When I’m out there on the travel trail and I tell someone I’m a blogger, 9 times out of 10 the first question they ask me is how I make money. It comes up so often that I basically have my prepared responses ready to go!
Since this topic is clearly of interest to many, I thought I’d share more about the behind-the-scenes workings of Indie Traveller.
Most people guess that travel blogging hinges on sponsorship, but for me at least that’s almost never been an income source. Indie Traveller makes money in a couple of other ways, but the biggest is affiliate links. These links will give a commission to a creator if you book something through them (for instance, a hotel or tour booking).
They’re my favorite way of monetizing the site; I get to make valuable recommendations, you benefit from my travel advice, and any commissions I receive will help fund the content that I make.
By far the most important tool I use for this is Travelpayouts, a platform that makes it easy to integrate affiliate links. Travelpayouts recently did a Q&A with me for one of their case studies, and the following is a lightly edited version of my answers.
What follows is a little ‘peek inside the kitchen’ on how this blog can be my passion as well as my business. The biggest secret? It’s to keep the advice authentic and to genuinely help you with your travel decisions. Only with that foundation can the monetization truly work.
Sign up with Travelpayouts here and you can boost your revenues immediately. The setup is quick and their automated tools can do all the integration for you.
Travelpayouts has also just updated its referral program, so by signing up via my link, you can earn up to an extra $100.
Get started with Travelpayouts
Q: You set off on what was meant to be a two-month trip to Thailand and ended up travelling for two years. Was starting a blog part of the plan, or did it happen naturally along the way? And when did it shift from a personal travel diary into an actual business?
In the beginning I was just a fool with a WordPress.org blog (the basic version that you can’t actually monetize!). I simply used it to post photos and quick stories to my family and friends.
I ended up on a spontaneous world trip after my previous career hit some serious setbacks. I needed a personal reset and blogging was initially just a way for me to share my journey.
About 9 months in I did begin to worry about what could be next. I still had no idea what I’d actually do after this career break. It’s at this point I decided to rebuild my blog as a commercial site. If nothing else, I hoped a little blog income could help me travel longer.
I did have the benefit of having run another site in the past (not travel but video game related), so I already knew a bit about online publishing and some of the monetization methods available. I just didn’t know if I could do it with a travel site. I followed an online course (one that no longer exists – this was way back in 2012) which hammered home the idea you need to be a reader-first. Not just making it about myself was the perfect advice for a newbie travel blogger.
Looking back, my earliest articles weren’t always my best work. However, one post went viral on Reddit – my top cheap countries to travel list that is still one of my most-viewed articles. Striking a chord on Reddit gave me a brief surge of traffic and a belief I should stick with it.
14 years later and I’m still doing this, still a full-timer, and I’m unbelievably grateful that I can call this my job.
Q: You’ve built your own playbook for running a successful travel blog — things like basing all content on personal experience, regularly updating your existing posts, and staying away from keyword chasing or AI-generated content. What are your full personal dos and don’ts? What else do you swear by that helps you grow traffic and revenue without losing your voice?
I’m proud of the editorial course I’ve charted, especially over the last couple of years in which we’ve really zeroed in on authenticity. (You can read more about our editorial principles here.)
A common blogging technique is to use keyword research tools meant to show you the search terms people most often enter into Google, which you can then match content against. However, this technique became a definite “don’t” for me. These algorithm-guessing tools can lead you astray: you end up writing from a generated search-term list instead of your own knowledge, and anyway you’re competing with every other blogger chasing the same suggestions.
Of course, I try to hit topics I think many people are interested in, but I lead with my own instincts on what travellers need to know about a particular destination.
One challenge I had for a while was finding writers who weren’t creating strictly ‘SEO content’. I’ve received drafts that were generic keyword-stuffed listicles and the author would be like “oh, I thought that’s what everyone wanted?”. Then I’d have to un-train them on those content creation habits and they turn out to be really gifted and authentic writers.
(By the way, Indie Traveller is still hiring, so if you’re a writer and this approach resonates with you, check out our Write for Us page.)
Overall I’ve learned that you can’t just be purely commercial and take only shortcuts. You have a responsibility to the reader first of all. Layering in the commercial elements becomes so much easier when you’ve already earned the reader’s trust.
Q: Have you ever published a piece you didn’t expect much from, that ended up becoming a major traffic or bookings driver? What do you think made it work?
Yes, this happens all the time! I’ve come to accept that within a collection of posts there’ll always be unexpected winners or losers.
A recent example is my travel guide to the town of Essaouira in Morocco, which I wrote after I’d already done a bunch of really detailed Morocco itinerary posts. It was just a bonus thing I quickly wrote in one sitting, but now it’s actually my number one post for Morocco (both in terms of views and monetization).
I think because I wasn’t trying to write the “ultimate”, longest, beefiest take ever on Essaouira, it actually ended up being a really fun and approachable guide. Sometimes you can overthink stuff when the first draft actually works best.
Q: You now run three sites: Indie Traveller as your flagship and two niche geo-sites covering the Azores and Madeira. Why did you decide to build separate sites rather than just expand Indie Traveller? What does the niche site model give you that a single broad travel blog doesn’t?
