web and online advertising continues it will become harder and harder for anyone to make a living through creating content alone. Those bloggers who had some visitors but essentially relied on accepting dough for linklove are likely to lose their income in the coming months/years (sites who break the rules will be punished and removed from Google’s index, and Google, a bit like Big Brother in 1984, is getting pretty smart at guessing who is breaking the rules, partly by encouraging companies to tell on one another) and thus be forced to stop blogging altogether or become amateur bloggers only. So only those websites with very high viewer numbers will be of any value to brands who might want to engage with those readers genuinely (ie. not for SEO purposes as has often happened in the past).

Partly because this has already started to happen, and partly because there was never much money in cashing in on link advertising, travel bloggers have been forced to become quite entrepreneurial in their outlooks, effectively using their blog as a CV/tool to provide other services or sell their own products. Those services might include freelance writing, copywriting, SEO or social media consultancy, branding or destination marketing, to name but a few, whilst typical products sold by bloggers include books, e-books, prints, comics and photos. It’s probably fair to say, just as I argued in 2011, that this not “making money through travel blogging” in a precise sense, but whilst it might involve a lot more than uploading photos of your holidays and scribbling a note or two about them, using your blog to live a self-employed entrepreneurial lifestyle would still allow many to enjoy the freedoms they dreamed about when they first left that much-maligned cubicle.

It’s hard to know how these new threats and opportunities are going to pan out for the average (travel) blogger, but definitely a versatile skill set and flexible and entrepreneurial attitude will be required for the average Joe/jotter/jetter to survive… if you’re one of them say hello and let us know what you’re doing to survive in this big bad world of (travel) blogging!