As you start exploring different ways to make money travel blogging, affiliate marketing is something you’ll naturally encounter alongside display advertising. However, the story I hear time and time again from other bloggers is that because it’s hard to be successful at it, they end up giving up. There are a ton of affiliate marketing guides out there but none that are really focused on how it works for travel bloggers. With this new travel blogger’s toolkit article, I...
One of the first things that happened to me as a travel blogger that gave me feedback that I was heading in the right direction was when I was invited to my first press trip. This was in large part thanks to a referral from another travel blogger (again…the power of networking!) and I was excited as heck. Thing was, I didn’t really know what to expect or how to prepare. I ended up having to learn and improvise on the fly but you don’t have to. My interview with...
Pinterest is on the rise and I know a lot of you have been feeling the heat because it’s something that’s just not easy to crack. The problem is that Pinterest takes a lot more time to nurture and grow than any other platform I’ve worked with so far. You know me though, I’m always a proponent of finding new systems, strategies and hacks to make my life easier. And if you’re like me, you don’t have the time to dedicate to pinning all day. You can exhale...
One of the key lessons I’ve preached over and over in my income reports is the fact that if you want to branch out in terms of your income streams you need to find ways to make yourself discoverable. The math is simple and is best said by Gretzky. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. In the past I’ve talked about places like IZEA and themidgame and sure they may not always pay dividends right away but rather than saying they’re a “waste of time”, I...
A lot of people have asked me how I designed my emails that come out the day after a new post. While I’d like to take credit and say I do them by hand, the truth is that I actually had (I recently switched to Aweber) it set up as an RSS-Driven Campaign in MailChimp that would basically pick up new posts from my RSS feed and automatically create an email based on a pre-designed template. It sounds complicated but it really isn’t. Let me walk you through the steps Step 1: Create a New...
Alright today I’d like to introduce to you a super simple tool. It probably won’t change your life but if you’re leveraging Google AdSense to display ads on your site, you may want to check this out. Google account confusion You’re probably thinking that you can easily go to and yes you’d be absolutely correct. But if some of you are like me, the primary Google account you’re usually signed in with normally is not the same as the account that’s tied to Google Adsense. As a...
As a follow up to my earlier post on how to prepare for your press trip, I thought it’d be a good idea to talk about photography tips to make sure that press trips goes as smoothly as possible. A lot of these 10 tips may be obvious but still it’s a great check list of things that I always keep in the back of my mind whether it’s preparing for a trip or when it’s “go go go!” chaos. These are my list of 14 things you should think about when doing your...
Without a doubt, CoSchedule is one of the few tools I’ve encountered in my 3 years of travel blogging that have TRULY been a game changer. For those that are already using CoSchedule, you’re nodding in agreement with me. For those that don’t know about CoSchedule, get ready for your mind to be blown. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You started your blog as a hobby but you’ve begun to take it seriously after seeing traction. You continue to write but you wonder how...
In this review of WP Engine, I get down and dirty into my whole hosting migration process, why I switched and how I’m much happier now. Changing web hosting is one of the scariest things you’ll ever do as a blogger. That’s why we try our best to not migrate even when we know we probably should. The longer we let it linger, the more it hurts. What I don’t think most people realize is how easy that upgrade process is with guys like WP Engine. I did quite a bit of...
So it’s your first press trip and you’re nervous but excited at the same time. Excited because you’ve just landed a big gig with a CVB/tourism board and anxious at the same time because you’re not really sure what to expect and you don’t know if you’ll be ready. Preparation is key with every trip I’ve been on. Here is my checklist of things to make sure you do before you head out to make sure your press trip goes smoothly and without a hitch. Travel...
After you’ve decided to start your blog, and you’ve bought your domain and hosting, the next thing you want to jump right into is to create a logo for your newly minted site. I was exactly the same when I started Going Awesome Places and Travel Blog Breakthrough. I had ideas for what it wanted to look like but I had no idea how to build it. It’s a serious problem right? Because not all of us can be graphic designers and while you can try to hack something together on...
Alright real quick before I forget to write this one. I recently discovered this little hack at Starbucks that may end up saving me even more money. As some of you may know I’m a big fan of Starbucks. I go there not necessarily for their coffee (which I enjoy) but more so for their great coffice set up. I don’t know what it is but I learned very early on that I’m just not as productive when I’m working from home. There are just way too many distractions and...
As part of the natural evolution of the blogger, you get to the stage where you’re starting to monetize. One of the ways to make money with your blog is to take on sponsored posts. This is when a company comes to you to get you to help promote a certain product, promotion, contest etc. The company will either provide you the content to post on your blog or you have the freedom to write a story that relates to the campaign. You post it and when you do, you get paid. Now these...
If I could sum up my experience at Affiliate Summit West 2015 (ASW15) in two words, it’d be “eye-opening”. The 3 days in Las Vegas for me introduced me to a whole new world of affiliate marketing. Between meeting some of the most successful internet marketers to meeting affiliate companies, and so many like minded entrepreneurs made the whole trip worth it. While ASW15 isn’t going to make me rich overnight, what it did was plant the seed for two things. 1) ideas...
Triberr is an interesting platform that I discovered last year. It really started from my search for the answer for “How the heck do all these other bloggers have so much to Tweet about?” That’s when I started to do some of my own digging and I noticed something very interesting. A lot of the content being shared on Twitter had a very similar format. It was always a [Title] [Link] via [Twitter Handle]. Interesting… Stelle di Stelle – 3 Michelin Star...
