How to make money with a travel blog

A travel blog can pay for its own keep, and a few end up paying for the travel. Between those two sentences sits most of the dishonesty on this topic: courses sold on survivor stories, income reports written only by the people with income to report. This page is the other version. What each channel actually pays, when it starts paying, and the order that works.

My bias, stated plainly: I’m Julian, I founded TravelFeed in 2018, and we host paid travel blogs. The ranges on this page come from what bloggers in our community share about their earnings, plus Hive rewards, which are public by design. We can’t see into anyone’s affiliate dashboards and don’t want to. Whatever your blog earns is yours in full; we take no cut.

What each channel really pays

Everything below in one table. The rest of the page is the detail: how each channel works on TravelFeed specifically, and the mistakes that waste the most months.

Channel 01 · The compounding one

Affiliate marketing

You recommend something you’d recommend anyway (the guesthouse, the insurance, the ferry-booking site) through a tracking link, and earn a commission when a reader buys. It ends up as the biggest earner on most monetized travel blogs, and it’s the channel where honest writing is literally the business model: readers book through people they trust.

The arithmetic nobody puts in the pitch: travel commissions mostly run 3–12%, and of a thousand readers on a post, a handful click and one or two book. A $300 hotel booking at a 4% commission is twelve dollars. Real, but only meaningful once the clicks come from posts written for people planning something. A beautiful story about your week in Laos earns nothing; “how to get from Luang Prabang to Nong Khiaw” with the bus-booking link earns for years. You need both; the stories are why anyone trusts the route guide.

Where to start: a network beats juggling direct partnerships while you’re small. Travelpayouts bundles flights, stays and activities programs behind one dashboard and one payout, and SafetyWing’s ambassador program pays recurring commissions on nomad insurance, plus bonus quests that pay $100+ per completed task, unusual in this space. (Both are affiliate links; see the disclosure above.) Direct partnerships come later, when a brand can see your traffic.

On TravelFeed, affiliate links and banners work in any post and in your blog’s layout, and your commissions are entirely yours; we don’t touch the links and we don’t take a share. The craft of it, from picking programs to placing links where decisions happen, has its own deep-dive guide.

Channel 02 · The volume one

Display advertising

Ads are the channel everyone pictures first and should add last. The economics are strictly a function of traffic: Google AdSense pays travel sites roughly $1–3 per thousand views, so ten thousand monthly readers (a real milestone that takes most blogs a year) is coffee money. The step change comes with premium networks like Mediavine, which pay $10–25 per thousand but require around 50,000 monthly sessions before they’ll take you.

Two things to know before switching anything on. You need your own domain, because ad networks won’t work with a subdomain on someone else’s platform. And every ad slot costs reading speed and trust: a page plastered in programmatic ads is the fastest way to make readers quietly leave, and Google’s page-experience signals leave with them. Until the premium-network math kicks in, a single well-placed banner for an affiliate program you believe in often out-earns AdSense anyway.

TravelFeed doesn’t run ads on your blog. If you want them, they’re yours to add and yours to earn from. On any hosted plan with your own domain, AdSense drops in with a copy-paste: the setup guide walks through it.

Channel 03 · The immediate one

Cross-posting to the Hive blockchain

This is the odd one out, and the reason earning on TravelFeed starts on day one instead of month twelve: every channel above needs an audience first, and Hive doesn’t. Hive is a social network on a blockchain where readers with a stake in the network upvote posts, and upvotes translate into rewards, paid out about a week after publishing, per post.

The mechanics on TravelFeed take one setting: create a free Hive account or connect an existing one in your settings, and every post you publish is cross-posted automatically. Same writing, a second readership, no extra work. The realistic numbers: most posts earn a few dollars, writers who show up consistently and engage with the community earn more, and a post the community loves can clear $100. Think of it as the channel that pays you to keep publishing through the months when nothing else does.

And the disclosure this section owes you: Hive rewards are cryptocurrency. If that word raises an eyebrow, fair. There are good reasons to be skeptical of crypto. So, the facts. You never have to invest or buy anything; the rewards only flow toward you. The Hive you earn can be sold for regular money on the major crypto exchanges. And like most cryptocurrencies it is highly volatile, so what a payout is worth in dollars depends on the price Hive is trading at when you sell. The same post can be worth a lunch or just a coffee a few months apart.

Two more caveats worth knowing. Hive content appears on other Hive sites too, so if ranking your own domain is the priority, the “only excerpt” setting shares a teaser instead of the full text, usually at the cost of some rewards. And the Hive community funds human writing; AI-generated posts get flagged and downvoted, so keep it in your own words.

Channel 04 · The earned ones

Sponsorships, press trips and products

Everything in this section arrives with an audience and not before. Once your blog can prove readership, brands pay for sponsored posts: anywhere from $50 to $5,000+ depending on reach and niche. Tourism boards run press trips, which pay in travel rather than cash, covering flights, stays and activities in exchange for coverage. And your own products (a route guide as an e-book, photo prints, freelance writing or consulting booked off the blog’s authority) convert trust directly, with no middleman’s cut.

One warning from the trenches: the day your domain shows a flicker of authority, your contact form fills with “sponsored post” offers at $30–80 from strangers with a casino or CBD site to link. That’s not sponsorship, it’s link buying. It violates Google’s spam policies, and accepting it risks the search traffic every other channel on this page depends on. Real sponsors want your audience, not your link equity; the difference is always obvious from the first email. Whatever you accept, disclose it in the post.

The order that actually works

Most new bloggers do this backwards: ads first because ads are what money on the internet looks like, affiliate links sprayed into every post, and burnout by month six when the dashboard still says $4. Sequence it instead:

• Posts 1–20: switch on Hive, ignore everything else. Connect the account once and publishing does the rest. What matters isn’t the few dollars per post, it’s income that starts while your search traffic is still zero. Join one affiliate program only when you first write something a reader could act on.
• First few thousand monthly readers: build the planning library. Route guides, cost breakdowns and how-to-get-there posts are the pages that earn affiliate commissions for years. This is also when the blog’s costs are still bigger than its income, which is normal; the cost ledger covers that side.
• Tens of thousands of monthly sessions: now ads. Qualify for a premium network and display advertising becomes the largest line on many travel blogs’ ledgers. This is the stage the income reports are written from. Sponsorships and your own products start making sense here too.

The uncomfortable truth underneath all of it: every channel except Hive compounds on traffic, and traffic takes one to three years of consistent publishing to build. Whether that trade is worth it is a fair question, fair enough that we wrote the honest answer separately. And if you’re still at zero posts, start with the guide to starting a travel blog. Audience and name first; monetization sits exactly this far down the list.

Frequently asked questions