How to Make Money Even as a Noob

The days of going to an office, tethering yourself to your desk, and working are largely over. The internet and ubiquitous access through various devices have made stationary work nearly obsolete. With the rise of the emerging industry of travel blogging it is important that people understand that they can make money traveling and this doesn’t mean business travel. Travel blogging allows someone to explore new and exotic destinations, write about their experience and make money doing it.

How to Make Money Even as a Noob

If you can make money sitting under a palm tree, with your toes in the sand instead of in a cubicle farm, the choice becomes obvious. But how hard is it to make money as a travel blogger? Surprisingly not. Here are some ways to make money even as a beginner.

Get Set Up

First of all, you have to start a blog. In today’s world, creating a quality, versatile website is easier than ever.  You don’t have to be an ubergeek or super techie, either. Most people must simply have a basic understanding of how to use the internet, a computer and have the ability to follow instructions. Additionally, if you want to do something outside of the obvious there are almost always videos that will walk you through the steps to add features or improve your site.

Sell Your Own Stuff

Once you get your site finished, there are multiple ways to make it a money maker via travel blogging. One shortcut to making money is if you already have a business, and the increased exposure through your travels helps you promote your brand. Stop by for the travel info, stay for the advertising.

You can use your platform as a traveler who creates interest in the destinations you visit to sell products online, link to your product pages and include messages in your blog about how valuable your products are. This can be a subtle way of advertising and promotion. And with the ease of fulfillment through online vendors, you can conduct your business from anywhere. You might as well do it with a tropical drink in your hand and a hammock under your behind.

Advertising

If you can create enough traffic to your travel blog, there are two ways to turn that into cash. First, some services like Google Adsense allow you to simple embed code into your posts and you get paid relative to your traffic and how engaged your readers are with the ads that the code creates. If you get a large enough following, this can convert into large amounts of money. Even with smaller traffic numbers, this can produce some extra pocket change and add value to your travels.

A more direct way to make money advertising is to sell space on your blog to merchants. This can be an ad for you friend’s business or it can be an ad for a company that feels their product is relevant to your travels. In this case, you get paid in advance to place an (usually a picture) image that links back to the client’s website. Usually the amount is negotiated ahead of placement and isn’t contingent on future results. However, your blog’s traffic data will determine the value of ad space.

Freelancing

Because you, as a traveler, have a lot to write about, some companies are willing to pay you to produce content that they need for various reasons. You could document your experiences and sell the content to needy content farms, publications and SEO firms for money.

All of these industries need fresh content and particularly interesting articles. Therefore, your travel experiences could become valuable to sites needing fresh material or platforms for their advertisements or SEO leverage.

SEO

Speaking of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEO companies will often ask to post relevant content on your blog, which they wrote, in order to provide backlinks for their paying clients. Their clients pay them to get links on other sites back to their site. Therefore, they will pay you, as a cost of doing business, to publish their writing. This works because search engines have robots which perceive a link from one site back to another as a signal that the site linked to is authoritative.

This makes them more relevant in searches, which business find valuable. There is a whole industry of SEO firms trying to improve the authority and ranking of their clients and if you are willing to publish their writing on your site with links to their clients, you can get paid for that service and convenience.

The nice thing about this is that most of the work is done for you. You must merely take the few minutes required to publish an article and voila, money. This is a great way to see residual income as well.

Many of the SEO companies will produce daily, if not more, content for your blog. This helps your blog stay fresh while you pile up income. The content they produce could also produce ad money as well if your site is bringing in money from that source. More articles, more money.

Travel is fun and exciting. It is a great way to gain perspective, wisdom and understanding of the world. It is entertaining and often creates envy in our friends and relatives (bonus). But it has the potential to be a profitable endeavor as well.

With the ease of accessing the internet around the world, there is really no reason a traveler shouldn’t document their adventures and turn those adventures into profits. Those profits can fund a perpetual trip. Then your career would be vacationing, and what's better than that?