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How to Make Money from a Travel Website

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How to Make Money from a Travel Website

It is great to hear from another traveler who is looking for a way to continuously keep traveling (and from someone who seems to enjoy blogging, haha).

Yeah, the Vagabondjourney.com website brings me in a little money for traveling, but it has continually been an uphill struggle. There is a little bit of bean money to be had on the internet, though it takes an amazing amount of time and effort to get it haha.

I receive a little money through donations, but I do not push it too much. I have a Paypal donation button on the bottom of almost every page on the site and I sometimes make a mention of receiving donations on the travelogue. In all, I may get $30 a month from this. My friend Andy the Hobotraveler stresses that it possible to make enough money to travel off of donations alone. Though, for now, I am satisfied with the nickels and dimes I have thrown at me from time to time. You can get the HTML code for a Paypal denotations button by logging into your account and go to "Merchant Services" and scroll down to the donation button link.

My main way of making travel funds on the website is through ads. I am trying to make a living off of the Google Adsense game, and it is going alright. You can set up an Adsense account through your Blogger system. But to to this you need A LOT of traffic before you will even make a negligible amount of money. I still only get only half of what I would like to make off of this, and this comes after a year and a half of working hard. In point, if you put up five pages a day for two years you will begin to make money.

Another way that I make money off of the website is through private ads, but this is shaky ground. I usually only offer [no-follow] type ads, which are not what most advertisers are looking for.

I looked over your website at http://waywardmoot.blogspot.com/  

It is a pretty good blog, lots of photos, and it is obvious that you really seem to enjoy writing on the internet haha. You have been blogging for a really long time! I have a few suggestions though that should raise your traffic a little:

1. When you upload photos make sure that you change the file name to key words. So that a photo of X and Y mountain says its proper name and so on. You can do this right from the Blogger photo upload page. When you select a photo that you want to upload click once on the filename that is below the image and change its name before double clicking on it to be loaded to your blog. Google Images can only search for the filenames of the photos, so keyword them the best as you can. From the amount and diversity of photos that you have on your blog you will get tons of traffic this way.

2. Title your posts with good key words. When you load up your posts make sure that you write a title in the box at the top. Again, Google values the keywords in page titles highly.

3. Make sure that you have "Post Pages" enabled. This is very important as it will publish each of your posts as a separate page on the internet.

4. The more pages you have the more traffic, the more traffic the more money. The Hobotraveler - who makes around $150 a day off of his websites - stresses that if you put up five pages per day for two years you will begin to make enough money to continuously travel. I agree with this advice.

Overall, as you probably have already found out, it is not too difficult to make money on the Road and to keep traveling. A good way to travel in the more expensive countries without going completely belly up is to trade Hobohideout.com hotel webpages for free accommodation in hotels and hostels. I have gotten stays of over two weeks just for making these webpages for hotels.

For more information on this go to:
Hobo Hideout Traveling Webmasters 
Travel Cheap with Hobohideout.com
Hobohideout at Budapest Bubble Hostel
Loft Hostel in Budapest
Hobohideout.com Mission Statement
Free accommodation while traveling
Hostel in Olomouc on Hobohideout.com
Earning my Keep in Prague
Hotel Webpages on Hobo Hideout.com

I wish you the best on your journey! If you have any more questions feel free to ask them!

Walk Slow,

Wade

Related Pages:
Encouragement to Travel- Assurance that it is possible to find work while traveling.
How to Get Money to Travel- How to fund international travels.
Work in Youth Hostels- How to find employment in youth hostels in Europe.
Money for traveling, travel necessities? - Question from Ben about what is needed to travel and how to make money.

Hi Wade,

My name is Ben.  I was directed to your site by someone I stayed with in Portland, Oregon recently. I was referred to Courtney Acostagrates by some couchsurfers I hung out with in Bend after hiking the Pacific Crest Trail earlier this year, and through our conversations she mentioned you and your travels. Then she mentioned that you have been able to make your living at least in part through receiving donations on your blog.  Fascinating!  People've been telling me that I ought to do something similar but I haven't quite broken free of the life people were expecting me to live earlier in life.  My interests lie in travel and exploration and I've been able to do much of that under the auspices of conservation and service while volunteering in Alaska, New Zealand, and most recently as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ecuador, one of your haunts.

It appears that I have quite a lot of reading to catch up on at your website.  I'm definitely interested in learning more about the process of getting published (text or photographs) as a means to fuel more travel and would welcome any tips or suggestions you may have for someone who's debt-free, has some savings in the bank, and a strong aversion to the idea of ever again being "plugged in" to this twisted modern American consumption circus that I see around me.  Any good books you could recommend for someone keen to set out on the road again?

Surely the vagabond lifestyle keeps you busy out experiencing instead of wasting the day staring at computer screens, but it would be nice to hear your input when you get a chance.  The link to my blog is below. 

Happy trails,
Ben