How To Make Money Online As A Travel Writer
To many the idea of earning money travel writing sounds like a dream job. Wandering the world, visiting exotic locales, meeting interesting people, seeing sights and having adventures while friends are chained to their desks back home, working 9-5, sounds great in and of itself. But what if you could get paid to write travel articles online? How great would it be to plunk down with your laptop under the shade of a palm tree and earn some bucks to help finance your journeys? This may sound like an impossible dream, but trust me when I tell you it is quite a realistic goal.
No longer do legions of travel writers have to fight for one of the rare, but immensely coveted jobs in the industry. The immense popularity of the internet as a vacation research tool has opened up a new and glorious opportunity for scribes who want to turn their travel experiences, tips and recommendations into cold, hard cash.
One of the simplest ways to start earning money traveling is by creating your own blog and documenting your travels. If you've never created your own blog before then a free blogging platform like Google's Blogger is a good choice to get your feet wet. However, if you want to eventually make a living at this then I recommend bucking up for your own hosting and domain name, and create your travel blog on the Wordpress platform. With an endless number of themes, plugins and widgets to play with you can customize the look and feel of your travel blog until you find the combination that works best for you.
Once you've got your blog set up you will need some content. Of course, if you are a travel writer this shouldn't be a problem. If you are packing a laptop and a digital camera/video camera you can quickly and easily create articles and post them to your blog. Be very detailed and descriptive in your post, and try and target topics people will be searching for. If you are writing an article on Normandy, try and think of what you searched for when planning your own trip there. Tips on best restaurants, hotels, fun activities, historical sites etc are all highly searched and should bring a lot of traffic to your blog. Remember to include plenty of pictures and/or video. An interactive, visually arresting page will bring more visitors and also attract links from other travel websites.
Okay, so you've written some articles, and you've started to get some traffic to your website. How do you go about making money with your travel blog?
There are a number of ways to monetize your travel website, and as your website gets bigger and more popular you'll find no shortage of money-making opportunities in this popular niche. If you are still a small fish in a big pond I recommend starting with Google Adsense. By incorporating Adsense into your website your visitors will be shown relevant, contextually targeted text and image ads that are integrated right into your content. If a visitor to your site clicks on one of those ads you will earn money. The more visitors you attract the more clicks you get, and the more money you earn. You'll be surprised how quickly those pennies can add up, particularly in the lucrative travel niche. Best of all if you've taken care to write "evergreen" articles that don't go stale and out of date your old articles will continue to earn for years to come, establishing a nice passive income.
A blog is a great way to earn money travel writing and to gain exposure for your work, but it certainly isn't the only way to build an income stream. If you don't have the time, inclination, or technical knowledge to start your own blog then there are a number of internet content sites that will pay you directly, or offer you a share in their own Google Adsense revenue, for writing for them. This is perfect for technophobes who simply want to write and share their travel experiences without having to worry about the initial expense and the ongoing maintenance of running a website.
Associated Content and Bukisa are two good options for writers wanting to earn direct passive income from their work. These are huge authority sites that get plenty of traffic, and each visitor to one of your articles will earn you a small royalty. The more articles you write and traffic you attract the more money you make. Of course, these are broad sites that allow you to write on any topic, so if you've run dry of travel stories you can always throw out an article on another topic like your favorite songs of the 80s, and you can earn money for that too.
Other sites like Infobarrel, Hubpages and Xomba operate in a similar fashion to the two mentioned above, but instead of paying you a royalty each time your content is viewed they instead pay you a share of the revenue your article earns. There is certainly more potential for profit under this business model, particularly if you are writing in a lucrative niche like travel. Again, these are big authority sites so there is a better chance that your articles will attain a high search engine ranking and thus attract more traffic. It is a win-win for the publishers and the authors alike. The publishers get valuable content that helps build their authority and bring visitors, and the authors get to reap the benefits of extra traffic they would likely never see on their own blogs.
