Selling travel gear on Vagabond Journey.com– “Things like this take time,” my coworker on the farm, J, reassured me one day. We were pulling weeds from the pepper plants and I was griping about the fact that I had put up a travel gear shop online full of the items that I travel with, and [...]
Published on August 3, 2009
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Selling travel gear on Vagabond Journey.com–
“Things like this take time,” my coworker on the farm, J, reassured me one day.
We were pulling weeds from the pepper plants and I was griping about the fact that I had put up a travel gear shop online full of the items that I travel with, and how nobody had yet bought anything.
He was correct. These things do take time.
“Most people don’t buy things the first time they look at it,” my wife spoke to me in a cooing sort of voice.
She was correct. People often don’t buy travel gear the first time they look at it.
So I kept my head up and waited.
Trusted Travel Gear Shop
This Trusted Travel Gear shop is meant to be one of the prime sources of income for Vagabond Journey.com — for myself, my wife, and my soon to come baby. The fact that nobody had yet purchased ANYTHING a week after I put up the store had me shrugging my shoulder in self mockery:
If I keep throwing darts at the board, I will eventually hit a bull’s eye.
I felt as if my darts were falling far short of even touching the board, let alone hitting any bull’s eyes.
So I waited, walked slow, and gave it time.
Then somebody bought something.
Then another person bought something.
Then another and another and another . . .
The Trusted Travel Gear shop is now in business: people are buying their travel equipment here.
A narrow and brush strewn path through the woods is now opening up into a wide, clear cut trail. It is happening: people are shopping, I am making a little money.
I figure that if I can continue making $100 a month off of advertisements, $100 off of the generous contributions of readers, and $100 off of the Trusted Travel Gear shop, that I would have a good leg up on funding a continuous journey around the world from the work that I put into Vagabond Journey.com.
This is my dream. I am trying everything I can to make it happen — every single day.
To these ends I have added a few new items to the gear shop, as well as a new store for How to Travel Books, which are essentially a genre of books that provide practical instruction and advice on how to travel the world.
I will admit that some of these “how to travel” books border on the common sense for people that have previously walked down the backpackers trail, though I have found morsels of information in many of them that I was able to throw into my standard operating procedure and use.
Travel tips have a way of sticking into people’s minds and hiding out in the subconscious — ever waiting for the opportunity to come out and assert themselves. If only a single piece of information in any of these books could potentially help me travel a little better, then I say that it is worth reading them all. It can’t hurt.
I was once searching for a path through a dense forest towards the goal of making enough money to travel with my family off of this website alone, and these travel shops have provisioned me with a big machete.
About the Author: VBJ
I am the founder and editor of Vagabond Journey. I’ve been traveling the world since 1999, through 91 countries. I am the author of the book, Ghost Cities of China and have written for The Guardian, Forbes, Bloomberg, The Diplomat, the South China Morning Post, and other publications. VBJ has written 3703 posts on Vagabond Journey. Contact the author.
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VBJ is currently in: New York City
8 comments… add one
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August 4, 2009, 8:02 am
LinkAdd a link at the top of the Shop page and near the top of every page would help.
Ooops, just as I was typing this, I saw the link on this page, way down here near the comment box. It gets screwed up in Internet Explorer when I zoom in so could not see it properly. I think, maybe, as well as the changing link, a small, static link near the top, maybe under the Gear link, might be a nice addition.
I will let others know about this link, maybe if we all get everyone we know to use this link, you will become rich. Then you owe us each a beer 8^)
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Link
Never Mind…….
Some day I will actualy learn to look at a page before I suggest improvements.
I see you have a link like I was suggesting, at least on the books page. And I must say, this is one of the better designed pages I have seen for this sort of thing.
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August 4, 2009, 11:56 am
LinkWade,
Consider writing and illustrating your own ebook. Then set up an account and affiliate program with someone like clickbank. Once you have your ebook in an affiliate program ask, beg, and plead with other travel bloggers to sign up and stump your book. You will make more per book than what Amazon pays in commission, even the ebooks that are sold by others.
An example: Nomadic Matt did something similar by writing a “make money with your blog” ebook (http://www.nomadicmatt.com/travel-blogs/make-money-with-your-blog).
I saw others promoting it, such as Nerdy Nomad (http://www.nerdynomad.com/2009/06/30/review-of-nomadic-matts-ebook/)
For the record, I don’t know either of these people personaly nor have I read or sell Matt’s book. It just an example of what I think you could do.
Good luck.
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August 4, 2009, 2:02 pm
LinkThanks Baron,
I will check this out.
You are probably correct, I should spread my wings out into other forms of internet based publishing. Thank you for the impetus.
Wade
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Link
With the consultation of Motorcycle Bob I have put up a store for motorcycle travel books.
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August 4, 2009, 4:45 pm
LinkWade, if you write a book and plan to publish it in eBook form you can do clickbank and make some decent money from it. More than the $100 that you dream of. I will tell you this, I personally, my self, with my own work and stumbling have made over 30k per year for 8 years doing things like this online while still holding down a real job. I have been doing it since 2001 when I was faced with needing the money to keep my house. I have sold physical and virtual products and over the years have honed it to a point that with an effort of LITERALLY about 5 hours a month I make about $1,500 (USD) a month and honestly about 4 of those hours is spent trying new things to see what else works. I know that if I just took like a month and pushed it, I could quit my job and 6 months later be in bliss, but hey, I am kind of a slacker and have not gotten around to it yet.
Anyway, back to eBooks, you could simply package up your blog and sell it on Amazon as a kindle book, or use clickbank and make way more than $100 a month. I honestly think that it would do well as a paper book.
$100? That dream is too small… I don’t think that you realize the gold mine that you have in your recorded experiences.
People locked in the cubicle cage living in a world where the forecast is 72 and fluorescent from 9 to 5 followed by an hour worth of gas, gas, break, gas, break, honk, these people want to live vicariously through your writing. The beauty of it is that you don’t have to sit down and write a book, you have to do a weeks worth of organization and maybe a little formatting since the writing has taken place over the past 5 year.
btw, check out this dude over at http://www.brotherscott.org/ he wrote a short PDF about his experiences living in a van. It’s awesome.
Anyway, you have my email address. I am not trying to sell you anything, I just love to read your story and if there is anything that I can do to help it along, I am here!
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Link
Hello Scott,
You, sir, have some excellent ideas. I just sent you an email.
Thank you very much,
Wade
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