After the Google apocalypse of 2024, traffic to this DA52 site, with no AI, no spam (maybe, wink emoji), and good EEAT, was on its knees. I wrote about that in a post I titled “Is Google Destroying Blogging?” Since then, things have improved. A couple of readers have asked me for an update, so here it is.
This post may contain affiliate links.
Blogging Today
I have 5 travel blogs, a homesteading/gardening blog, a homeschool blog, and maybe a few more, I lose track. I’ve been blogging for a living for 15 years.
Obviously, I don’t work on them all consistently. The two travel blogs I’m talking about in this post are the two that make the most money.
Search traffic is pretty much my only traffic source. Life is too short to create social media posts with the consistency and elaborateness that’s required. So I don’t.
Starting A New Blog Today
Not quite today, over a year ago now, just days before Google wiped my big site, this one, out of the SERPS, I started a new travel blog about our local area.
That site has grown, done well and never been negatively impacted by any Google updates. Touch wood. I wrote about it already in a post called “Can a new blog today make money.“
The graph below shows that site’s search traffic over time. It’s not huge, but it makes me a good chunk of money. I’ll explain how.
This new website only has about 70 posts today. So let’s say that’s 70 days work. 10 weeks of work, maybe, over an 80 week period, and that’s an overestimate.
The initial set-up of a site takes me about 3 days. Each post probably takes me half a day. Plus you have to get out there, find stuff out, and take the photos, but that’s the fun part!
But the real beauty of blogging is that I can do it when I feel like it, with plenty of time to do all the other stuff I do as a mum, wife, and homesteader. I’m also free to travel, which we still do for months each year.
I should say that my husband, and the kids, have decent incomes now. I haven’t had to be the sole breadwinner for a long time. So I don’t work so hard. Nobody helps me with the websites, they used to, but no more.
Why traffic to this new site is not consistently rising
With my general travel blog, this one World Travel Family, traffic steadily rose without the dips you can see in the graph above. That’s because this site is barely affected by seasonality. We cover destinations that are popular for travel at any time of year, plus other, non-seasonal topics, like travel blogging and the realities of being a nomadic, worldschooling family.
I was also very consistent in publishing new content back then. These days – not so much.
We stopped travelling full-time in 2020, and my kids are now past school age, so I rarely talk about those topics today. But I’m still a travel blogger, so here we are.
This new site is highly seasonal. The weather, the cyclone season, the heat and school holidays affect my traffic. Peak season is roughly July to October, with little peaks at Easter and over Christmas.
I can see that different posts are popular at different times of the year. So right now, during school holidays, lots of people are on vacation here and they’re looking for ideas on where to eat and so on. They’re not booking hotels.
So seasonality doesn’t just affect total numbers of page views, it affects the popularity of particular posts and the number of bookings.
So how about those bookings?
What’s The Best Way To Make Money With a New Travel Blog Today?
This new travel blog hasn’t got many daily page views, just under 400 per day is typical. With that sort of traffic volume, there is no way you’ll make a living with display ads. But that doesn’t matter!
This new site is on Journey by Mediavine (use this link to apply). I often describe it as “Mediavine Lite”. The published threshold for eligibility is 10,000 monthly sessions (I believe). In my experience, you can qualify for Journey with much lower traffic, just a few thousand.
I currently have 3 low-traffic sites on Journey. None of them makes over $100 US per month just from ads. It’s pocket money, but I’m very glad of the US / AU exchange rate, it makes it feel like more.
$100 a month is “free money” to me. I don’t really see what I do with the websites as work, it’s what I do for fun. Even if I were only making $100 per month, I’d probably still do it. But I make much more than that.
You have to love blogging to do it and have the determination to make it work.
I make way more money from affiliate sales than I do from display ads. I’d say at least 10 times more, maybe 20. That’s because I got better at making money from travel blogging, and the technology behind the affiliate sales got better.
The two best platforms, that make me the most money for me today, are Stay22 and Travel Payouts. Apply to join both by clicking those links. Both can easily automate the affiliate sales process. Particularly Emerald by TravelPayouts.
