I just did a review of my world tour and an update on my trip (link at the end of the article). Many of you asked me how I financed my trip and “how I make money with my blog“. In this article, I will give you my financial report over the medium term (3 and a half years since I started blogging) of what I earned with “my” blog.
Financing your trip around the world with your blog
Before starting my blog
I started my blog in February 2012, that is 45 months ago, and to tell you the truth, at that time, I would never have imagined that 3 and a half years later, I would be earning more than 50,000 euros with my blog.
Let’s go back a bit, in May 2011, I returned from my first around the world trip with a student budget lasting 20 months where I traveled the USA, Asia, and Australia while working and traveling. In the end, I spent my savings, which was 6,000 euros.
This amount came from my savings when I was a student. To save this amount, I worked weekends over a cumulative period of 3 years during my studies. I had a student job (working in a supermarket), I worked during school holidays (building caretaker), and one of the most important points, I was already doing business on the Internet by reselling items (some of these items were virtual) on eBay.
Upon returning from my first world tour, I told myself I had to do a second world tour for my 30th birthday, but it was then that I asked myself:
How am I going to finance my second world tour?
After finding a job upon my return in 2012, I got used to my little daily life but I still had this idea of a world tour, so 6 months after my return, I decided to create this travel blog with the goal of financing my next world tour in 2015.
My idea was to develop my travel blog to have a sufficient number of visitors and attract sponsors during the year before leaving on the world tour.
@Caye Caulker in Belize
The beginning of the end
So I started at the bottom and I knew nothing about the blogging world. The first 6 months, I wrote more than 100 articles of about 500 words and to tell you the truth, I focused more on quantity than quality.
I was never a good writer nor a good blogger but I always had this entrepreneurial spirit that I developed from a young age.
This entrepreneurial spirit allowed me to develop other qualities such as curiosity, resourcefulness, the ability to seek information when starting from nothing, and many other things.
So I developed my blog for 6 months (count about 35 hours of work per week on it on average). Developing a blog requires writing skills, social media skills, marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), programming knowledge (very minimal), and other minor skills.
In the end, this saved me because I had other skills besides writing and one of them was going to bring me 95% of the income over 3 and a half years.
I started making money with my blog from the fifth month and my first thousand euros in the seventh month. I wrote sponsored articles for marketing agencies and brands and I was paid.
Example of articles: http://www.conseil-voyageur.fr/organiser-son-voyage/ (billed 350 euros)
http://www.conseil-voyageur.fr/berlin-mon-coup-de-coeur/ (billed 300 euros)
It was at that moment that I told myself that if I could make money with one site, why not make a second? And that’s what I did. Most people would have stopped at one site (blog) but my entrepreneurial spirit pushed me to make a second blog and reproduce the same pattern.
To be honest, I focused more on quantity than (writing) quality but my site had SEO. The success of the second site with advertisers and brands was quite quick. I quickly earned my first thousand euros with this second blog after the eleventh month of my adventure (that is, after the fifth month of this second site).
After one year, I was already earning a good amount of money. So I created a third, fourth, and fifth site/blog, etc.
To earn even more money, I had to diversify and so I thought about making sites on various themes because I saw that the travel domain was starting to saturate compared to the number of sites I had.
At the end of the second year, I had about twenty sites on various themes such as DIY and home, money and finance, automotive, and travel.
Creating sites to please advertisers took me a lot of time, so I hired virtual assistants to take care of writing and SEO, and other tasks. At one point, I had up to 10 virtual assistants to help me (hired on the site Odesk) develop my sites and I had a budget of about 200 euros per month on average during the second year (Thanks to low-cost French-speaking countries).
The third year was the year of decline. I no longer had virtual assistants and far fewer new contracts. The truth was that I was focusing on quantity rather than quality. Advertisers and brands were looking for quality rather than quantity. I had fewer and fewer partnerships.
It was at that moment that I started working less (15 hours versus 35h during the first two years). It was also at that moment that I was chaining trips and started my world tour at the end of my third year.
The skill that made me earn a lot of money is SEO (search engine optimization).
So I sold SEO services on the twenty or so sites I had. I won’t go into details because it’s too technical; if you want to learn more, there’s our friend Google (type what is SEO).
What you need to know: in SEO, it’s not your number of visitors that counts but metrics such as page rank, domain authority, etc. You just need to have the right metrics to sell SEO services.
