Detailed Look at Quarterly Blog Income Report – Q3 2020

If you’ve been reading our blog, you know how much we love numbers and since we ourselves enjoy reading about others’ blog income, we thought we would share our blog income on a quarterly basis.

Since we are still a modest 2-year-old blog, our numbers won’t blow your mind but you might be interested to see that there is still a bit of income trickling in that requires little effort to maintain once they have been properly set up. But don’t be mistaken, creating content for a blog does require a lot of work so you have to love it. Although generating income is not our primary goal, one thing we learned is that a large blog income that can cover your living expenses is not easy to come by as it may seem when you look at the large popular blogs. They have huge amounts of traffic which requires a big audience to be able to generate that level of income, hence why they are so successful! It’s obviously doable but they are not the majority of blogs. Well, we have to start somewhere and hopefully one day we will be able to share larger numbers when we find more people to help with our content!

In this article, we explain how we monetize our blog, what works, what doesn’t, and how much we made in the third quarter of 2020 (which covers the period from 7/1/2020 to 9/30/2020).

Are you ready to dive in?

Some links to the products mentioned below are affiliate links, meaning that if you click and make a purchase, Nomad Numbers (we) may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. For more information please review our disclaimer page.

How do we monetize our blog?

We have two sources of revenue for our blog: affiliate marketing and display advertising.

Our major 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 to date:

• Traveling Mailbox: this top-notch company has been handling our mail since we started our nomadic journey like champs 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 (in times of a pandemic, you might want to consider using them to securely handle your mail for you!) 
• Amazon: 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: 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 
• Google FI: we’ve been using google FI since we started our international travel and it has made staying in touch with friends and family so easy and we don’t have to worry about having to purchase a local sim card every place where we go!  
  • What do we get? For everyone who signs up, we get a $20 credit on our next bill
  • What do you get? If you sign-up using our link, you also get a $20 credit on your next bill.
  • Want to know more? Check out our in-depth review of Google FI & learn how you can significantly cut your cell phone bill while traveling internationally (or staying home).
• Airbnb: we almost exclusively rely on Airbnb to find our accommodation because they make it super easy and let us score amazing deals.
  • What do we get? For everyone that signs up using our link, we usually get up $20-$30 in Airbnb credit that we can use towards our next booking
  • What do you get? If you sign-up using our link you get a $35 Airbnb credit on your first booking. Who doesn’t like free nights? 
  • Want to know more? Check out our ultimate guide to AirBnB to learn our best techniques to score some really sweet deals while traveling!
• Personal Capital: we use personal capital to combine all of our accounts (60+ at the time of writing this post) 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.

Our second source of revenue is display advertising. We have also been experimenting with that at the beginning of the year, by adding a very small number of ads to our blog as we knew we were going to get an increase of traffic due to our blog being shared on important sites (our episode with ChooseFI being the latest of such events). We plan to review this experiment at the end of 2020 and decide if we want to keep it or turn it off!

We are currently members of the following advertising programs to date:

• 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 ads displayed and/or clicked
  • What do you get? Information about products or services relevant to the things we talk about.

What works and what doesn’t?

Here is the breakdown of our revenue in Q3 2020 per source of blog income we just discussed:

• By far, Traveling Mailbox (making 54% of our blog income for this quarter – -7% QoQ) is the best return per amount of time we’ve invested. We created our review of Traveling Mailbox in 2018 that we’ve kept up-to-date. 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.
• Google AdSense (14% of our blog income for this quarter – +25% QoQ). As we said earlier, this is an experiment that we are doing in 2020 and we might turn it off if it doesn’t perform well.
• Google FI (13% of our blog income for this quarter – +44% QoQ). 
• Amazon (11% of our blog income for this quarter – +57% QoQ), AirBnB (4% of our blog income for this quarter), and Personal Capital (4% of our blog income for this quarter) haven’t been performing well this quarter. Amazon has been reducing their fee significantly after COVID19 and with a lot of travel restrictions, it isn’t too surprising that people aren’t looking to sign up for Airbnb at the moment. 
• Bluehost (0% of our blog income for this quarter – -100% QoQ) 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 quarter though.

Show me the money

So here you have our numbers:

This blog across all programs has brought in Q3 2020: $465.28 (or $155 / month). 

This is definitely very little but we treat it as extra fun money for doing something we enjoy anyways. If you break it down per hour of work, it’s definitely pennies per hour which is why we say it has to be something you love doing versus expecting income for your work. We’ve been able to connect with some cool people through the blog so that is also a great outcome. 

Program	Income earned in Q3 2020	Change QoQ
Traveling Mailbox	$249.60	-$9.1
Bluehost Affiliation	$0.00	-$75
Google AdSense	$64.23	+20.37
Google FI	$60.00	+$20
Amazon Affiliates	$52.45	+$22.1
Personal Capital	$20.00	+$20
Airbnb	$19.00	+$19
Grand Total	$465.28	+$17.37 (+3.7%)

If you look at our total for the first half of the year, this brings the total for 2020 to $1,368.42, which is currently more that what we made in 2019 so there is progress! 

What can we do with this income?

Great question! Well as travelers $465 can go a long way based on where we can go. In normal circumstances, we could get it to enjoy 15×2 1-hour long oil massages in Thailand as a couple or an hour-long foot massages to relax these legs after long hikes every other day! If we would be back in the USA the story would be quite different as we could probably only enjoy one 50 minutes couple massage back in California (in a place like the Nob Hill SPA in San Francisco that I’ve been before that currently offer 2×50 minutes couple massages for $425! quite sad, isn’t it?)

But since we are here in Taiwan, we could use it to treat ourselves to fancy date nights every two weeks at places like Ikki that serve wonderful Japanese food and a dinner set for two for less than $50 USD! (Check our June destination report of our life in Taiwan if you want more details).

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Would you like to start your own blog?

If you are interested to start 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! What are you waiting for? Check out our step by step guide to start a blog and let us know if you have any questions!

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.