The short answer is yes, I’ve done it, I’ve proved it. In February 2024, just before the catastrophic March Google update that killed off incomes for so many bloggers, I started a new blog or website. This was purely coincidental; I didn’t know that update was coming. I just felt like making a new one because that’s what I do on a random Tuesday morning.
This post contains an affiliate link
In this post, we’ll go into how I did that and how much money I’ve made from that site so far, it’s still growing in 2025, using SEO alone.
We’ve also given traffic a nice boost in October 2025 by switching on a new email tool, I’ll tell you about that too.
You will need to sign up to read it. There is no catch, no courses, no sales funnel, we just can’t rely on Google to send us traffic any more, so my secrets will come to you by email.
I’ll say up front that I’m a one-person operation, I do not use AI, I have not used outside writers, and I have no staff. I used to have a small team when blogging was booming (circa 2018- early 2020) but those days are gone.
I’m just a mum working from home with a laptop and some skills I picked up along the way. I do not work very hard, and I don’t work many hours, I just slowly chipped away at this new site using some canonicals and redirects (repurposed content from old sites) and it worked. So let’s get into it!
Traffic to the new site in its first 6 months, March-Sept 2024. It’s still performing and growing in 2025. 36,000 views total in 6 months made me over $1000. For comparison, this site, World Travel Family, used to get 10,000 page views PER DAY. I don’t think that’s obtainable today, but a nice little side hustle blog is possible.
I have not put a lot of time into this new site. It has existed since mid-February 2024, so when I first wrote this post, it was about 6 months old. In October 2025, just about 1.5 years old, it is still performing. I’ll leave this post with data from the 6-month point and update you more via email.
For one of those first 6 months I was travelling and did no work at all.
You’ll see on the graph that traffic is dropping off into September, we’re coming into the low season, rankings haven’t dropped, they’re climbing. I also haven’t worked on this site, at all, since the start of August. In September and October I started work again for the reasons I’m about to explain below.
This new site only got search traffic, mostly from Google. While I have created social media accounts and linked them, I’ve really not used them. Life is too short for social media. In October we activated email, as below.
I don’t think social media works any more unless you really invest time into it and publish something at least daily. I’m never going to do that.
I’m collecting subscribers, and I have a couple of hundred but I wasn’t using email very much to reach them. This changed in October 2025 and I’ll explain how in a minute.
So this traffic was all through SEO, mostly Google. A lot of people will tell you that’s not possible any more, but it is.
How I Boosted Traffic in October 2025 Using Email.
If you have Grow by Mediavine (it’s open to all sites, on Journey, Mediavine, or not), their free automailer is gold!
I switched it on in October, and it’s really increased traffic on all of the sites I own.
I was reluctant to switch it on for a very long time, I have no control over which posts it sends out, and I previously had multiple email lists, for bloggers, gap year planners, and even people researching travel in particular countries.
I wasn’t creating content very often. I’m a procrastinator, and it’s hard for me to finish a post. I have over 800 draft posts that I never finished! So I thought that this automailer wouldn’t work for me as it sends out a weekly (now bi-weekly) email whether I have new content or not.
Well, how did I get around this and get the automailer to work? I started creating more content! Not just completely fresh content, but updated and republished content, like this one. Because I’m updating it today, it should appear in an email this week.
On the new site, I’ve done the same, but with such a narrow, niche site, it’s hard to come up with ideas. This big site is way more flexible, and I like to make sure there is something for everyone in each email.
It costs me nothing in time, I don’t have to create email sequences, and it will save me $160 US a year when I cancel my email service provider.
The open rates and click-through rates are higher (7%, 4% is the industry standard I believe) and it outperforms those tedious email sequences that I had in place previously.
It’s a great tool, I love it. It keeps me on my toes and lets me reach you.
How Many Hours Do I Put Into Creating My Blogging Income?
How many hours have I put into it so far? Not many. Setting up a website takes a few days of tinkering. Adding each post may take anything between an hour and several days, depending on the amount of research you have to do, facts you need to check, etc.
The new site, to date (October), has just 86 published posts and 8 published pages. I’m going to estimate that I’ve spent maybe 300 hours on it in total. The working week is 40 hours, so 7.5 working weeks. It makes about $70 US per month on Mediavine Journey. RPMs are low. But it sells plenty of expensive hotels and tours. I can’t give you an exact figure because that data is lumped together with the sales from all my other sites.
It sells more hotels by far than this big site because it’s so niche.
Repurposing Content For The New Blog
With this new site, I was able to re-purpose a lot of old content from this big site and move it across. Each post was updated, got new photos and was polished up.
