Travel Blog Income Report Q3 2022 – Our Travel Blogging Income from Q3

It’s time for our next income report!

We already wanted to publish our travel blog income a while ago, but a trip to Tunisia kept us busy. Afterwards, we focused on some Christmas content, which we think will be very helpful for the upcoming Christmas market season.

Now, we’re finally releasing the next income report. We’re going to cover the third quarter of 2023, so we’re going to look at the months of July, August and September.

Keep reading if you want to find out our travel blogging salary for those three months, what worked for us and what didn’t, and what plans we have for the following months.

Travel Blog Income Report Q3 2022

Why an income report?

This is now our second income report.

Daniel and I both have full-time jobs and work on our travel blog as a side project. Writing about our income as travel bloggers is a great way of holding ourselves accountable for our work. Plus, every time I write one of those blog posts, I feel much more motivated to create blog posts and figure out other ways of earning money.

But it’s not just about our own motivation. We also want to be transparent with you about how we make money from the blog and how much we get.

And maybe you’re a travel blogger who has just started out? I always found it very motivating to read these kinds of blog posts and hear from other bloggers who managed to make money with a travel blog. We want to show you that it’s possible and motivate you to keep going.

Our traffic in Q3 2022

On our blog, our traffic is directly related to our income.

We make our income exclusively from affiliate sales, so if we have more visitors, the chances increase that they click on affiliate links and book a hotel or tour.

After growing in Q2, our traffic stayed mostly stable in Q3. We had hoped for more growth, as July and August are the busiest months for tourism in Europe. Towards the end of the quarter, in September, it started declining. Then again, that’s the end of the high season for Europe, so we expected that.

Here is our travel blog traffic for Q3 2022:

In total, we had 64,700 users on our blog in those three months. That’s almost 2,000 users more than in the previous three months, but as I already mentioned, not the increase we had been hoping for.

Those users came to our blog in 79,000 sessions. Our best month was July, with more than 22,000 users and almost 28,000 sessions.

Here is a breakdown of our traffic by month:

Our income in Q3 2022

Take a look at our income report from Q2 2022 if you want to see a more detailed breakdown of how most travel bloggers make money.

To sum it up, we currently only earn income from affiliate links. That means we get a small commission if someone clicks on one of our links to book a hotel or tour.

We only recommend things we’ve either used ourselves or that we would also book on one of our trips. Therefore, this form of monetising the blog fits perfectly for us. We do extensive research, so we’re always happy to give recommendations to other travellers.

Another common source of income is ads. At the moment, we keep our blog ad-free, but we might change that in the future if we get more traffic and are able to join a good ad network.

Here is a breakdown of how we earned money from our affiliates:

Booking.com

Our most profitable affiliate program is booking.com. July and August were great months for us, and we had a steady source of income.

In September, our income decreased. Some of the bookings were cancelled, and it seems as if not many tourists travelled to the places that we cover on our blog. Or maybe that’s also because summer was over? In any case, we could already see the end of high season.

Here is what we earned from booking.com:

• July: 432.66€
• August: 495.74€
• September: 307.21€

Total income from booking.com: 1,235.61€

At the time of writing this, one euro is pretty much equivalent to one dollar, so the income in USD is approximately the same.

Amazon

Amazon is a bit difficult. We had months with great income, but we also had times when we barely made any money.

The worst is when someone buys an expensive item through one of our affiliate links and then returns it a month later. That way, we can even be in the negatives for a while. And yes, we know that it’s not a real negative (they pay out a sum of money to us and then subtract it from our earnings a month or two later when the item is returned), but it’s very depressing to see on the payslips.

Despite those issues, Amazon is still our second biggest source of income.

Here is what we earned from Amazon:

• July: 60.53€
• August: 152.60€
• September: 42.18€

Total income from Amazon: 255.31€

Get Your Guide

In our travel blog earnings from Q2, Get Your Guide didn’t play a significant role.

This quarter, sales picked up. We could really see that people were eager to go out and book tours. And we’re happy to recommend Get Your Guide because we’ve booked a few fantastic tours through them ourselves.

