Travel Bloggers Explain How to Make Money Online: Affiliate Links Ads

• After graduating from university, Cazzy Magennis and Bradley Williams started traveling the world.
• They did remote copywriting until their travel blog started earning enough to fund their lifestyle.
• Covid hurt their business, but they now earn up to $15,000 a month from affiliate links and ads. 

After graduating from Exeter University in England, Cazzy Magennis and Bradley Williams pooled their savings and set off on a four-month backpacking trip to South America in 2016.

“We each had about $5,000 pounds and we blew the whole lot,” Williams, who is from Kent, England, told Insider. He and Magennis, who is from Belfast, Ireland, met in their second year at university. 

Their plan was to return to England after traveling and land traditional 9-to-5 jobs. In early 2017, the couple rented a flat and started working: Williams took a job as a sales rep for a company in London and Magennis did remote freelance copywriting. But after getting settled in, they missed the nomadic lifestyle.

“We really hated being in one place,” said Williams. So they decided to start traveling again and do freelance copywriting remotely. Williams quit his sales job and they headed to Southeast Asia, where they both did copywriting for a couple hours a day to fund their lifestyle. 

They lived in countries like Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, where they could get by on $25 to $30 a day, they said. “We worked for what we needed,” Magennis added. “What we did work-wise the next day was dictated by how much money we needed — and we didn’t actually need to earn loads to survive.”

Remote copywriting offered flexibility — they could set their own hours and work from wherever — but they didn’t get to choose what they wrote about. 

“I wrote about shower doors one day,” recalled Williams. “It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t fun. It wasn’t what we wanted to do.”

In their spare time, the couple posted travel tips and guides to their website “Dream Big Travel Far,” which they started at the beginning of their South America trip in 2016 as a way to inspire diabetics and people with chronic illnesses to travel. Magennis has type 1 diabetes and wanted to show how she manages the chronic condition while traveling. 

The blog gradually gained traction, and they started earning some money from it through affiliate links and Google AdSense.

At the beginning of 2019, after nearly three years of consistently posting content, Magennis and Williams started making enough money from the site to sustain their relatively inexpensive lifestyle on the road. Their monthly expenses fluctuate depending on where they are in the world, but they say that they’ve lived on as little as $1,000 a month in various countries. 

The pair were at a bar in India when they decided to quit copywriting, said Magennis: “We thought, if we keep copyrighting, that’s taking time and energy away from what we could be pushing into ‘Dream Big Travel Far.’ The website was making a small amount of money, but we were in India and didn’t need a lot to live. So we cheersed each other and, the next day, we stopped copywriting and went all-in.”

That was in January 2019. They earned $2,500 from their site that month and, by mid-2019, they were earning about $5,500 per month, they said.

After nearly another year of consistent growth, the Covid-19 pandemic hit while they were in Malta. They ended their trip early and flew to Ireland to stay with Magennis’s parents at the start of the Covid lockdown. 

Their readership and revenue plummeted. 

“Traffic dropped significantly, by about 80%,” recalled Williams. “Because people weren’t traveling, they weren’t Googling things like, ‘what to do in Jaipur,’ or, ‘what to do in Sri Lanka.'” And the people that were reading their site weren’t booking anything, he added: “So, of the traffic that we were still getting, there was hardly any money coming from it. Ad revenue dropped by about 90%.”

In March 2020, they earned $1,600 from the site, they said. In April, it dropped below $1,000, and the lowest it got that year was $350. By the end of the year, they were making about $1,200 a month. 

Since they didn’t have many expenses — they weren’t paying for housing or travel — they decided to keep working on the site rather than job search. They were banking on the world eventually reopening and the travel industry recovering.

Plus, they barely had any overhead costs, said Magennis: “Running a travel site like this meant that our outgoings were limited. Beyond hosting and paying for some digital tools, we were fine, and we could just stop paying for the ones we didn’t need. But we personally made hardly anything. It was enough to cover food and, fortunately, we didn’t need to pay any rent.”

They used the time at home to work on their backlog of content, update old posts, and revamp images on the site. They also spent time thinking about how to better diversify their income in case they ever have to deal with another major setback like Covid.

It took about 15 months before they returned to pre-Covid revenue numbers. In July 2021, when countries started reopening and people started traveling more, they started earning close to $6,000 a month again, they said.

Today, Magennis, 29, and Williams, 28, make up to $15,000 a month from “Dream Big Travel Far,” according to documents viewed by Insider. They’re currently driving across the world in a converted camper van and estimate that they work between 20 and 30 hours a week.  

“A lot of people still assume that blogging makes pocket change. I think I can make more money online than I ever could from a job that I could get with my degree,” said Magennis, who graduated with a degree in politics and human rights. Williams graduated with a degree in economics. 

There are two main ways the couple earn money from their site: affiliate links and ads.

Ads make up about one-third of their income, they said. The majority of the other two-thirds comes from affiliate links, and a small portion of their revenue comes from brand partnerships.

Here’s exactly how they make money from both categories.

1. Ad revenue

In the early days of blogging, Magennis and Williams used Google Adsense, a free service that matches ads to your site based on your content and visitors.