Some I redirected (I think only 2), some I just moved the canonical links. Some I duplicated but changed so that the two posts could co-exist for slightly different keywords. There was no syndication involved.
You never want to compete against yourself for the same term, and you cannot create duplicate content.
How Long Does It Take To Make 1 Blog Post
My last post on this big general world travel site took 3 days to finish, it was a labour of love. Not 3 full days, but 3 days of only working on that post. I work however many hours per day I feel like working. That’s one of the beauties of my job, I’m my own boss.
It was this one, you’ll see there are a lot of photos, a lot of facts, prices, tours, long words. It wasn’t one that I could just pull out of my head.
It did require me to go to Thailand and visit the place, so if you’re not a travel nerd, you may not see a few thousand $ on flights and hotels as a good investment in creating a blog. To me, it’s always worth it.
This post on blogging is easy to write and won’t have many photos, it will take me an hour or two. I’m just pulling words out of my head and I probably won’t include any affiliate links. I could, I could link to Generate Press, Siteground etc. Actually I will include 1. You need to join Stay22, after 100 bookings they’ll give you an extra $100 if you use this link!
Which Income Streams Are Best on a New Blog
Stay22 is by far my biggest income stream in the hotel booking sector. It turns every page into a potential earning page, even those without hotel links. It’s a game-changer. You can join Stay22 here,
Creating an income from a blog is a challenge, and I love a challenge.
If I stopped working on it today it may continue to make $400-$500 per month forever more. That suddenly becomes a very good return on 300 hours of work! But of course, it may not, Google could crush it tomorrow.
If that happens I don’t mind too much, it still made me over $1000. It was easy money and I had fun, helping people in the process. It was a cool little experiment.
This site is monetised with ads by Mediavine Journey, they make very little, under $100 per month. There are changes coming at Mediavine. This big site has been on Mediavine for maybe a decade. I’ve had days when it’s made hundreds of dollars just in ad revenue. Today I’m happy if it makes $20.
Changes in Mediavine Earnings Coming in 2026
Mediavine is changing their structure as of January 2026. I got the email this morning, another kick in the teeth.
I think, but I don’t know for sure, that this site will be demoted from Mediavine to Journey in January. I will lose half of my ad revenue as the RPMs are much worse.
I can’t say more right now, this news is just hours old.
How Much Does Making a Blog Cost?
What about costs and overheads? So far, there have been zero costs other than the $10 or so to buy the domain. It’s hosted on my existing hosting platform, I already owned the theme. I’ve bought no paid tools for it other than those I already own.
If you’re starting a new site and you’re not already a blogger, there will be costs, but you should be able to buy a theme for $30 or so (I’m using Generate Press Premium – the free version isn’t enough, but you could use a free theme) and get hosting for about $20 a month. It’s not a huge investment. We have a post on starting a blog from scratch here.
But what you do need is know-how. And that’s what I have through years of trial and error.
How Much Money This New Blog Made in The First Year?
How much has this new site made so far? Between $1000 and $1500 in Affiliate sales and about $130 (all US) in advertising revenue. This site has only been monetised with ads since July, so that’s only 2 months of showing ads. My ad revenue is low on the new one, much lower than on this big site. That’s for a lot of reasons I’m not allowed to talk about because I signed a thing saying I wouldn’t. So no more on that!
Let’s talk about affiliate sales as they make up much more of my income on every site than ads.
For the record, I have sites on Mediavine, Ezoic, Adsense and Mediavine Journey. Pick whichever one you prefer, but Mediavine needs a very high level of monthly page views to qualify, way more than the new site has.
On this new site, the ad revenue is trivial compared to the affiliate revenue. It may not be entirely bad to just not monetize a travel site with ads at all.
There has been speculation that Google is penalising sites with ads. I don’t subscribe to that theory.
How To Make Money on a New Site
My biggest earner is hotel sales.
You need to pick a hotel booking platform that suits your audience. I use Agoda a lot on this site, it works for an Asian audience and travellers in Asia. This new site uses Booking dot com and occasionally Expedia, where a particular hotel isn’t on Booking.
The second biggest earner is sales of tours, for this we use Viator, GetYourGuide, and Klook. Klook works for Japan, the new site hasn’t had a single Klook sale. You have to test which platform works for the audience it attracts.
After these two (which are all very expensive purchases, so good commissions), there is a smattering of car hire sales and there were a few Amazon sales. This was until we started removing Amazon links for various resasons. They’re mostly gone now.
I make very little from Amazon today, I used to make a lot. But I also put barely any effort into earning from Amazon recently because the commissions are just cents. A single hotel sale can (and has) brought me a $500 commission. I’ve even seen a $1000 commission, just once. My biggest single commission on the new site to date is $300 on a hotel sale.