Take that $100/month advertising revenue and compare it to a $300 commission on a single hotel sale. The biggest one ever was over $1000, but the average is around $20. The ads quickly become irrelevant.
I make almost nothing from Amazon today, and I’m slowly removing those links from all of my sites. I no longer want to work for them, and I no longer use this company myself, not since March 2025. But if you want it, we have a post on making Amazon affiliate sales.
That platform used to be very lucrative for us, it isn’t now, and that’s in part due to changes in the SERPs.
SERPs stands for search engine results pages, where scraped AI and Google’s own affiliate links are taking a big cut of the affiliate sales that used to go to bloggers. Google, and other AI, scrape our content, steal it, and dish it up in a way that makes the creators no money and instead lines fat pockets. But I’m hanging in there.
I think enough people have the common sense to scroll past the AI garbage and find the actual source of the information. Enough to keep me afloat, for now.
This Travel Blog’s Recovery After The Updates
World Travel Family started recovering its traffic around the 8th July 2025. There was another Google update that reversed some of the damage Google had done, for some of us. 3 of my sites saw some recovery on that date.
The recovery is only partial, but it has made a big difference. At its peak, this site had 10,000 page views per day, today it’s only around 1,000, but that’s enough to make a decent amount of money.
This site does not do as well in affiliate sales because it’s not as niche as the new site I talked about above. We cover the whole world plus other topics.
A lot of our posts are about destinations in Asia. A hotel sale in the cheaper parts of Asia may only make me a dollar or two. The big profitable sales are in the expensive countries.
We are still with Mediavine, despite traffic dropping below the 50K monthly threshold. We’re very grateful for that, but my Mediavine income today is only a few hundred dollars a month. It used to be a few hundred per day.
Mediavine is better than Journey, but it’s nowhere close to being our major income source, as it once was.
If you’d like to look at monthly Mediavine income, I touch on it in a post on how revenue dropped at the start of the lockdowns, I gave a monthly breakdown.
What Do I Do Differently in Travel Blogging Today?
The buzzword in blogging for the last few years has been diversification. We were all told to lean into e-mail, create courses, sell a product, get traffic from Pinterest or Tik Tok. Did I do that? No.
I tried a few things but they didn’t work. I can’t get traffic from Pinterest, email open rates are pathetically low and I have neither the consistency nor the will to milk the socials. I’ve always been an SEO blogger. I still am today.
I will say that I stayed consistent with Pinterest for a full 3 months. I worked really hard on it. I even had chats with Pinterest “experts” and VAs on best practices. Nothing changed.
If you are a subscriber, you’ll notice that email notifications look a bit different over the last week or so. I switched on Mediavine’s automated email system. I’ll see how it goes. Crafting emails was taking me a lot of time for very little engagement. Let’s see if MV can do better.
Overall, SEO is still working for me, despite the changes in the search results.
Have I changed how I do SEO? A little. My new content is much more human and personal. You may notice that my internal links are a bit different today, too. I’ve done a lot of updating, added new, bigger images and just tried to keep key posts up to date.
So I hope that answers your question, Brian, and Kate. If there’s anything else you’d like to talk about, we can do that in the comments. Feel free to ask. I’m enjoying blogging again, it’s a brain workout, and I just love looking at data and spotting patterns. I have that sort of brain. When I check my data every morning, I get the required dopamine rush, and that keeps me hooked.
A lot of people probably think blogging is about writing rambling posts like this one (which was 1 hour of work, max), it’s not, it’s far more technical, it’s a science. Don’t forget to apply for Journey by MV, join TravelPayouts and Stay22, and good luck!
Related Posts:
If you'd like to hire a car during your stay, use this car rental comparison tool to find the best deal!
We also suggest you take a look at this company to get a quote for all kinds of the more tricky adventure or extended travel insurance.
Try Stayz / VRBO for an alternative way to find rentals on homes/apartments/condos in any country!