How to Start a Travel Blog in 2025 ($80k/yr Blogger's Guide)

Most articles on "how to start a travel blog" are not written by experienced travel bloggers (they're written by hired freelance writers).

Even if they are, maybe they've succeeded 10 years ago or in 10 years.

This guide is different because it's written by a travel blogger with recent proven results achieved in a short time (2 years):

Here's my origin story in a nutshell:

• Started a travel blog in November 2022
• Achieved $1,000/month in revenue by December 2023
• Grew revenue to €7,300/month by July 2024
• 100% monetized through affiliate income
• 95% of revenue from Google, 5% from YouTube
• No prior experience in SEO or affiliate marketing
• Important: I was not working full-time on the blog. I would likely be much further ahead if I had been.
• Currently, I have 3 projects: 2 blogs and a travel e-commerce store. So I continue to make a living as a travel blogger.

If you want the lowdown on how to start a profitable travel blog from someone who's been there, this guide is for you.

It's a Rapidly Growing Industry

The tourism market has been growing for decades and shows no signs of stopping.

More people are traveling than ever before, leading to increased spending on experiences, hotels, flights, insurance, and more.

This means that, all else being equal, your business is bound to grow independently each year.

Better to be in a growing industry than a shrinking one. 👀

No Prior Experience Needed

I'm a very business-oriented person.

I come from an e-commerce background before I got into travel blogging.

When I underwent my "career change" in 2022, my goal was to find a growing industry where I had a reasonable chance of winning using affiliate marketing.

Many lucrative niches, such as finance, insurance, or medicine, require credibility, such as being a legitimate professional in the field.

I had no interest in competing in these niches, nor did I have any unfair advantages.

But to be 100% qualified to write about travel topics, you need only visit and try the place or activity you recommend.

(...and documenting it like an investigator with sh*tloads of photos and videos.).

With lots of personal experience-based insights, photos, and videos, you can write articles that rank well on Google.

Why?

It's because you can offer details, nuance, and specifics with proof in your articles.

(Why do you think I write about travel blogging now? Because I'm one of the few who's been there-done-that. Otherwise, why would you listen to me?)

Personal Testing is Highly Valued (Which Is Your Secret Weapon to Ranking High)

Another key is personally testing whatever you recommend. This will set you apart from 99% of your competition.

No need for years of education or experience.

Anyone can become a travel blogger at any time.

However, I only recommend personal testing when the expected payoff is worth the effort, as it's a lot of work.

On the other hand, for small fish, you can achieve good rankings with lower investments, as competition is generally less intense:

Don't Put the Cart Before the Horse

Most articles on starting a travel blog jump into creating a website after a brief intro on choosing a niche.

I like to do things differently. I like to discuss the big picture before we jump straight into execution, lest you do work that leads to nothing.

(Not to be a cynic, but the authors pushing you to sign up for web hosting so quickly is likely driven more by the attractive web hosting affiliate commissions than by a desire to help you succeed.)

My (profitable) approach to travel blogging

My approach differs from typical (unsuccessful?) travel blogger content and keyword strategies because it focuses on maximizing conversions.

This focus influences the keywords I target and the topics I prioritize.

Again, we want to be business-focused travel bloggers. We want to make a living from this, not do it for free.

I want you to travel anywhere you want without having to create content at some point. I want you to buy a home and reach all those fancy-schmancy societal milestones.

You’re just a few successful pages or articles away from living life on your own terms.

These articles and pages must cover topics where people want to buy something.

Focus on BOFU, not TOFU keywords.

Keywords in the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) are those where people already want to buy something, and you're the salesperson who presents them with options just before they whip out their credit cards.

With these topics, there's always an affiliate program you can join to sell something.

Examples:

• experiences (bicycle tours, segway tours, walking tours, river cruises, guided tours, etc.)
• hotels
• hostels
• car rental
• flights
• insurance

Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) keywords are those where people are not sure about what they want. They may have a general idea but are not ready to make a purchase just yet.

In short, making money with TOFU keywords is tough.

Plus, most bloggers and SEOs only concentrate on these, which makes ranking for these terms even harder.

Don't get me wrong. You can focus on these keywords further down the line, but not before exhausting your reservoir of BOFU keywords.

Examples:

• things to do
• itineraries
• how to get to the airport from the city center
• how to get around
• best restaurants
• best ruin bars
• best pizzerias

The shortest path to success is to focus on the BOFU keywords.

Avoid timewaster activities

Like any other field, travel blogging is filled with timewasters.

Timewasters don't or barely contribute to your (financial) goals. I've fallen into these traps myself.

