Welcome to our travel blog income report for Q2 2022.
For the first time, we want to share our travel blog earnings with you. Lately, our blog has grown more than expected, and we are finally earning some money!
We did not get our first income in the past three months, but we now earn enough to cover our expenses.
In this report, we would like to share with you our travel blogging salary, so we’re going to go into detail on where we got our money from, what worked well and what didn’t, and what kind of expenses we had.
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Travel blog income report Q2 2022
Why an income report?
A while ago, when Daniel and I got serious about this blog, we tried to figure out how to make money as a travel blogger.
We both have full-time jobs that we love and that we don’t want to quit anytime soon, but the idea of earning money with a side project seemed interesting. And while we were researching our options, I spent a lot of time reading income reports.
Knowing what to expect as a travel blogger salary was inspiring to me. Reading that there are travel blogs that make money made it easier for us to imagine that we could one day join those bloggers.
And here we are.
We are not in a position to teach you how to make money from a travel blog. We are still figuring out lots of things ourselves.
However, we want to show you that successfully monetising a travel blog is possible. Maybe you can find the same inspiration and motivation we once found when looking up income reports.
We also want to be transparent with you guys. If you’ve ever wondered how we make money with this travel blog, this is your chance to find out.
Our traffic in Q2 2022
When you look at travel blogging income, you always need to look at traffic.
We cannot earn any money if nobody visits our website.
From April to June 2022, our traffic steadily grew. On one side, I believe that our hard efforts of the past months finally paid off.
We are researching our keywords more carefully and putting more effort into our blog posts to ensure that they contain all the information readers are looking for. As a result, many of our articles now rank high on Google.
On the other side, the rise in tourism helped our blog. After two years, people are travelling again. The tourism industry might not be back to normal, but it is slowly recovering. Borders, hotels and restaurants have reopened, and people long to travel more than ever before.
Plus, we have a lot of Europe content, and tourism always increases in spring.
Here are our stats for the second quarter of 2022:
In the last quarter, 63,000 users visited our site for a total of 78,000 sessions. May and June were our best months, with almost 28,000 sessions.
Here is the breakdown by month:
April 2022
- 18,499 users
- 22,599 sessions
- 26,266 pageviews
May 2022
- 22,765 users
- 27,693 sessions
- 32,459 pageviews
June 2022
- 22,311 users
- 27,728 sessions
- 32,245 pageviews
Our income in Q2 2022
How do travel bloggers make money?
Many bloggers have multiple sources of income:
- Ads
- Affiliate income
- Sponsorships etc.
At the moment, we exclusively monetise our blog with affiliate income. You might have seen a small disclaimer at the top of this article that we include affiliate links. That means that every time someone clicks our link and makes a purchase, we get a small commission.
We only recommend hotels, tours or products that we would use ourselves. Therefore, this way of monetising our blog fits us perfectly. We do extensive research on where to stay and what to do, and if someone likes our recommendation and books it, we get a little bit of money out of it.
That said, we could probably earn more money if we had other ways of monetising our blog. Ads are the easiest way to generate a steady income. We do not want to go down that road at the moment, but it’s an option we keep in mind for the future.
If you’re wondering, ‘how much do travel bloggers make’, keep in mind that other bloggers have different sources of income. Therefore, a blog with similar traffic to ours might make much more or much less money than we do. These are the numbers for our blog.
Booking.com
We get our biggest chunk of affiliate income from booking.com. While we already had multiple bookings last year, most of them got cancelled.
This year in April, things finally took off. We received more bookings than ever, and our cancellation rate dropped massively. While before, more than half of the bookings got cancelled, now, most of our bookings go through.
May was a special month for us, as we had two very expensive bookings for a total commission of more than 500€. Besides that, April and June were almost equal in income.
Here is what we earned from booking.com:
- April: 223.72€
- May: 736.21€
- June: 220.15€
Total income from booking.com: 1,180.08€ (approximately $1,209.75)
Amazon
Amazon is a mixed bag for us. Sometimes, we get a lot of commission at once, and sometimes, we don’t get any income at all.
Last year at Christmas, we had a few expensive sales. Unfortunately, the buyers returned the items a month later, and suddenly, our income was negative.
The same happened to us again in the second quarter of this year. After making a decent amount of money in April and May, someone must have returned an expensive purchase in June. We did not drop into the negative, but it seriously affected our income.
Here is our income from Amazon:
- April: 173.11€
- May: 141.66€
- June: 6.79€
Total income from Amazon: 321.56€ (approximately $329.64)
Get Your Guide
While we do not earn much money from Get Your Guide, it also contributes to our income. April wasn’t great, but activity picked up in May and June.
