Monica Lent: My travel blog has already made $25k this year
How does something like this work? Also, is anyone else here making money from blogging, or hoping to?
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How does something like this work? Also, is anyone else here making money from blogging, or hoping to?
Thanks for the tag, @csallen!
I'm happy to share a bit more about how it works. Main thing is affiliate marketing and display ads. I write helpful articles about different places I've traveled, and promote things like hotels and tours I experienced while there. The articles are optimized for SEO and get traffic from google.
This is an oversimplification but that's basically how it works.
Last year I wrote 12 months worth of income reports which talks about this: https://monicalent.com/categories/income-reports/
And my company Affilimate has a blog full of free content on this topic as well:
https://affilimate.com/blog/
If you plan to do something similar, I'd just be aware of how this differs from a typical software business like the main one that I run, as many Indie Hackers do:
Happy to answer any specific questions you may have, Pavati.
P.S. I do teach blogging and SEO in my free courses (https://bloggingfordevs.com) and (https://seofordevs.com), but I don't talk about monetizing a blog in there. If you want to follow a very similar path to me, there are a lot of great, free Facebook groups full of people doing the same.
Just like Anil mention below -- take the advice with a grain of salt. People online definitely exaggerate their success (though I think in most cases not knowingly, it's more that success is relative for everyone, so for some people $1K/mo feels huge, and others $10K/mo feels small).
Monica does affiliate marketing. My product, Curlsbot, is monetized through affiliate marketing as well. Mine doesn't make as much but I also only work on it about every couple of years, I should probably update the blog and apply to better programs.
Affiliate marketing takes time. You start with the low rate programs (like Amazon) and gradually move into programs with better rates. These programs are often invite-only or have traffic requirements.
You need to be very good at writing and at least decent in SEO and marketing.
Curious, how do you get invited to the better affiliate programs? Is it like, they'll notice you get a lot of traffic for their niche and reach out to you directly?
Once you have enough traffic, you will get non-stop emails from companies who want you to join their affiliate program.
What they do (which is smart) is look for affiliate content that is already ranking, and email those site owners to try to partner with them. Or, try to get a link placement in your existing article.
Cool, thanks!
For Curlsbot they reached out to me. But I probably could get into more if I did some research. Usually the best way is to look at similar blogs and see what links they use.
Monica (@momoko) teaches about how to do things like this with her Blogging for Devs newsletter and community. She's got a free 7-day email course on it here.
Works like this;
Anıl K.: My food blog has already made $30K this year.
You believe in one and not the other. Simply don't believe everything on the internet.
How it works; by sponsorships, ads and affiliates. These are the most common revenue channels for blogs.
affiliates selling what?
Seems like anything you can plug.
Latest post includes affiliate links to booking, tripadvisor, airbnb and a book on amazon, even a link for Japan Rail Pass is seems like affiliated.
A camera, its lenses and accessories are inevitable for travelers.
Oh! You are doing well. How you are tracking the revenue from Affiliate Channels?