I didn't know any better when I got started.

For example, you might start working on articles:

• with no clear purchase intent (hard to make money that way)
• where you actively NOT recommend people buy something 🤦 (even harder to make money that way)
• where there's not much search volume (you can make money, but not too much)
• where NO ONE is searching for your article (again, not likely to make money)

Most of these articles took as much effort as my cash cow articles. I learned the hard way that it's not rewarding to write articles that don't bring results.

Be okay with being a profit-oriented travel blogger

Travel bloggers are business owners.

Like any business, travel blogging is a means to a financial end. Without the financial incentive, you'd not do this work, even if you love to travel.

(Traveling and being a travel content creator are two completely different things.)

And most importantly, you're not working for free.

I get it. We all seek emotional fulfillment. We want to be "passionate" about our work.

But I would be happier for you if you could earn $7,000 a month passively like I do and cry in a Ferrari (figuratively speaking).

So many would-be travel bloggers spend years working on their travel blog and never reach the point of profitability.

Let's avoid that fate.

Focus on affiliate marketing instead of display ads

I hope the following is not a controversial opinion:

Most travel bloggers are better off focusing on affiliate marketing.

Why?

According to a cursory Google search, display ads in the travel niche can pay up to $30 per one thousand views (Revenue per Mille or RPM).

That's assuming the audience is from the United States.

In comparison, here are my RPMs for some of my cash cow articles:

30$ RPM (on a good day) vs. 390 to 1950$ RPMs (on every day, regardless of user traffic source).

Exception: If you want to make a killing with display ads, you'll need to focus on a US audience and somehow dominate many top-of-the-funnel (TOFU), competitive keywords.

Or you can focus on bottom-of-funnel keywords (BOFU), which are easier to win. The high affiliate RPMs more than make up for the lower traffic.

1. Choose Your Niche and Angle

The most successful travel blogs don't try to cover everything. Instead, they have a specific niche or angle that allows them to stand out.

What niche you choose should depend on three critical factors.

Market Demand

Since you're a travel blogger, your traffic comes from Google.

Basic keyword research lets you quickly determine if your idea has demand.

My favorite, affordable, simple keyword research tool is keysearch.co.

Here's a short video demonstrating my keyword research process:

Steps:

• Type in the keyword ("New York River Cruises")
• Initially, you have 700 keywords
• Go to filters
  • Add keywords that must be included (new york+cruise,new york+cruises, new york+boat tours, new york+boat tour, etc.)
  • Add minimum keyword volme (200-500)
  • Exclude irrelevant keywords (to, from, out)
• Now you should have 20-50 keywords
• Manually go through the keywords to make sure they're relevant
• If not, go back to the filters and check the "Words to include" and "Negative words to exclude" again
• Copy the keywords to the clipboard and paste them to Google Sheets
• Do a rough profitability calculation
  • 192320 impressions on Google (not bad!)
  • 3846.4 clicks (2% CTR)
  • 1538.56$/mo income (0.4$/click)
  • Conclusion: It's worth investing in a serious article project for this keyword (e.g., personal testing 5 to 10 cruises).

Big fish keywords start from 100.000 searches a month.

Anything below that is small fish that doesn't usually merit persona testing unless the ticket price (thus $/click) is high enough.

Your unique unfair advantages

Anything that makes creating content easier, cheaper, or more convenient is a competitive advantage.

• If you live in or near a capital city or popular tourist destination
• If you speak the local language or you're a local
• If you already have a conducive lifestyle to creating travel content
  • You're already traveling the world
  • You live and work on a cruise ship
  • You're a remote worker
• You've got lots of free time
  • You're a student
  • Stay-at-home mom
  • Living with your parents
  • Living in your own fully-owned house

You get the idea.

Do you have any unfair advantages that you can capitalize on?

Your Interest in the Topic

It's a competitive advantage if you're eager to create content about your chosen topic.

But you don't need to be.

Take me for an example.

I'm not thinking about cruises under the shower every day.

I was obsessed with creating the best river cruise article at the time though.

But as soon as I finished it, I forgot about it. I returned now and then to polish my content, but 98% of the work was done.

That's all I needed to be now able to enjoy abundant passive income from it.

Putting it all together

I was living in Budapest when I started my travel blog, which happens to have decent tourist numbers (6-7 million tourists a year).

It's nothing compared to cities like Paris, London or Rome, but it's good enough for me.

This made it very easy to create a Budapest destination guide, budapestadventures.com.

Now, it's your turn to consider the most obvious and accessible way for you to start making money as a travel blogger.

