Since we value transparency, it’s time to share how much we earned from our blog this past year. The numbers won’t blow your mind (yet?), but they might give you a sense of what’s possible — and what isn’t. While the income runs mostly on autopilot once everything is set up, we do pour a lot of time and effort into creating content we hope is genuinely helpful. If we broke it down by the hour, let’s be honest — we’d be making less than minimum wage!
Starting a blog takes a lot of work, including:
- Publishing quality content regularly (consistency is key)
- Promoting your work — and yourself, if you want to grow faster — on other platforms like guest posts, podcast interviews, and more (Check out the publications that’ve been featuring us)
- Building a newsletter to connect with your audience and eventually reach your 1,000 True Fans (a concept Kevin Kelly explores in 1000 True Fans: Simple Idea to Earn A Living Doing What You Love)
That’s why it’s so important to write about topics you’re truly passionate about — long before you think about making money from your blog.
In this article, we’ll share how we monetize our blog, what’s working (and what’s not), and how much we earned in 2024 (from January 1 to December 31). Ready to dive in?
How do we monetize our blog?
We have three sources of revenue for our blog: affiliate marketing, referral and display advertising.
Affiliate Marketing
Our primary source of revenue for our blog is affiliate marketing. This is where we promote services or products that we ourselves use. If you decide to use/purchase such items (by using our special links) we get a small commission (at no cost to you obviously) in the form of credit.
We are currently members of the following affiliation programs:
Amazon.com Associates Program: we share everything we read or travel with and most of those articles include links to Amazon to make it easy for people that are interested to purchase such items.
- What do we get? For every purchase you make using our links, we get a 0-5% commission based on the type of product being purchased.
Bluehost Affiliate Program: Bluehost is the service we use to host this blog as well as our free travel tool.
- What do we get? We get usually $75 per sign-up, which is a nice size of money if people are looking to start a blog!
- What do you get? By signing up using our link, you can start your blog for as low as $3.95 a month (which is a preferential rate) which is what we actually paid to get started ourselves!
- Want to know more? Check out our detailed step by step guide to get you started with your blog in minutes
Booking.com Affiliate Program: we get commission by sharing travel related products (accommodation mostly) from Booking.com.
- What do we get? Every time someone books and completes a stay (or other products provided by Booking.com) we get paid a 10-15% commission.
- What do you get? You get access to the places we enjoyed and highly recommend through our blog and you support us by booking through our links 🙂
- Want to know more? Email us and we will be happy to share more about this program.
Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program: this top-notch company has been handling our mail since we started our nomadic journey and we plan to keep them, even if we return back to the USA.
- What do we get? Every time someone signs up for the service we get a lifetime 10% commission on their membership fee.
- Want to know more? We wrote an in-depth review of Traveling Mailbox and show you how you can access your physical mail from anywhere.
GoRuck Affiliate Program: GoRuck is a company known for making rugged, military-grade backpacks and gear designed for adventure, fitness, and everyday use. This has became lately a big trend to build on your strength, endurance + cardio.
- What do we get? Every time someone purchase an item from GoRuck we earn a 8% commission on the purchase.
- Want to know more? Check out the health benefits of rucking — and if you’re curious, take a look at how awesome these rucksacks are!
Nexstand Affiliate Program: Nexstand makes lightweight, portable laptop stands designed to improve posture and ergonomics for people working on the go.
- What do we get? Every time someone purchase an item from Nexstand we get a 10% commission on their membership fee.
- Want to know more? We wrote a comprehensive review of portable laptop stands which includes Nexstand as our favorite stand that we are traveling with.
The following program got discontinued since our last income report:
- Remarkable Affiliate Program: We’ve been using and loving the Remarkable II since 2021, and through their affiliate program, we earned $40 credit toward our order when someone buys using our $40-off link — plus, if you’re curious, we wrote a full review of this powerful, ever-improving note-taking device for nomads!
Display advertising
Our second source of revenue is display advertising. As the traffic to our blog started to grow in 2020 we started experimenting by adding a very small number of ads to our blog and we have been happy by how this experience turned out, especially as we did not get any complaints from our readers about them.
We are currently members of the following advertising program:
Google AdSense: Google provides us with great control of the type of number of ads we would like to include on our blog. They make it super easy to configure them on our blog.
- What do we get? A small commission per ad displayed and/or clicked
- What do you get? Information about products or services relevant to the things we talk about.
Referral
Our last source of revenue is referral. This is where we share custom links to services we use and provide you with a specific discount. In return we would get a small fee at no additional cost to you.
We tried a few and shutdown most. We are currently members of the following referral programs:
Personal Capital RAF: we use personal capital to combine all of our accounts (we have more than 60 between Mrs. NN and myself) into one single place and get great reports to help us visualize our current net worth and how it progresses over time.
- What do we get? For everyone that signs up using our link, we get a $20 Amazon gift card
- What do you get? You also get a $20 Amazon gift card once you start linking your accounts.
What works and what doesn’t?
Let’s look at the breakdown of revenue for 2024.
