Note: Affiliate links may be used in this post. When you buy through my affiliate links I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Full disclosure here.
This blog post is sponsored by Stay22.
How I Made $1,350 in a Month with a Small Travel Blog
This month, I made $1,350 with my small travel blog all from one source.
How did I do it? I’m going to walk you through it step-by-step!
If you’ve been around for a while, you probably already know that I run multiple other blogs in addition to Blogging Her Way and this is my full-time business.
But you might not know that I’m basically a travel addict.
I spent a full year traveling in 2021, visiting 20 countries in just one year! And then I decided I still hadn’t had enough, so I spent another year and a half traveling full-time and living a digital nomad lifestyle while working remotely.
All in all, I’ve been to over 60 countries now and I’ve had some amazing travel experiences! So it only makes sense to share my passion on a travel blog.
I’ve actually started (and later sold) several travel blogs in various travel niches, but today I’m going to be focusing on just one of my travel blogs.
This is the blog I made $1,350 from last month. It’s a small blog (it has never gotten more than 6,000 monthly pageviews!) but it’s in a very focused niche, and I think this is a big key to the success I’ve had with this blog so far.
I don’t spend much time on this blog — usually I just publish one new blog post a week and I’d estimate I spend no more than 5 hours a week on it.
But I was able to earn $1,350 from this blog last month! Here’s how I did it…
Using Stay22 to Monetize My Travel Blog
All of my earnings on this blog currently come from Stay22.
Stay22 is an affiliate platform that automatically turns links on your travel blog into affiliate links so you can earn money from them.
You can earn money from Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Expedia, Hotels.com, VRBO, and more. So this makes it an ideal solution for travel bloggers.
In my case, I have a travel blog that focuses solely on where to stay in different destinations. If I travel somewhere, I write a guide to help other travelers decide where to stay, including the best areas and best hotels. I’ll often highlight where I personally stayed if it’s a hotel that I recommend.
So obviously, Stay22 is a good fit for my content.
If you have any type of travel blog, though, you can use Stay22 for links to hotels and other accommodations. What I like about hotel affiliate programs is that the commission is typically quite high. Most people are booking multi-night hotel stays and their total order value is in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars, and you earn up to a 10% commission of that as an affiliate!
Why Use Stay22?
Why should you use Stay22 on your travel blog?
There are other affiliate programs and affiliate platforms you can choose from, but after using Stay22, I truly think it’s the best for hotels and accommodation.
It’s extremely easy to sign up and get started for free.
All you have to do is enable a script on your website, and it automatically turns links you on your website into affiliate links. Stay22 also has something called the Let Me Allez script that increases your booking conversions.
It’s much easier than joining individual affiliate programs and having to manually get affiliate links from within the program to use on your blog.
Stay22 saves so much time and effort and gives you better results.
Since I switched to Stay22 from a different affiliate platform, I saw more than a 100% increase in my earnings. And the first full month that I switched to Stay22, I had only a 15% increase in traffic from the previous month. So with only a little more traffic, I was actually earning double what I did before thanks to Stay22.
It’s also worth noting that the customer care at Stay22 is top-notch (this is actually what sold me on switching over from my previous affiliate platform.)
Another big thing? You get paid a lot faster than you do with some other affiliate platforms. This was also a big concern for me when switching.
And you can use Stay22 concurrently with other affiliate programs and platforms (for example, TravelPayouts) for non-hotel affiliate programs.
Tips for Getting the Most Out of Stay22
Okay, so I’ve talked about how great I think Stay22 is and how it’s allowed me to earn passive income from my blog while I travel.
But how can you get the same results?
The first step is having a travel blog. If you haven’t already started a travel blog, I do have a step-by-step guide on how to start one today.
The next step is to write content that is likely to convert.
For me, this has been blog posts like “Where to Stay in X Destination” or “10 Best Luxury Hotels in X Destination.” This is because the people clicking on these types of blog posts are at a stage in their travel planning journey where they are actively looking for a hotel and are ready to make a booking right away!
You could add hotel affiliate links to a blog post like “Top 10 Reasons to Visit X Destination” but readers of that content might just be thinking about planning a trip and not ready to take action yet (and booking a hotel is hardly an impulse decision unlike some other smaller items you might purchase on a whim.)
Other types of blog posts that are likely to convert well include having a section on where to stay in an itinerary blog post (“How to Spend 3 Days in X Destination”) or a things to do guide (“Top 15 Things to Do in X Destination.”)
If you already have a travel blog, you can take a look at your most popular posts and see if there’s a way you can work in a section about places to stay in a natural way so you can include some hotel affiliate links.
Joining Stay22 is free and extremely easy to get started.
Once you’ve signed up, you can start earning money from your travel blog.
More Tips for Travel Bloggers
I hope you found this post about making money with a travel blog helpful!
Read on for some more of my travel blogging tips…