I don’t think SEO has changed, but I think Google is demanding higher quality posts and pushing blogs down the page. Blogs are getting less traffic in 2024- 2025 because Google puts its own results and AI responses at the top of the search results.
And of course, Google loves Reddit and YouTube – because Google owns both.
Smart searchers are scrolling past all that stuff, so aim your site at those people!
My new site is sparkly and new, every post has plenty of big images. Images at least 1200 px wide are required now, as stated in Google’s own guidelines. This site is 12 years old, it has a lot of very small images from the early days of blogging. It would take years to replace them all. I’m working on it.
The new site has no broken links, no missing alt tags and hopefully no errors at all. I built it in 2024 for 2024. The World Travel Family site started life in 2012! And honestly, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing back then!
This year I ran full SEO audits and technical audits on all of my sites. I fixed every error I could, but on a site as old as this one you’ll never get them all.
The new site has no hotels that no longer exist or factually inaccurate information. Things change over the years in travel blogging. For instance, the Bangkok to Chiang Mai train now departs from a new station. We had to take that journey again recently to fully update that old post. It’s here.
Travel blogs are never “done once and earn forever”. There is no truly passive income.
This is one of the problems with creating a genuine informational travel blog. You have to keep travelling! We’ve been to Thailand around 30 times now, and that’s required to keep things real. Because that’s just how we roll.
I think I worked out recently that the travel has more than paid for itself over the years. I crunched the numbers on how much money one blog post can make. We were going to travel anyway, it was never about the money.
Tips To Make Money With a Blog Today
So, a few quick ideas on how to make a site and make a profit this year.
1. Keep it niche. This big site is general world travel covering 50 or so countries. That’s too much work, and you can’t cover each destination in sufficient depth. The new site is one destination. You can cover that easily, from every angle. I also think that having every post on a site be relevant to every reader helps keep people on the site longer. That’s good for them, good for your sales, and good for your SEO.
2. Pick an expensive destination. The more expensive the hotels and tours, the bigger your commissions.
3. Write about a place you know well and can visit often. You will need to keep everything updated. You will need photos and videos, and you need to stay abreast of what’s going on there and post accordingly.
4. Your chosen destination must be popular with Americans, US visitors bring the big RPMs. If you can’t do that, pick Canada, the UK and maybe Australia.
5. Have a plan to avoid seasonal drops in traffic. If a site covers only one place, it will probably have a busy season. Think about what people could need to know about in the off-season. Fully cover holidays like Christmas, Easter and Halloween. If you can’t get traffic in the off-season, start another site for a place with opposite seasonality. This big world travel blog has never had any seasonality issues because we cover 50 plus countries. We’re not about summer vacations!
6. Have a backup plan or a diversified income. If your travel blog income is crucial for paying your bills, you’ll be in a whole world of pain if Google cancels you out of the blue. Be ready for that. Have alternate income streams or be prepared to get a job. I’m lucky, I can play around with websites for fun, and I have a lot of them. If one goes down, normally one goes up. Or I can just start another one and see how long it takes me to make another $1000!
Supporting a Family Through Blogging
Over the years I’ve made enough money with our websites to support a family of four travelling full-time. I’m not making that sort of cash today, but I’m making a helpful amount.
We live on a farm and we’re fairly self-sufficient, our costs are low. I can afford to be a stay-at-home-farmer. Our farm is here, on yet another website! Obviously our food costs are very low as we produce a significant ammount. I’m home to make bread, preserve fruit and do all of the jobs that help a household run. So not having “a job” outside the blogs does pay in many ways.
That site was totally obliterated in the March update. In July it picked back up. I did nothing, it was Google. Maybe one day it will recover, maybe not. But still, it makes a few hundred bucks here and there.
So travel blogging today is different, it’s unreliable, but I don’t think it’s hard. If you have a bit of know-how and time on your hands, you can easily make some extra money on the side. If you need to know more just ask in the comments and I’ll keep this post updated with earnings going forward. And don’t forget to join Stay22!
Alyson is a British medical scientist who jumped ship to chase dreams. A former Chief Biomedical Scientist in London hospitals, she started in website creation and travel writing in 2011.
Alyson is a full-time blogger and travel writer, a published author, and owns several websites. World Travel Family is the biggest.
A lifetime of wanderlust and over 6 years of full-time travel, plus a separate 12 month gap year, has given Alyson and the family some travel expert smarts to share with you on this world travel site.
Today Alyson still travels extensively to update this site and continue her mission to visit every country, but she's often at home on her farm in Australia.