Here is what we earned from Get Your Guide:

• July: 69.16€
• August: 11.13€
• September: 64.90€

Total income from Get Your Guide: 145.19€

Travelpayouts

Travelpayouts is a platform that combines multiple affiliate programs. It’s a very convenient way to use programs to which we only have a few links on our website.

All of the affiliate programs that we’re part of have a minimum payment threshold. That means we need to earn a minimum amount of money, like 50€ or 100€, before they transfer to our bank account.

Since we have joined multiple programs through Travelpayouts, reaching the minimum threshold is much easier. It’s also a very convenient way to link to different websites and products without having to sign up for a ton of programs.

At the moment, we mostly use Rentalcars.com and Viator, but we also sometimes get a booking through Omio.

Here is what we earned from Travelpayouts:

• July: $28.49
• August: $130.23
• September: $5.24

Total income from Travelpayouts: $163.96

Directferries

The last affiliate program in our list is Directferries. We don’t make as much money from them as from other programs, so this is a great example of a program I would usually try to join through a platform like Travelpayouts.

Unfortunately, for Directferries, that’s not an option.

Here is what we earned from Directferries:

• July: 24.44€
• August: 0€
• September: 0€

Total income from Directferries: 24.22€

Total income in Q3 2022

So how much did we earn in Q3 2022?

Our travel blogging income was slightly higher than in Q2 when we earned around 1,615€.

Here is what we got by month:

• July: 615.28€
• August: 789.70€
• September: 419.53€

Our expenses in Q3 2022

Running a blog isn’t free, so you need to consider the expenses whenever you wonder how much travel bloggers make.

We pay for website hosting, but we also use a few services that make our lives much easier. Here are our expenses for Q3:

Hosting & Domain: 36,69€

Good website hosting is essential to ensure that our website is always reachable. We use Siteground, with whom we’ve had pretty good experiences so far. If we switched to a cheaper provider, we could probably save a bit of money here, but right now, we don’t think it’s worth it.

Keysearch: 28.37€

When deciding which blog posts to write about, we use the help of a tool called Keysearch. There, we can look into the different keywords and find out which ones have high volumes and which ones we can actually rank for. Writing an article that only gets to page five in Google just isn’t worth it for us (or for any travel blogger), so SEO and keyword research is extremely important.

Tailwind: 43.62€

Tailwind is a program to schedule pins on Pinterest. We haven’t used it much over the past months, so it’s probably not really worth paying for it. On the other hand, we have an old plan which offers plenty of advantages compared to the newer plans, which is why we’re keeping it for the moment.

Grammarly: 33.81€

Grammarly is the tool we use the most often in our day-to-day work. It’s a spellchecker that can also check grammar and make style suggestions. Before we publish an article, we always review it with the help of Grammarly.

Total expenses for Q3 2022: 142.49€

Our revenue in Q3 2022

Looking at our income and our expenses, Q3 was the best quarter for our month so far. It’s exciting to watch our blog grow, even though we know that some came from the seasonal increase in tourism.

If you deduct our expenses from our income, you’ll see that we earned 1682,02€ in Q3 2022. That’s absolutely amazing and more than 500€ per month! It’s not a great increase from Q2, but it’s nice that our earnings are stable for the moment.

What’s coming next?

Autumn and winter are coming. The next months are going to be slow for our blog, but we’re going to use the time to prepare for next summer.

Plus, we’re going to visit some Christmas markets this year, and we’re already excited to write about them. Keep your eyes on our blog to find out where we’re going! We promise to take some amazing pictures at one of the most scenic German Christmas markets, and we’re also going to give you lots of practical advice if you want to visit yourself.

If you found this income report helpful or have any questions, please leave us a comment below. As I said, income reports like this one motivated me to keep going when we had just started monetising our blog. We want to pay it back and inspire you.

While you’re here, check out our income report from Q2 2022. Or get some inspiration for your next trip:

• See the beautiful towns and beaches you can discover on a Mallorca road trip
• Do you like beaches? Then check out these ones in Central America and Mexico
• Athens is the perfect destination if you love bustling cities and history. Find out how to spend the perfect day.

Until your next adventure!

Like it? Pin it!