We get a decent amount of bookings, but most are for very affordable tours, so we only get a small commission. Here is what we earned from Get Your Guide:
- April: 5.25€
- May: 28.88€
- June: 32.30€
Total income from Get Your Guide: 66.43€ (approximately $68.10)
Travelpayouts
When you join an affiliate program, one of the main points to consider is the minimum payout threshold.
This threshold varies for each program, but it might be around 50€ or even 100€. That means that if you only expect to earn a few euros (or dollars) from a program per month, it’s going to take you a long time before any of that money reaches your bank account.
That’s why we joined Travelpayouts. On this platform, we can participate in multiple affiliate programs without having to worry about payment thresholds. Everything accumulates in our Travelpayouts account.
Plus, it’s very convenient to use different affiliate programs without having to sign up for every single one of them.
On Travelpayouts, we primarily use Viator and Rentalcars.com. We also have a few links to Busbud, Omio and Flixbus (which I honestly believe is one of the cheapest ways to get around Germany); however, we haven’t had any income from these programs yet.
The reporting on Travelpayouts makes it challenging to establish how much we earned each month, as we still have a few pending bookings. The amount we mention now might still go up if some of the pending bookings get confirmed.
Here is our income from Travelpayouts:
- April: $14.85
- May: $4.40
- June: $0.00
Total income from Travelpayouts: $19.25 (approximately 18.78€)
Directferries
The last affiliate program that we need to mention is Directferries. They’re a great company if you want to research ferry operators and book your tickets online.
We don’t consistently have an income from them, and in the second quarter of 2022, we only had some bookings in June. So here is our income:
- April: 0.00€
- May: 0.00€
- June: 30.98€
Total income from Directferries: 30.98€ (approximately $31.76)
Total income in Q2 2022
So how much did we earn in total in the second quarter of 2022?
Here is our breakdown by month:
- April: 416.93€
- May: 911.15€
- June: 290.22€
Our expenses in Q2 2022
Every month, we have expenses. We need to pay for the website hosting, but we also use a few services that we pay for every month.
Here are our expenses for the second quarter of 2022:
Hosting & Domain: 36.29€
We host with Siteground, and so far, we are pretty happy with their service. They aren’t the cheapest provider out there, but they have good customer service when we have problems, and our website works quite well.
Keysearch: 25.36€
Keysearch helps us discover keywords that we can easily rank for. I always have ideas for hundreds of articles. With Keysearch, I can figure out which ones are worth writing. Some would never show up in Google, so we like to focus on the ones that have a chance of making it to the first page of the search results.
Tailwind: 39.86€
Tailwind is software that helps to schedule Pinterest pins. To be honest, we haven’t used it much over the past months. Daniel, who has made all of our pins, has been travelling through Africa for a few months now (you should read his interview with Edison from Uganda if you want to get an idea of what he’s up to). Hopefully, we can get back into it when he returns.
Grammarly: 30.09€
I love Grammarly! If you haven’t heard of them yet, Grammarly is a program for checking spelling and grammar. I use it all the time when writing blog posts. The premium version also checks for style and conciseness, which helps me get my point across much better.
Total expenses for Q2 2022: 131.61€ ($133.72)
Our revenue in Q2 2022
I can’t believe how much we earned this second quarter of 2022. Up until now, we found it challenging to reach 100€ a month.
Now, it seems like our blog is properly taking off. Plus, people get back into travel which is wonderful.
If you deduct our expenses from our income, you can see that we had a revenue of 1,486.22€ ($1510.07) in the past three months. That’s an average of almost 500€ a month!
What’s coming next?
So what are our plans for the next quarter?
We want to try growing our blog even more by focusing both on traffic and income.
Our goal is to reach 50,000 sessions a month so we can join an ad network called Mediavine. They are well-known amongst bloggers for their excellent rates, and they will help us monetise our blog even further.
We also want to focus on income. Itineraries usually help us generate affiliate income, and they’re fun to write, which is a win-win. You’ll see more of those on our blog soon.
First, though, we’re going to travel. Mid-July, Daniel and I are flying to Pakistan together for a two-week trip. I will need to return home afterwards, but Daniel will continue travelling through India and Sri Lanka.
If you found this income report helpful or have any questions, please leave a comment below. We will be posting more income reports, and if you’re a travel blogger yourself, maybe you’ll feel inspired by them.
In the meantime, check out some inspiration for your next trip:
- Is it time for a beach holiday? These are the best beaches in Central America you need to visit!
- Medieval old towns and a fairy tale castle wait for you on this Germany road trip
- Check out the best travel lenses for the Sony A7 III, so you can take perfect pictures on your next trip
Until your next adventure!
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