PS: I also remind you that during these 3 years, I had my engineering job in parallel and a life.
Since the 4th year, I only earn now 400-500 euros/month but I have saved a lot of money for my world tour with my 2 jobs.
@Cruise on the second largest coral reef in the world
The numbers of my entrepreneurial activity
Numbers and dates:
The numbers are approximate.
Blog start: February 2012
Self-employed since August 2012
Year 2012: 2 blogs, earnings of 9,500 euros. (About 35 hours of work per week in addition to my engineering job).
Year 2013: about twenty “blogs”, earnings of 25,500 euros (about 35 hours of work in addition to my engineering job).
Year 2014: 20 blogs or sites, earnings of 13,500 euros (about 20 hours of work in addition to my engineering job).
I quit my job in July 2014 and have been on a world tour since September 2014.
Until September 2015: earnings of about 4,500 euros (the first 9 months, I hardly worked on my sites, about 10 hours per week on average over the year).
I made a sacrifice: my professional career.
@The beach of my hostel in Belize
Quick calculation:
If we add up all the hours, it amounts to more than approximately 5,160 hours.
To date, I have earned more than 50,000 euros with my blogs, that is 53K euros or 1,177 euros/month; if we subtract charges and various expenses, it comes to 850 euros per month on average over 45 months.
That is 10.2 euros on average per hour over 5,160 hours of work, from which charges and various expenses must be deducted.
If we do not count the last year where I made 500 euros on average per month, I am roughly at the same hourly rate of 10.12 euros.
These numbers should be taken with caution because since I started blogging in February 2012, I accumulated 20 months of travel in 3 and a half years, that is almost half (20/45 months).
What you need to know is that if I had worked much more, I would not have earned much more money because I did the bare minimum and developed new sites.
On the other hand, if I had worked less, it is certain that I would have earned much less.
In these working hours, there are many hours of training, research, and skill development. The effective hourly work rate then rises to an average of 12 euros per hour.
I specify that currently, although I try to develop my blog, I earn almost nothing with this blog but I still make money with my other sites, but it is my main blog that brings me clients.
@Bacalar in Mexico
Blogging data:
Number of Facebook fans: 1100 Fans, here is my conseil-voyageur Facebook page
Number of Twitter followers: 450 followers, the crabetan Twitter link
Number of Instagram followers: 180 followers, the crabetan Instagram
Average number of visitors over 3 and a half years: 8,000 visitors/month.
If I had to quantify what my travel blog brought me, I would say less than 20% of total income but it is rather thanks to my blog that I earned so much money through the contacts I made.
I am not at all a top blogger but marketing and SEO skills tipped the balance.
@Bacalar in Mexico
What to remember from this article to make money on the internet.
Beyond the numbers, here are some points to remember:
- You are not going to get rich with a blog or only 0.01% will be, I see a bigger potential in video on all themes as long as you stand out.
- My activity was viable for 2 years, it was short/medium term but it allowed me to finance my world tour and many trips (20 months out of 45 months).
- You have to work hard and it’s like having another job.
- I was there at the right time, if I had arrived a year later, I would never have made these numbers.
- I showed initiative to succeed. If you travel, you have to do the same.
- I could have worked like a madman (which I did) and have no financial return.
- I did not wait to leave on a world tour for this to happen.
- Besides the financial return, I learned a lot and gained skills in areas I had no knowledge of at the start. Travel accelerates experience and life.
- If I can do it, you can do it. You just have to know what advertisers are looking for, how it works, know supply and demand, etc.
- There are currently better ways to make money.
- I had experience before starting, I have been an entrepreneur for more than 10 years with internet businesses (eBay among others) but I had never earned so much money.
- I did not say only my successes but I also had failures, but these failures gave me the necessary experience for this success. The wheel turns as they say!!!
- The skills you gain by blogging can earn you more than your blog itself. The blog itself only brings potential clients. Some are paid for their blogging talent (writing) but that was not my case.
If you want to receive much more information, I advise you to subscribe to my newsletter:
@Tulum in Mexico
And you? How did you finance your world tour? More interesting articles: My review of my first year of world tour Put yourself in the shoes of a long-term traveler Pay less than 1300 euros for a plane ticket for a minimum of 10 destinations on 4 different continents. Check the page: world tour to find information for your world tour.
