14 Years of Travel Blogging – Lessons

I read a fellow travel blogger’s post this morning called “Lessons learned from 6 years of travel blogging“. It inspired me to write something similar, because it’s been a ride! I found this girl’s article on Pinterest. That’s the best place to find real human travel bloggers today, they’re hard to find in Google’s search results, and I refuse to read AI slop.

I started blogging back in 2012 for fun, as a hobby. To document my plan to pack up the kids and travel around the world for a while. It seemed to be a revolutionary thing to do, and I wanted to help other people with similar non-conventional plans. The expression “Living Differently” was born.

We did that, travel blogging became “a thing”, and I started making money. Enough money to support a family of 4 in full-time travel. In 2020 we had to stop. Travel was shut down, and my income plummeted. Since then, we’ve travelled a lot, but differently. I’m off on an extended trip with one of the kids shortly, I’m done with staying home through fear. Sign up to follow if you’d like to hear about that.

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Lessons in Travel Blogging 2026

I have not added any affiliate links to this post. I just want your eyeballs for a few minutes.

People don’t read articles with perfect SEO and fully optimised affiliate sales potential

As travel bloggers, we want people to read. We have things to say and personal experiences to share. In an ideal world, we develop a relationship with regular readers. We also want people to read, not skim, because that way, we make more money. More time spent on page = more ad revenue. Read the next section about ad revenue if that sounds avaricious.

A lot of search terms relate to finding out a particular fact. For instance “does it snow in North Vietnam“. That search might lead to that post, but it probably won’t because that question is easily answered by AI, and that person doesn’t need or want to read a whole article about that.

So don’t target those keywords with your travel blog today, it’s all but pointless. Write the posts that people will read, and that may be helpful to a fellow citizen of beautiful Mother Earth.

In Content Ads Are Not Evil on Real Blogs

Did what I just said sound a bit money-grabbing? Sorry. But scrolling past an ad doesn’t hurt anyone. Or does it? Personally, as a non-consumerist sick of the capitalist meltdown that the world is in today, I dislike ads intensely. It annoys me to be confronted with products that nobody should buy.

I don’t buy them. I don’t use Amazon, we’re boycotting supermarkets and we don’t buy anything we don’t need. I don’t buy into that world at all. 7 years of living out of backpacks as digital nomads with kids taught us a lot about what we need and what we don’t.

So if advertisers want to spend money in putting ads before my eyeballs, let them. I’ll take their money and never buy their product, thanks.

I’m a big fan of “let them theory” in general. Mel Robbins’ site is here if you want to dive into that.

That said, if I see ads on a fellow travel blogger’s (or recipe blogger’s) page, I’ll eyeball them gladly, I know that blogger has worked hard and put their heart and soul into getting my eyeballs on that page.

I’ll often leave a supportive comment to spend even longer on that page and just be nice. The world needs more humans spreading the love. This is why I published this post about a food tour, it was to help a fellow blogger out, and my words were genuine.

It’s Hard To Tell Real Bloggers From AI and Grifters

Is what you’re reading even human? Is what you’re reading written using AI by some guy in a co-working space who’s never even visited that country? He thinks he’s so smart, lying to people for a living.

I find it hard to tell what I’m reading today, and I’m 14 years deep in the blogging world. Blogging used to be different, it used to be fun, there was community between bloggers and between the blogger and their readers.

Here’s an example: this morning I was reading a blog post about Mediavine. The author said they were making $x on huge traffic. Then I noticed the ads, they were Grow, not Mediavine, it was all lies. You need 50K monthly sessions to qualify for MV today, they obviously weren’t at that point and had no real experience at all. It was probably AI because I recognised a few sentences that had been lifted from my articles, my personal experiences.

Then we all discovered how best to do SEO to get clicks (more clicks = more money), and our content became more and more inhuman and formulaic.

I’m guilty of that too, I love SEO, it’s a science, and I’m a nerd. The SEO days were exciting, but that’s not where we are today.

Then we were told (usually by our advertising overlords and affiliate marketers) that we shouldn’t send out real human emails to our real human followers. We should use their expensive automailers and craft spammy email sequences instead. But read the next section about that.

Readers tuned out. I don’t blame them.

New posts on this site, back in 2019 would get thousands of views each time I sent them out. Today it’s dozens.

I want to bring that back. If you’re a blogger, get human again. Tell me in the comments about your blog. I’ll follow, I’ll read, because human connection has never been more important than today.