They didn’t start earning significant money from ads though until the end of 2019, when they got accepted onto an ad network called Mediavine. 

There are a few major ad networks out there, “but it’s widely regarded that Mediavine is the best,” said Williams. The way it works is, companies buy their ads through Mediavine, which then uses an algorithm to decide where specific ads are placed. “It’s all optimized to increase performance for the people buying the ad space, which in turn means that we as a publisher earn more money.”

In 2019, when they got accepted, Mediavine required 30,000 sessions per month (now, it’s 50,000). “Sessions” are a metric that measures how many times users are visiting your site.

Joining this particular ad network was “a big landmark for us,” said Williams. “With Mediavine you typically earn $20 to $30 for every 1,000 people that view your site. So, if we had 30,000 pageviews, we’d be making $600 to $900 just through ads.” With Google AdSense, they were making significantly less: about $100 a month, “so it was a big jump.”

Today, their pageviews exceed 300,000 a month, meaning they can make thousands of dollars per month just from Mediavine. 

2. Affiliate links

Over the last couple of years, Magennis and Williams have been focusing on boosting their affiliate income. 

“Ad earnings are good, but you do need to get thousands of people more to see any sort of growth in money, whereas affiliate earnings can be a lot higher with just 10, 50, or 100 extra pageviews,” explained Williams.

Affiliate linking is when you put tracked links to various products on your website; then, if a reader purchases the product after clicking your link, you earn a commission. 

The first affiliate link they used was for a cruise they enjoyed and were recommending readers to check out. Within a few weeks of posting about it, “people were reading it and booking the same cruise,” said Williams. “The commissions on that were like $15 to $20 a go. It was really exciting because, back then, we’d have to do copywriting for an hour to make that money. People were booking this cruise every day and we would get that money for no work. That was a big moment because we could see passive income coming in as a result of writing very targeted content.”

Anyone can apply for generic affiliate programs, he explained: “There are the big ones, like Amazon, Booking.com, and GetYourGuide, that you can apply for. You provide your website and some stats that they’ll review before accepting you.” The big affiliate programs typically have fixed commission rates that you can find online, and they vary depending on the product. 

Magennis and Williams have links for products like camera gear, luggage, and portable chargers. Their strategy is to write product reviews or affiliate-heavy round-up guides and include affiliate links in the posts, rather than ads.

You can also reach out to specific brands or smaller companies that you like and ask if they have an affiliate program. That’s what Magennis and Williams did with a tuk tuk rental company they like in Sri Lanka. 

“They don’t have a big affiliate program. It’s just a direct relationship that we have established,” Williams explained. “The good thing about those smaller relationships is that you have the ability to negotiate the commission percentage. The bigger platforms have tiered commission standards, but if you’re working directly with a company, it gives you the chance to renegotiate your rate if you’re bringing in sales and proving that you’re doing well.” 

While you might be earning 4% with a big program like Amazon, you could earn 15-20% with a company you have a direct relationship with, he said.

A key to maximizing affiliate earnings is understanding intent, said Williams. Say someone is searching online for the “best travel drones.” They’re in what’s called a “buying position,” he explained, since they likely want to purchase a drone. Whereas, if someone is searching for “drone photography tips,” chances are they already have a drone and aren’t looking to buy one. In this example, he would include affiliate links in their post about the best drones, but not in their post about drone tips. 

“We probably wouldn’t even have any ads on the ‘best travel drones’ post because it’s simply not worth it — we’re going to earn a lot more from affiliates,” he said. “For the post about tips, though, we would enable ads because we’re probably not going to make any money from the affiliate links.”

Working with brands is another way to make money online. This is when a brand will pay content creators to review their product or create a guide that recommends their product. 

“It has to be a product you really believe in,” said Magennis. “If you just start putting loads of random stuff on your website, then you run the risk of losing authenticity.”

They don’t do a lot of brand deals, but it creates more income diversification, which is key. 

“A lot of bloggers are very ad dependent, and probably too ad dependent,” said Williams. “A great benefit of affiliate commissions is that you can have so many different affiliate programs, so if one falls apart then you have something else to fall back on.”

Nothing is guaranteed, he emphasized: “Airbnb used to have an affiliate platform but pulled it last year. At the start of Covid, Amazon completely slashed the commissions they were giving publishers.”

If you want to make money online, you have to be willing to constantly learn and adapt. 

“Everything we’ve done is self-taught,” said Magennis. “You don’t have to have a background in building websites. If you want to learn, everything you need to know is available online.”

You also need patience, she added: “You’re not going to make big money for a couple of years, which is why we did the copywriting at first. A lot of people will start a blog but give up. Especially at the start, it’s scary and you’re wondering if you’re putting in all this working for nothing. The people that do make the money are the ones who hold on.”

As for where their motivation to keep going even during the low points comes from, Williams likes to think back to the couple of months he worked in sales in 2017.

“Having to commute to London every day, sit in an office, and earn money for someone else was such a painful experience for me,” he said. “I knew that if we didn’t make the blog work, I’d have to go back to that. So I don’t care if the website goes down or if we lose half our traffic or if money dries up from a certain avenue; I’ll find a way to problem solve and make it work because I don’t want the alternative.”