Many people or friends asked me how I could have so much money to keep traveling and photographing. “Yes. I enjoy traveling as much as blogging.” People are also interested to know how I could make decent money from my travel photo blog, especially since Travel Feeder reached PR3 status in less than 6 months since Year 2009! I smiled at them.

Mt Fuji at dawn

Yes. My travel expenses, including booking flight, transportation, accommodations, and daily expenses to 12 European cities, 6 China cities, Thailand, Australia, and 8 Japan cities, as well as improvement costs on my photography equipment such as upgrading my camera to Nikon D7000, 4 lenses including Ultra Wide Angle Nikkor lens, tripod, Circular Polarizer filters, camera bags and all other accessories, are financed by monies I made solely from this travel blog, Travel Feeder! Let’s face it, making money from blogging is always the motivating factor for most bloggers to keep blogging, keep traveling and keep photographing.

Most of the bloggers who keep thinking how to make money from blogging never make much money. Most of them still think they can make fast and easy money from their blogs. In reality, it is not true. Bloggers who are successful and popular on the internet are people who have put so much efforts, persistently and continually in their blogs for a period of time, before they can achieve what they are now.

Of course, by following successful bloggers’ footsteps, and 5 crucial steps which I’m going to share below, you can at least do that in the right directions with inspirations to make money from blogging. After 3 years of blogging experience and some achievement, I’m sharing here with you what are the top 5 things to do to make money from blogging.

  1. Be passionate about the niche of your blog. Whatever your blog is about, you need to have great interest in what you are going to blog. As sure as eggs is eggs, having deep passion towards your blog is a prerequisite for any popular and successful blogger. Blogging something you are interested in is always easier and enjoyable. Moreover, passion is your first motivation to blog persistently, without giving up, albeit without any income yet from your blog. Persistency is the key to success in blogging. Try looking at those successful bloggers around such as JohnChow.com, Nikonrumors.com, or Everything Everyday, the common characteristic among them is passion. I blog about travel because I’m passionate about travel. My passion has made me an avid traveler who always seek for new travel ideas and tips. Passion has motivated me to share thoughts that I have experienced from travel to travel. If you have found your interest, writing original articles and blogs are rather easy. The next thing to do is to make sure you write quality contents.
  2. Writing quality contents or stories, and provide unique and useful information. There are too many info or tips being shared or passed on every minute on the internet. What made your blog stands out is your unique and quality info and interesting stories. People and travelers will come back for new tips, photos and stories written by you. Even better, they will start sharing it with their friends or other travelers. Slowly and steadily, your good reputation will attract more and more traffic to your blog until your blog becomes too popular for you to stop blogging! If writing is your only interest and nothing else, you may stop reading now. The above 2 steps could be your only things to do to make money from your blog. You don’t have to look for money. Money will come to you. If you are reputable and your blog has high incoming traffics and high PageRank (though Google is no longer looking at PR to justify one’s blog ranking, but still a useful reference for advertisers), advertisers or sponsors will start approaching you for ads options, and money will start coming in! Having said that, if you wish to make more money from other sources of income, you may read on…
  3. Monetize your blog wisely and efficiently is the next most important thing to do to make money from blogging. After writing quite a few popular and original contents with good incoming traffics, you can start monetizing your blog to make full use of your blog traffic. There are few ways you could monetize your blog. The first and the easiest way is to insert Google Adsense ad units to your blog page. Adsense is a fully automated, self generated and contents related ad unit being displayed on your blog. Whenever visitors click on the ads displayed, you will get paid by Google. Click Through Rate (CTR) is around 0.5% and Cost Per Click (CPC) is average USD0.50. So don’t expect to earn decent money if your blog has less than 10,000 visits per day. Besides Adsense, the second monetization option you can use is to join affiliate program, such as Amazon, Hotelscombined, or others. Affiliate marketing makes money through case reference and commission received. Also subject to your blog traffic, commission earned is normally 2-5% of each successful case, be it a product, travel package or booking. Both Adsense and affiliate marketing are traffic reliance. Once monetized, you need to do nothing but see money coming in. If you are looking for sponsors or advertisers, allocate some ad spaces on your blog and market them, so advertisers will know you are offering ad spaces and the ads locations.
  4. Market your blog. The next thing you could do to improve your earning from your blog is to market it to the world. No one will know you and your blog if you don’t market it. New models from Nikon cameras will still need to advertise on paper or online in order to inform its customers or attract new consumers. Similarly, you need to market your blog to the world if you wish to attract more traffic to your blog. Joining to social networks such as Blogcatalog, Stumbleupon, Facebook or Twitter is a good start. Apart from being active in any social community, you can also submit your blog to one of the blog listing website. Invesp or Alexa are some of the more reputable listing websites. If your blog is listed on top of the list, show off to your readers! Marketing your blog also involves some careful blog template design to ‘wow’ your readers to come back just because your blog is pleasant to browse and fast to load, and
  5. Keep blogging, and keep shooting photos. Persistency is the key for success. Keep blogging and sharing even though you don’t make much money initially. Keep blogging with determination and you will be able to monetize your blog and attract advertisers from around the world. If your blog lacks content or inspirations, slowly and surely, people will know and they will turn away. Let’s get down to the acts, keep blogging isn’t as easy a task as you would have thought, but is a rather straight forward thing to do. All you need is determination. Your hard works will pay off one day.

I have done all these things to make more than enough money to keep me traveling and photographing. However, I still  haven’t done enough to start my own travelers cafe next year. So keep blogging! 🙂 – Travel Feeder, your ultimate photo travel guide

Note: This is an ongoing project page which will be updated every now and then when new information is available. Make sure to bookmark this page for your future reference and watch this space by subscribing Travel Feeder’s feed for more hot topic on making money blogging. Thanks.