Automailers Aren’t Evil For Bloggers

I am using a free automailer service today, and I like it. It means that new posts, like this one, will go out to subscribers, plus a selection of older popular content.

It means I don’t have to pay for a service, so I’m better off.

I’m making a huge effort to make sure there is new content like this every week, plus other factual content about destinations, with a human touch, constantly.

I love writing about destinations and travel experiences. I love the whole process of going somewhere to find out, take the pictures and have the experiences. I won’t stop.

It seems to be working, my open rate has gone from 4% to 7%, and that’s above industry standard.

But, the spammy email sequences are gone for good. I wish I’d never listened to that bad blogging advice.

Bloggers Can’t Rely on Social Media Traffic Today

The algorithms are against us today. Your followers on social platforms won’t see your posts just because they are followers. The algorithm takes over and that’s about making maximum cash for the owner of said social media platform.

They are showing you what they want you to see and that involves censorship sometimes.

Note, owner, not owners. The same people own most of the platforms today, and that’s one of the reasons we left Facebook and Instagram. The former is a nasty, hate-filled environment, deliberately. It keeps people riled up and engaging. None of us needs that.

None of us, as bloggers, need to spend hours creating clickbaity reels and other garbage to make more money for those platform owners. They take the cream, you get the scraps.

Doom scrolling is over for me, and I don’t think anyone should encourage it.

I’m still on Pinterest, it’s not as bad as the others, and it’s kinda fun, when you can find the real bloggers. It’s not as full of AI bots stirring up hate. Without the effort of Facebook and Instagram I have more time for Pinterest, and it’s looking good, reach is going up nicely. Maybe I’ll be in a position to write about how to get traffic from Pinterest in 2026 soon. I was a Pinterest ninja back in the day. Maybe I will be again.

Travel Blogging Is Not For Anyone

Back in the day, if you knew the tricks, anyone could easily make good traffic and good money from travel blogging. And it looked like that traffic and income would just keep rising as you added more and more fresh content.

We now know that the plan was to get us to make the content, so that they could steal it for their AI and have all the money for themselves.

You can still make money travel blogging. I started a new one in 2024 and for the first 18 months, it did really well financially. It wasn’t a passion project like this site, but it was authentic and based on personal experiences. I may like making money, we all have to pay the bills, but I’ll never be a fake or a fraud.

After 18 months Google started to knock it down. It’s in decline. But it was fun while it lasted. If recovery is possible, I’ll let you know.

I used to coach new bloggers with our “Let’s Get Started” project. I never sold courses, that’s not for me, but I loved helping people to be successful in the blogging world. I probably wouldn’t do that today because I can’t guarantee success.

If you want to be a blogger, go for it, but you have to have passion and an authentic voice that people will follow, because traffic from other sources is all but gone.

This is exactly how blogging was back in 2012. We gained followers through interacting with other blogs and commenting. Do that, it helps everyone involved.

You can make money with “sponsored posts” in 2026

A “sponsored post” means different things to different bloggers. To me, it is link selling, nothing else. People will pay for a link to their site, from this one. I ask $1200, and some people will be prepared to pay that.

The dozens of sponsored post requests that I get daily are mostly spam. Tell them your price and walk away. It’s not worth haggling with anyone who asks $50. Stick to your guns.

Link selling is frowned upon by Google, you may get de-indexed. Who cares? Google isn’t on our side any more, actually, it never was. “They don’t owe us traffic” was a statement we should have listed to. Things only got worse.

I also make a point of linking to other real human bloggers along with authority sites like, say, UNESCO. I don’t link to AI or promotional sites, no grifters. Link to the good guys, it lifts us all up.

A fellow travel blogger experienced something tragic recently. This is a link to her site.

Positions In The Serps Count For Nothing Today

My average position in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) is about 8 today, and rising. That’s higher than it was back in 2019 when I was getting 10,000 page views per day. There’s no traffic coming from the SERPS because they’re full of spam, AI, and big businesses. The billionaires’ mates.

The smart people put “travel blog” on the end of their search terms, or keep scrolling until they find a real result, but too many people aren’t awake enough to realise what’s happening.

What Do You Think About Travel Blogging Today?

Are you a reader or a blogger? What do you think about the state of the blogging world today? How can we all uplift each other and help each other as humans? I want to bring back blogging community. It’s us against them, and we’re the majority. Are you in?

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