How can you earn money as a travelblogger? Is that even possible? If yes, how?

That’s a question I get asked very often. The thought of traveling around the world and earning money sounds so great, but like an impossible lifestyle. But it is possible! I want to show you how. Beware – I have to tell you about my history. That’s why this blog post will be very long. If you don’t want to read about my history (but you should to understand the context), you can click on the text below to skip to the part “Earn money.“

| »  Earn Money as a Travelblogger |

Earn money on the internet? How, What, When, Where?

Yes, I know – for most people the thought of earning money online with a blog seems bizarre or ridiculous. Normally I like talking about my blog, about how everything started and evolved, but it’s hard if people don’t understand you. I’m doing this for 4 years now and I know what I’m talking about. If I talk about it to someone, tell them my story and how this is all hard work and a “real” job, I won’t get recognition. It’s the opposite, people laugh and raise their eyebrows. It makes it hard to talk about.

I want to tell you about this “secret” and describe how I earn money with this blog. I have to add that this blog is not my only income. I work part time and I really like my job. I can’t tell you how this will play out. This has evolved over years and it will grow even further. I can’t answer how this project will evolve.

2013 – The beginning: The First Months / The First Year as a Blogger. No Income Through my Blog – “Only“ Presentse

I started my blog in 2013 just for fun. I wanted an online picture diary with my outfit combinations, so that I could see my looks later on. I didn’t write about travelling. It was just supposed to help me organize my closet. The pictures of my outfits were pretty popular. I got more and more comments and the visits to my blog grew. After some time, companies started contacting me and sending me clothes. This was crazy for me. I was really happy and I showed the clothes on my blog. The companies who provided me with products shared my pictures. I got more exposure like this.

Month by month it grew. At this time, I didn’t earn any money with my blog. I didn’t even know that you could. You could say that my blog was only a hobby at that time. After I got more and more readers, I wanted to be seen on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. That’s why I signed up there to get more followers. It worked! New readers came by. And the number of gifts and emails grew every month. Why I’m telling you this and what I want to say is: The reader must be there first, and then the money will come.

2014/2015 – 17 Months Later: The Moment I Didn’t Want it Anymore
Cooperation offers would come every several months.

Exactly 17 Months after I started blogging, I had a phase. At that time I got a few invitations to hotels in Austria and I was asked if I wanted to blog about my experiences, after people liked my private blogposts about Thailand so much. Our holiday on Koh Chang changed everything.

I saw on Instagram and on my blog, that you liked my posts about traveling much more. This makes sense because everyone wants to read something useful and wants to learn about other cultures. My short outfit blog posts became insignificant in comparison to the long, informative travel posts. I noticed that I wanted to write about something, that is “useful“ to others. I didn’t want to be seen as an arrogant, narcissistic fashion blogger who only thinks about shooting the newest clothing trends. I didn’t want to represent this. There was a huge fashion blogger boom, so I had to do something.

I was in my bed and I told Manuel “either I will stop or do something else – I don’t want to be like this and you know that this is not the real Julia.“ He agreed and told me to focus on my passion, which is traveling.

It went by relatively fast. I sat down in front of my computer, searched for a new design, moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress and changed my subject to travel. I deleted the short and bad blog posts, because they wouldn’t be useful. The other posts stayed online. I didn’t want to stop 100% – I love getting chic and I’m just like any woman. I love handbags, shoes, and clothes. That’s why I changed Chic Choolee in December 2014/ January 2015 to a travel and style blog.

Before changing, I already got a lot of cooperation offers from big companies. Since these companies want a lot of advertisement, I did some research on what I could charge. I work very long on one of my blogposts, I bought expensive camera equipment, and sometimes I drive very far just to take some good pictures for this work. I don’t want to do this for free. That’s why I registered my blog as a business and started to inform myself on the best business practices for bloggers.

After I knew the most important basics, I started creating templates for cost estimeates and invoices. For each cooperation offer I got via mail, I told the customer that I’m charging a fee for my work. We negotiated about the fee and I always found a solution. It’s rare that a company rejects this. There are some cooperation partners that want long blog posts, but want to pay me with a watch or a cheap chinese piece of clothing. You will have to learn to say no.