Let’s start with our source of blog income:
Our blog income for 2024 (per source, ordered per performance for this quarter starting with the best performing one to the least performing one)
- Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program (making 61.9% of our blog income for this year) is still the best return per amount of time we’ve invested. We created our review of Traveling Mailbox in 2018. We are promoting this service through our newsletter and other avenues which are bringing us a decent amount of traffic and conversion. What we love about this partnership is that it keeps on giving since we get a 10% commission on the lifetime subscription of people that sign-up for the service using our links, while every other program offers only a one time only commission.
- Booking.com Affiliate Program (21.0% of our blog income for this quarter). Booking.com is gaining strong momentum for our blog as we’ve been increasing the amount of listing we do share that we’ve made through this platform.
- Google AdSense (14.0% of our blog income for this quarter). Half way through 2024, we decided to turn off all ads on our blog in order to provide a least disruptive experience to our readers. This represents a loss of income of about $200 for 2024.
- Amazon.com Associates Program (3.9% of our blog income for this quarter). Our least performing affiliate program. That being said, just a few of our posts have affiliate links like our packing list posts: Men packing list for long term travel + Women packing list for long term travel).
We did not receive any income from the following sources in 2024:
- Bluehost Affiliate Program (0% of our blog income) – This can be a very lucrative program, giving us the largest commission of any program we have currently signed up for. We haven’t received any commission this past year though.
- Personal Capital RAF (0% of our blog income). We love Personal Capital to track all of our finance and we don’t know why people aren’t taking advantage of the free $20 sign-up credit currently available using this link.
Show me the money
Let’s look at income made during 2024.
This blog across all sources of revenue has brought in 2024: $1,497.07 (or $124 / month).
| Program | Income earned in 2023 | Change YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program | $926.65 | +0.22% |
| Google AdSense | $209.94 | -24% |
| Booking.com Affiliate Program | $315.06 | +363% |
| Amazon.com Associates Program | $45.44 | -12% |
| Bluehost Affiliate Program | $0.00 | N/A |
| Personal Capital RAF | $0.00 | N/A |
| Grand Total | $1,497.09 | $174.11 (+13 %) |
Here is the same income breakdown for this year in a graphical version:
How much money did our blog earn so far?
This blog across all sources of revenue has brought us since inception in July 2018: $9,098 (or ~$119 / month).
Check out our previous income reports to see how much our blog has made in the previous quarters:
- 2024 – $1,497
Q1 2024 – $448
Q2 2024 – $328
Q3 2024 – $327
Q4 2024 – $393 - 2023 – $1,323 (2023 Blog Income Report)
Q1 2023 – $452
Q2 2023 – $270
Q3 2023 – $332
Q4 2023 – $327 - 2022 – $1,395
Q4 2022 – $325.88
Q3 2022 – $323.01
Q2 2022 – $318.58
Q1 2022 – $375.85 - 2021 – $1,893
Q4 2021 – $277.22
Q3 2021 – $350.12
Q2 2021 – $633.62
Q1 2021 – $619.42 - 2020 – $1,705
(Q4 2020 – $450.33
Q3 2020 – $465.28
Q2 2020 – $447.91
Q1 2020 – $342.00 - 2019 – $1,206
- 2018 – $40
Here is our total blog income since we started blogging in the summer of 2018!
We do not run this blog expecting income so we do not stress over it and gladly accept this extra cash coming in. This is actually a nice amount to cover our operating cost.
What revenue to expect for 2025?
Well it turns out that publishing new content in 2024 might not have made much of a difference to the amount of traffic our blog received. For 2025, we are going to experiment with trying to publish different types of articles, focusing on the one that has been performing the most.
Here are our top 10 performing blog post of 2024 based on page views:
- [2023] Our Ultimate Guide to Obtaining a Thai Motorcycle License in Thailand
- [2023] From Lifespan to Healthspan: The Wisdom of ‘Outlive’ by Petter Attia
- [2023] How to become a Permanent Resident in Taiwan – A guide to APRC
- [2019] 2 day itinerary & cost – Douro Valley, Portugal
- [2023] Thailand Tourist Visa Mastery: How to Stay for 3 Months
- [2021] Book Review: Limitless – My action plan to learn anything faster
- [2020] Biking in Taiwan: Ultimate 3 Day / 200 km bike ride on the east coast
- [2023] Destination Report Koh Samui Thailand: What to do, see, eat and avoid
- [2023] Destination Report: Ubud Bali: What to do, see, eat and avoid
- [2023] Discovering Northern Thailand: A 5-Day Itinerary Through Mae Hong Son Loop
Interesting to note that most of our popular content was written in 2023 but the others were written in the past 5 years!
Would you like to start your own blog?
If you are interested in starting your own blog, we created an easy step by step guide to get you started within minutes for less than the price of a latte each month!
So that’s it for this quarter! If you like our content and want to support us, please consider any of the products or services we are promoting on our blog. Thanks!
What about you? Do you have a blog and have you been considering monetizing it? If so, what strategy have you been using and how successful have you been? Please feel free to share any tips you might have as we are constantly learning and are always excited to create new experiments.
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