How Much Do Travel Affiliates Earn?

Traveling is an amazing hobby, and an even better way to make money. I’m sure you have seen many travelers on YouTube and other platforms and asked yourselves, “How do they have so much money to spend on traveling?” Well, the truth is that traveling can pay for itself.

One of the ways that travelers make money is affiliate marketing. In this article, we have gathered some cases of travel affiliates earning large amounts of money by doing their travel blogging the right way.

Income to Expect from Travel Affiliate Marketing

Honestly, when it comes to traveling, you could be doing affiliate marketing in all sorts of ways. You could be promoting brands, wearables, clothes, hiking gear, traveling essentials and accessories, and everything else that might come in handy when traveling. Doing brand sponsorships and promotions are another way. But this is just the affiliate marketing side, which can easily make you some passive income.

The income you could be expecting from travel blogging can range from $1 000 all the way to $50 000 and even more. Nowadays, the traffic going towards affiliate travelers is more directed at YouTube as we can see in the chart below from Google Trends.

We can also see that the global online travel market size is predicted to grow to 600 billion dollars by the year 2026, and currently, it’s standing at more than $400 billion.

This is all proof that the online traveling promotions and spending is yet to grow even more. So why not get started while it’s still a hot market.

As mentioned, nowadays, a lot of travel bloggers are on YouTube, but since they can monetize their videos, we are not going to discuss their YouTube monetization earnings here. Now that we know how much money you could be earning, let’s see some real cases of travel affiliates making money.

Case #1: Drew Binsky

This is one of the most interesting cases of travel vloggers making money besides earning YouTube monetization income. Drew does affiliate marketing and brand sponsorships, such as the one you can see in the video below. He put the affiliate link to the app in his video description so users could click on it, and he could earn a commission.

The one thing that makes Drew different from other travel bloggers and vloggers is that he is doing all of that at the same time. Drew has a website on which he talks about how he became a traveler, how to become one, and sells merchandise.

All of this has brought Drew to make up to $30 000 a month. You might have seen him do different activities, such as trying living with different tribes or in different parts of the planet. The way he does it is that he brings up new trends and does creative things while traveling. So, if you want to stay on the top in 2022, it is not enough to simply travel, but to follow adventures!

Beside doing affiliate marketing, he leverages his blog to make other income streams, such as online stores, courses, speeches, etc.

Case #2: Nomadic Matt

Nomadic Matt is another great travel blog, run by Matt Kepnes. This blog has an interesting story. Matt quit his job back in 2006 and started traveling the world, not with that big of a budget. Then he started his blog and by 2010, he was making more than $50 000 a month.

Nowadays, Matt has more than 1.5 million page views, and that brings him more than $750 000 a year, which is not comparable to what he was making when working a 9-5 job.

Looking at his blog stats, you can see that he actually has a good bounce rate and average visit duration going on his blog.

Now that we know how much money Matt makes, let’s go through the ways he makes this money. By taking a look at his blog, you can see that he has multiple sections on it, in which he promotes affiliates products and services, such as the traveling gear section.

By taking a look at one of his posts, you can see that he is actually pointing to affiliate links.

That is not all. Matt also has a series of e-books which makes up a huge chunk of his income, ever since he started his blog. He also runs ads on his blog and his website both, which can also bring him lots of money. Since he has over 1.5 million pageviews, we can say that if the average of Adsense payout is $8 per a thousand pageviews, then he simply makes more than $12 000 off ads running on his website.

Case #3: Local Adventurer

Let’s end these case studies by a case of a blog that isn’t too big, and is still earning lots of money. This blog belongs to Esther and Jakob. On their blog, they run affiliate links, ads, and all sorts of guides. They have a blog where they talk about traveling destinations and guides. Taking a look at their income report shows how they made $23 000 in just one month, and since then, they are just making even more.

One interesting thing that they do is that they have a section on their website called “Traveling Resources” where they post affiliate links to the products they’re promoting. They have a disclaimer on that page as well, just to confirm that they are in fact affiliate links.

As we can see, most of their income comes from sponsored product posts, and that is the end goal for any affiliate marketer, to be able to sponsor for a brand.

Conclusion

After investigating many travel affiliates, it seems that the marketing is only growing and there is a lot of space for making money in it. Whether you choose to start from YouTube or blogging, you have many ways to go about doing it. Just make sure you are doing it your way, and stay positive.