Some people can, some people don’t. For me it was out of the question to spend so much time for a product, which didn’t cost more than peanuts in production. If I successfully started a paid cooperation, my customers were always very content with my work and my professional attitude. I think the word goes around. That’s why it’s important to me to only do cooperations that I can support 110%. Good work is not only seen by the customer, but it’s also seen by the readers.

2015 – The Money Didn’t Make Me Happy: I Wanted More
Luckily, I already had some income due to my blog

I knew that changing my main topic would be a big risk, because a lot of customers I’ve already worked with would loose interest and would start searching for other bloggers who write about fashion, beauty or lifestyle. I focused on travel related blog posts. The financial aspect was notable, but it didn’t hit me very hard. I didn’t start this blog to become rich or to become Austria’s number one blogger. Everything started for fun and out of love for writing and photography.

That’s why I continue. I publish travel posts one after the other. I published a lot of posts with the topics “Booking a Trip”, “Booking a Flight”, “Find Lodging”, “Travel Costs”, etc to fill up my blog with helpful information. I didn’t focus on my income.

It was important to me to have a nice looking and unique blog. A source of information people would visit and use.

2016 – Qualitative Content, a Better Blogdesign & Great Trips
The First Paid Trips, Great Advertorials & Instagram

I worked all year to write good blog posts that are useful to my readers. I don’t want to post every day just to get clicks. It is important to me to be a source of information on a long-term basis.

If someone plans a trip to Iceland and starts his research in front of the computer, I want him or her to find my blog posts and I want my blog posts to give that person a good feeling when booking their trip. That’s the goal I’m trying to achieve. The more readers, the better. To write more posts and to reach more people, I want to travel a lot. I did great in 2016. Since I’m a huge Thailand fan, I want to become an expert in this area.

That’s why we visited in 2016, and will also return in January 2017 – my home away from home. There will be more blog posts to help you with your travel plans. We visited tons of great places in 2016 – such as Santorini, Mallorca, and Amsterdam. Not only to create content, but also to fulfill my dream: travel, travel, travel & explore.

At this time, a lot of paid cooperations took place. As mentioned above through paid ads, but also through other possibilities. I took video and was a guest at several events while blogging about them. I was paid for the first time for travelling and I also had some great Instagram cooperations. The number of my followers grew over the year and I’m close to hitting 50,000.

Earn Money with a Blog

How Travel Bloggers Earn Money

As mentioned above, I already had some paid cooperations. For more transparency, I wanted to summarize my sources of income. I want to stress that I mark each kind of cooperation on this blog and you can read in each text if it’s a cooperation or not.

You also shouldn’t forget that having a blog is expensive. In the beginning, it costs more then you will earn. Maybe if you don’t get cooperation offers and you don’t have many readers yet, but you still want to come up with a professional blog (web design, webs pace, hosting providers), URL, and maybe a designer (for a logo). If you want to start a blog without investing, but you still hope for bigger income – you’re starting with the wrong motivation and you might want to just stop.

The best source of income besides advertorials are affiliate links. You will need a big community to be able to live off this. Paid blogposts are accessible when your reach is a little smaller. I have to mention again, that it’s not easy to live from your blog. A lot of your revenue has to be used for paying taxes, developers, designers and much more that most people wouldn’t expect.

But if you keep up and follow your dream, don’t give up and always work on yourself and your goals, you can still do it. Some people earlier, some people later. It doesn’t mean that one is better than the other. My blog was never my number one priority in my life. I have a job, that I like, a big wonderful family, great friends, and a wonderful partner. Spending time with these people is my number one priority.

I’m still very thankful and proud of myself that I made it so far and I hope it will go on like this with my baby Chic Choolee. For those that read all the way through here (thank you for reading 3,000 words) , you know that without you – my dearest readers – all this wouldn’t be possible. I look forward to 2017 and hope that I can tell you great stories and that I can visit a lot of countries.

Earn money as a travelblogger

pin this article for later