2. Decide on a Domain Name

Your domain name or brand barely matters.

People search for something, land on your website, maybe don't even see the domain name, book something, and leave.

Don't overthink it.

I recommend a typical travel blog name:

• [name] Abroad
• [name] Around the World
• Nomadic [name]
• Travel To [country or city name]
• [Country, city name, or name] Adventures
• [Your name] for a personal brand

Other factors to consider when choosing a domain name

• If you want to sell your business, avoid using your name in the brand.
• The shorter, catchier, and more easily understandable, the better.
• When building a multi-decade career, ensure you don’t limit yourself to a specific niche that you may outgrow in the future, such as being known solely as a backpacker.
  • There’s nothing wrong with managing multiple travel websites instead of trying to fit everything under one domain.
• Check if social media handles are available if you plan to use social media in the future.

3. Create Your Travel Blog with Webflow

Register for Webflow

I recommend Webflow instead of WordPress for travel blogging for the following reasons:

• Everything in one solution: web hosting, SSL certificates, and all the technical details in the background are handled by Webflow.
• No need for plugins to functionality: Webflow natively includes most things you need out of the box, although they do have an app marketplace now with useful apps.
• A tinkerer's playground: You can customize every minute detail of your website as you desire with the visual drag-and-drop editor in Webflow.

Clone my free travel blog template

There's no need for fancy schmancy templates.

The template of my travel blogging isn't exactly eye candy.

It doesn't matter because my articles are raking in cash.

Creating pages that meet search intent for high buy intent keywords is the most crucial factor for high conversions.

The articles on my website are optimized to capitalize on that traffic, with comparison tables, editor's choice boxes, widgets, and buy buttons.

(I go into more detail about what constitutes a "good" and "optimized" in my free profitable travel blogger course).

4. Put your content creation system in place

Once you familiarize yourself with Webflow it's time to fire up the content creation machine:

• Prepare 20-30 draft articles using my proven "Best [Activity]" template
• Create a structured process for article production that breaks down the different components, such as research, affiliate link creation, image editing, image uploading, titles, summaries, and detailed sections, to make the workload more manageable.

5. Start producing easy articles to get the ball rolling (Optional)

If this is your first rodeo, you may want to see if this whole travel-blogging-affiliate marketing-making-money-online thing works for you.

I get it—this is why I wasn't working full time on the business in the beginning and only produced articles with surgical precision that I was highly confident would succeed.

Good news!

Articles with low competition and low effort can start ranking in a week!

But they're also low payoff. ☹️

For example, I published this article on June 10th, 2023:

Here are the results:

Here are the lifetime financial results from the past two years, excluding Viator. This is just to provide a ballpark.

6. Plan and execute high-effort articles that are the real game changers

Game changers are keywords with either high search volume or price points, ideally both (such as 5-star hotels in London).

I doubled down on river and dinner cruises (a popular bottom-of-the-funnel topic in many cities).

You can win at these keywords by conducting in-person testing.

You test at least 5 of the most popular activities in a best-selling category.

You go there, buy the tickets, and act like a guest (not the sneaky reviewer that you are).

You write down everything you see and experience (like how cold/hot you felt, how comfortable the seat was, how tasty the food was), and document the living hell out of the experience with photos and videos.

Afterward, you create a "5 Best *Activity* in *City* (Personally Tested)" article.

With the information you've just gathered, you're the most credible person on Earth to create such a comparison list.

7. Translate your articles to scale with almost no effort

Once your article is done, why stop at just publishing in English?

Why leave money on the table when you can double your traffic and income with an additional 1% of the effort you put into translating your articles?

How can you do this?

Find out in my course. 😄 (it's free)

Travel is too competitive and oversaturated

"Travel" itself is too broad a term.

Only specific keywords can be competitive or not.

You might be surprised at how many profitable keywords have easily beatable competition due to thin content.

Otherwise, how could my 0DR blog outrank my high DR competitors?

Great content + low authority site is often enough to outrank lousy content + high authority site.

No need for link-building

Aside from redirecting an old domain with some domain authority to my website, I haven't done any deliberate link-building.

I recommend you wait until your website is a.) chock full of maxed-out articles and b.) your articles can only rank higher if your website's link profile is better.

Why?

Link building costs time and money, which you should put into content creation.

Don't sweat your logo.

After two years in the travel blogging business, I still don't have a professionally designed logo.

My logo is still a text logo.

I did play around with AI image generators to make a favicon, but that's about it.

You don't need to bother with a logo until you're making money.