I started my niche sites in 2023-2024 when I really felt a need to shake things up. I’d been doing Indie Traveller for over a decade and was worried I might be stuck in some “old ways”. A few bloggers had talked about how micro-niche sites worked well for them, so I wanted to give this a try.
I’m glad I did because the sites play to different strengths and complement each other very nicely.
I believe the niche model works especially well for islands because they’re, well, islands. Anyone researching these specific locations doesn’t want anything else. When every menu option is about that place, they don’t have to dig for related posts hidden deep inside a global destinations menu structure. When you are a “one stop shop”, the flow of internal clickthroughs can be very strong.
It’s also easier to be an expert on a smaller topic. I live in Portugal so if anything needs updating, I can just go there tomorrow and do the update. This helps so much with authority.
A final benefit is branding. Indie Traveller is all about adventure travel and backpacking, which might not totally resonate with someone planning a family resort stay in Madeira. Having some separation allows me to talk to different audiences.
But while the niche sites have been very successful, Indie Traveller will always be my main effort. Since it’s much broader it has more scale, diversification, and less seasonality (meaning more consistent income). I also love that readers keep coming back to Indie Traveller to research new trips. This gives me much more of a relationship with my audience, which rarely happens on a single-destination site, where most readers show up for one trip and never come back.
So in the end, broad and narrow both have different pros and cons.
Q: When did you first try affiliate marketing, and how long before you felt it was truly working? What changed in your approach once you started seeing real results?
Well, I should disclose here that I’m old. I’ve been running websites in some form or another since 1996 when I was a teenager creating video game fan sites. I got my first affiliate income from placing some Amazon links for people to buy video games on CD-ROM discs.
So I’ve been aware of affiliate marketing basically forever, but applying it to travel was still quite a learning process.
I mean, what’s the first thing many global travellers need? Flights of course! So then you do a bunch of flight affiliate links only to realize this might well be the most challenging of all to make money with (unless your whole site is built around them) due to low commissions and a very long booking window.
A turning point was when I understood that I shouldn’t just say what you can book or buy, but really why I specifically recommend it. The clearer and more specific I got, the more my conversions went up.
It’s like the difference between a waiter just handing you a menu, versus a waiter telling you how amazing the trout is today and which wine it pairs well with exactly. Your goal is to help people make decisions — authentically and based on your knowledge and experience.
Q: When did you start working with Travelpayouts, and what do you like most about it?
I joined Travelpayouts in 2025 and in hindsight I should have done it so much sooner!
Firstly because your analytics dashboard and monetization tools are fantastic, especially seeing page-level data so easily. It’s so much better than the generic affiliate platforms I used in the past. Your platform enables me to see everything at a glance, gain very useful insights, and increase my revenue overall. I didn’t realize what a game-changer this would be. It’s quickly become central to my entire business.
I also hugely appreciate how working with Travelpayouts feels like a true partnership. I’m able to share feedback based on my experiences and your team has offered amazing suggestions that unlocked a lot of additional income.
Q: Walk us through all the ways you monetize your sites. Which brings in the most revenue – and how has that balance shifted over the years?
I have essentially three monetization sources: direct product sales (mainly my book Travel the World Without Worries), affiliate links, and display ads.
Ads were once a cornerstone but its share of revenue has been declining in recent years. Display ads still play a supporting role, in particular for certain listicles or general guides that are otherwise hard to monetize.
Affiliate now represents 80%+ of my revenue. The mix of programs has shifted over the years, so I believe it’s wise to always be diversified and to work with a broad variety of programs. This is something that Travelpayouts helps with a lot as you get access to a variety of programs without needing to do any extra setup.
Q: Do your niche geo-sites follow the same monetization approach as Indie Traveller, or is the strategy different? What’s unique about monetizing a tightly focused destination site versus a broad travel blog?
I find that what works brilliantly on one site might not work so well on another. For instance, many Indie Traveller readers are planning ambitious multi-country adventure trips and so they’ll be more naturally interested in travel insurance. But this is not really top of mind for someone who’s just going to chill in a pool in Madeira. So everything depends on the specific audience and the destination.
A niche destination site can offer interesting opportunities for finding “niches within a niche”. Maybe some people going to the Azores just want to go glamping, which is something super specific that I can talk about. Such smaller topics I probably wouldn’t consider for a global travel blog, but within the topic cluster of a destination site they’ll be well-supported and can work quite well.
The best affiliate programs always depend on the situation, so I strongly recommend experimenting and studying what works. If you’re not sure where to start, you can use automatic tools like Travelpayouts’ Drive to insert recommendations and then see what people are booking and on which pages. You can then use this to inform your overall strategy.
The biggest lesson I think is to align whatever you’re promoting with the user intent. Just throwing the kitchen sink at every page is too spammy and just isn’t effective. But being targeted and thoughtful can do wonders for both your monetization potential and reader satisfaction. The two can really go hand in hand!
I hope you found it interesting to learn a little more about my travel blogging lessons. If you want to learn more about how Indie Traveller works, check out my post in which I go through our whole publishing process.
And if you’re a blogger, don’t forget to check out Travelpayouts, the platform just for travel bloggers where all your affiliate revenue streams combine into one single dashboard.