I’m helping them with whatever they need help with, however I think I’ll be creating a few standard packages to offer as well. With my first client, I did a site review, and we followed that up with 2-3 very detailed email exchanges with Q&A. She also wanted to bump up her earnings per month, which is why I began introducing her to my best advertisers.

“Have you scrapped Adsense altogether?”

No, I am using it on MedellinLiving.com and I still earn money from it via Lonely Planet’s Blogsherpa program, however it’s much less than if I were to add it back on GoBackpacking.com, which is actually something I’ve been thinking about recently.

“Do you know of anyone else who gives monthly updates?”

Lea Woodward from http://locationindependent.com has begun to share her earnings via their email newsletter.

It’s great to have a product of your own to sell to bump you up a few hundred a month and also diversify a bit. I’m pretty intrigued about the consulting work you’re doing. What exactly are you helping people with? A one-on-one version of TBS? I also think the advertiser referral thing is a great idea. I wonder sometimes about whether I should ask for a fee (from the advertiser) for referring them to people. Have you scrapped Adsense altogether?

I’m hoping to be at the steady $3000 per month mark by the end of the year which might be a challenge considering how long I’ve been hovering at $1500 without moving. But I have a whole heap of sites already built to promote and a few new ways of doing it up my sleeve. Most importantly, I have boatloads of time since I’m settled in one place for a few months. That’s the key for me.

I imagine you’ll do well living in Medellin and working on that site at the same time. It’s great to see how well it’s taken off in a relatively short amount of time.

It’s great to read your reports, I’ll be following along… I find seeing you do well motivates me to keep at it too. Do you know of anyone else who gives monthly updates?

well done. You must be pleased.

I have a new travel site and I am just starting to monetise. Hope I can achieve your level of success.

regards

Dave

Just as an example, I’d have to visit each individual site below to check stats, if I didn’t want to rely on the Ninja plugin:

World Nomads
Woo Themes
Commission Junction
e-junkie

I’m even using it to track my own banners/links from Go Backpacking to the sales page for Travel Blog Success. I can then see whether people are clicking the link in my RSS footer (they are), or the leaderboard banner I’ve got up (they are there as well).

Thanks for stopping by Blog to Travel.

Back in mid-2007, I learned how to manually create the redirections as you mentioned, however it was unwieldy. In late 2009, after deciding to treat my blogs like a business, I was willing to spend the money for a powerful plugin to automatically create the redirections, and not only that, but track clicks on those links as well.

The plugin is called MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate: http://bit.ly/9SPRZq

At $97, it’s not cheap, but I’ve found it to be a worthwhile investment. I’m using it on 3 different blogs, and the ability to easily track clicks on affiliate links from within WordPress makes my life a lot easier. I can quickly see which affiliate links are doing well, and which aren’t. Plus, there’s a cool feature whereby I can associate any keyword with an affiliate link, and it will turn that word throughout my blog into the affiliate link.

So I can do mass updates to dozens of posts in minutes. I haven’t even begun to take full advantage of it.

Mind if I ask you a quick question publicly? Are you using a WP plug-in to create your friendly redirection URLs, or are you manually creating them (.htaccess file, etc).

Example: http://www.gobackpacking.com/B...../woothemes

Always good to hear from you halfway around the world.

I definitely had a great November, and January is already looking better than December, after I sold some links on Medellin Living the first week.

But I’m more excited about the huge bump in traffic GoBackpacking.com is experiencing right now. Page impressions are up something crazy like 30%, and it’s coming from Google. It’s not a spike tied to any particular bookmarking/social media network, so I’m hoping that even if it tapers as the month wears on, these new numbers are here to stay through the Spring as people prepare for their 2010 travels.

Ya, getting in early has been great but it’s a shame I didn’t put more work in back in the early days! Shoulda, coulda, woulda. But having an income sprout out of a hobby is amazing. I don’t know about you, but back in 2001 when I started I didn’t expect to be able to make a living out of the internet.

It’s a shame you had such a big drop from November but if you look at it a different way you could say it’s great you had such a big November!

I’m looking like I will get back on track in January after a not so good month in December. Hopefully uou will do the same.

Kirsty

Thanks! Yea, I bought the gobackpacking.com domain back in early 1999. Probably the best website/blog decision I’ve ever made.

I haven’t written on this blog a lot, as I started it a month or so before my RTW began, but I wanted to help show others that you can earn decent money from travel blogging.

Dave

It’s $10 to join but I essentially used this forum as a platform to launch both of my web based businesses. It costs $10 to join with over 100,000 paid members but its a great resource for everything.

I am working aggressively to position myself to be location independent my mid 2010, but only to give me options. I’d really love to live in NYC for a bit, but then have the option to relocate to South America, and maybe spend 6 months living, 6 months traveling. Who knows.

I’m excited about the possibility of building my own business (sounds crazy to even say or write it, but it’s becoming my reality).

In November, GoBackpacking received 15,000 unique visits and 30,000 page views. We also hit 1,000 RSS subscribers for the first time (which I was really excited about).

Dave

Just one question for you if you dont mind, how much traffic do you get on your travel blog?

Cheers
steve

I write for Textbroker and I really like it. I’m glad you had a good experience. They are wonderful to write for.

I wish you were in closer touch as I start ramping up the buzz about my new site, but I know you’re doing great work over in Indonesia now.

So far, November is off to a slow start – no advertisers approached me in the first week, though one big one did say he was happy with a 1-month trial and would
contact me in December to resume. I much prefer the boom months to the bust, but one of the cool things is I never know what emails will be waiting in my Inbox
when I wake up each morning.

I’m looking forward to seeing what this new site of yours is all about.

I had 12,000 visits and 24,000 page views on GoBackpacking in September.

I’m excited to share my traffic and revenue for October – will do so in a few days.

#1 – completed after 2 days and about 5 ahead of the deadline (I gave 7 days). Written well – I didn’t want to change a thing. Sent me a direct message afterward to thank me for assignment.

#2 – completed and submitted right before the deadline (I gave 5 days). As I read it, seemed too forced. I saw myself wanting to edit it, and as a result, I haven’t posted it on the site yet.

I’m going to send my next request directly to the first author, and see about working directly with her.

Another benefit of outsourcing the content is that it puts me in more of an editorial role, which is something I’ll be able to add to my resume.

I think your strategy looks like a good one. With some many blogs it’d be really difficult to stay on top of them using content you produce yourself. It would make doing all the other important things pretty hard.

I think outsourcing content is going to be something I continue to do, especially if Textbroker works out well. Investing in content is a great way to bring down the tax bill and increase the overall quality of your sites.
.-= Kirsty´s last blog ..Iowa is Out But Indo Might Be In =-.

Please let me know if you can recommend any great travel writers.

Google Docs doesn’t have a lot of advanced features, but it has suited my record-keeping needs for the last 2.5 years. You might also be interested to know you can save a Google text document as a PDF, which is how I created my ebook.