The key to hitting the road and living our best lives as digital nomads is making enough income online to sustain ourselves. We earn all our income online through our websites, wyldfamilytravel.com, explorevictoriaasutralia.com, polandtravelexpert.com, and thingstodoinsanur.com.
There are several different ways we make money from our websites. Some make more money than others, but all are equally important, as you shouldn’t rely on just one income stream to make your living. We create our money line in the following ways below.
How in the world do we make money online?
Making money online might seem like a mysterious and elusive concept, but let me tell you, it’s not as daunting as it looks! It’s all about leveraging the power of the internet to create income streams. Here’s a breakdown of some standard methods we use to make money online:
Advertising networks
We are members of an advertising network called Mediavine. Mediavine inserts those annoying ads you sometimes see in between sentences when you read something online.
Think of it this way: Imagine you own a small clothing store that sells unique, handmade clothing. You have a loyal customer base that loves your designs, but you’d like to reach more interested people.
An ad network like Mediavine targets an audience that loves fashion. So, the ads you see pop up on your viewing websites are generally targeted at your likes. When someone clicks on the ads, they are directed to the handmade clothing store website, and we get a commission for sending viewers to the website.
Mediavine is an exclusive ad network that requires websites to be somewhat popular before they accept you into their network. Your website must have 50,000 sessions a month to qualify. 50,000 sessions means that 50,000 people must log onto your website monthly to qualify.
The advantage of a network like this is that it attracts high-quality advertisers who pay well for views of their ads and clicks on them. Mediavine pays us on the first day of each month.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a natural way to make money with online content. Because we run travel blogs, companies such as Viator, Get Your Guide, Trip Advisor, Booking.com, and Expedia fit our range perfectly. We insert links to these companies’ products in our content, and if people either click through to it or make a booking from the link, we get paid a commission.
Generally, your commission is between 5% and 10% of the sale, so the more significant the booking, the more we make from it. We can use an embedded link, where you see a bit of highlighted text in a clickable article or a widget.
A widget is much like an ad, and in the instance of Viator, it may display 3 different tours in the city you are writing about. For the best results, we use an in-context link. An example would be when we write a sentence like, In Melbourne, there are many good areas to stay, accommodation on Southbank is popular with many tourists. In this case, we would place an affiliate link in Melbourne and accommodation in Southbank.
This is what context means; it works much better than putting text like, Click here.
You can join an affiliate network, such as Travel Payouts, which allows you to use many different companies under one banner, or you can join affiliate programs for companies. Travel Payouts has companies such as Agoda, TripAdvisor, Hostel World, and more under its banner.
The advantage of an affiliate network is that you can share links from different companies. At the end of the month, all the commissions earned are bundled together, and you receive a single payout.
An individual program such as Viator and relies on you making sales from only that company. Some companies and networks have a minimum payout each month. You may have to have a $100 commission banked before they will pay you.
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Sponsored Content.
This is where companies and businesses contact you, asking you to publish an article on your website containing a link to a product or place they want to publicise. This works in two ways. As mentioned, it can be a whole article containing the link, or it can just be a link added to an already existing article.
The money you receive for this depends on several factors, such as the number of people who read your blog and the age of your website (Google tends to favour websites that have had a presence online for longer).
Making money online through blogging is not confined to these methods. Many people sell online and create podcasts, courses and printables such as worksheets, physical products, etc. Social media is another way to make money, but that’s another ball game that requires you to be very popular on YouTube or TikTok.
I hope this article shows you how to start a blog, make online money and be a digital nomad. As I always say, blogging is more of a marathon than a sprint. Don’t think you can begin a blog and make money straight away. It does not work like that.
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