Blog Income Report – Q3+Q4 (EOY) 2021

Since we are still a modest 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. And you might also appreciate seeing how much progress we have made over time.  

Don’t be fooled though! Living off a blog requires a lot of work that includes:

• publishing quality content on a regular basis (consistency is your friend) 
• promoting your content (and your identity) on other platforms that will help amplify your story (ie. guest posts, podcast interviews…). 
• building a newsletter to get your 1000 True Fans (a concept Kevin Kelly talks about in his book: 1000 True Fans: Simple Idea to Earn A Living Doing What You Love.)

This is why you should first and foremost blog about things you are passionate about before thinking about how to monetize your content.

In this article, we explain how we monetize our blog, what works, what doesn’t, and how much we made in the second half of 2021 (which covers the period from 7/1/2021 to 12/31/2021). Are you 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:

Airbnb Associates Program: we get commission by sharing travel content from Airbnb. 

• What do we get? Every time someone books a stay through our blog we get paid 25-30% of the Airbnb guest fee. Every time someone books an experience through our blog, we get paid 25% of the Airbnb host fee. 
• Want to know more? Email us and we will be happy to share more about this program.  

Note: Airbnb closed this program at the end of Q1 2021 so we will stop reporting about it at the end of 2021

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 

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 (in times of a pandemic, you might want to consider using them to securely handle your mail for you!)

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 ads 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 are currently members of the following referral programs: 

Airbnb RAF: 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? 

Note: Airbnb closed this program this quarter so we will stop reporting about it moving forward.

Want to know more? Check out our ultimate guide to Airbnb to learn our best techniques to score some really sweet deals while traveling!

Google FI RAF: we’ve been using google FI since we started our international travel and it has made staying connected so easy and we don’t have to worry about having to purchase a local sim card every place 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).

Note: We’ve maxed out our $200 of referral per account limit so we will stop reporting about it moving forward.

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 both Q3 2021 and Q4 2021.

Q3 2021

Here is the breakdown of our revenue in Q3 2021 per source of blog income we just discussed:

Our blog income for Q3 2021 (per source, ordered per performance for this quarter starting with the best performing one to the least performing one)

• Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program (making 78.6% of our blog income for this quarter) is still the best return per amount of time we’ve invested. We created our review of Traveling Mailbox in 2018 that we refresh once a year to keep it 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 (20.1% of our blog income for this quarter). We are pretty happy with this source of income as we don’t have to do anything to maintain it. 
• Amazon.com Associates Program (1.2% of our blog income for this quarter). Amazon has reduced their commission fee by a lot after the pandemic and we have not actively promoted many affiliate links on our blog in 2021. Some of our top performing blog posts when it comes to affiliate revenue are our packing list articles: 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 Q3 2021: 

• Bluehost Affiliate Program (0% of our blog income for this quarter) – 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 quarter though.
• Google FI RAF (0% of our blog income for this quarter) – We have reached the Google FI $200 referral credit per account for one of our accounts and actually lost 5 referral credits in 2021 because we reached that cap. We switched to using Mrs’ NN Google FI referral link instead but since we share the same account I don’t think we can get more referrals at this point.
• Personal Capital RAF (0% of our blog income for this quarter). 

Q4 2021

Here is the breakdown of our revenue in Q4 2021 per source of blog income we just discussed:

Our blog income for Q4 2021 (per source, ordered per performance for this quarter starting with the best performing one to the least performing one)

• Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program (making 66.3% of our blog income for this quarter) is still the best return per amount of time we’ve invested. We created our review of Traveling Mailbox in 2018 that we refresh once a year to keep it 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 (14.3% of our blog income for this quarter). We are pretty happy with this source of income as we don’t have to do anything to maintain it. 
• Amazon.com Associates Program (14.1% of our blog income for this quarter). Amazon has reduced their commission fee by a lot after the pandemic and we have not actively promoted many affiliate links on our blog in 2021. Some of our top performing blog posts when it comes to affiliate revenue are our packing list articles: Men packing list for long term travel + Women packing list for long term travel).
• Airbnb Associates Program (making 5.3% of our blog income for this quarter). The program has been shutdown in Q1 2021 so these are residual income due to people booking a late vacation when the program was still open.

We did not receive any income from the following sources in Q4 2021: 

• Bluehost Affiliate Program (0% of our blog income for this quarter) – 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 quarter though.
• Google FI RAF (0% of our blog income for this quarter) – We have reached the Google FI $200 referral credit per account for one of our accounts and actually lost 5 referral credits in 2021 because we reached that cap. We switched to using Mrs’ NN Google FI referral link instead but since we share the same account I don’t think we can get more referrals at this point.
• Personal Capital RAF (0% of our blog income for this quarter). 

Show me the money

Let’s look at income made during Q3 and Q4 quarters of 2021. For the previous quarter, check out our earlier blog posts (Q2 2021 blog income report, Q1 2021 blog income report).

Q3 2021 Blog Income

So here you have our numbers for Q3 2021:

This blog across all sources of revenue has brought in Q3 2021: $637.12 (or $212 / 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 blogging has to be something you love doing versus expecting income for your work. 

For us the blog has enabled us to connect with like minded people as well as share our stories on great podcasts or websites (read our Press page for details).

Program	Income earned in Q3 2021	Change QoQ
Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program	$275.25	+$25.65
Airbnb Associates Program	$0	+$272.25
Bluehost Affiliate Program	$0.00	N/A
Google AdSense	$70.54	+$8.01
Google FI RAF	$0.00	N/A
Amazon.com Associates Program	$0.00	-$12.74
Personal Capital RAF	$0.00	N/A
Airbnb RAF	$0.00	-$40.00
Grand Total	$350.12	-$287 (-217%)

Here is our income breakdown for this quarter in a graphical version:

Q4 2021 Blog Income

So here you have our numbers:

This blog across all sources of revenue has brought in Q4 2021: $277.22 (or $92 / 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 blogging has to be something you love doing versus expecting income for your work. 

For us the blog has enabled us to connect with like minded people as well as share our stories on great podcasts or websites (read our Press page for details).

Program	Income earned in Q3 2021	Change QoQ
Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program	$183.70	-$91.55
Airbnb Associates Program	$14.75	+$14.75
Bluehost Affiliate Program	$0.00	N/A
Google AdSense	$39.75	-$30.79
Google FI RAF	$0.00	N/A
Amazon.com Associates Program	$39.02	+$39.02
Personal Capital RAF	$0.00	N/A
Airbnb RAF	$0.00	N/A
Grand Total	$277.22	-$72.90 (-217%)

How much money did our blog earn so far?

Check out our previous income reports to see how much our blog has made in the previous quarters:

• Q4 2021 – $277.22
• Q3 2021 – $350.12
• Q2 2021 – $633.62
• Q1 2021 – $619.42
• Q4 2020 – $450.33
• Q3 2020 – $465.28
• Q2 2020 – $447.91

And here is our total blog income since we started blogging in the summer of 2018!
Love to see this steady increase in income.

As we said during our previous income reported, we we planning on posting less frequently since we left Taiwan in Mid may to spend time with family and also to build the mobile version of Nomad Purse (You can learn more and sign-up for our Android beta here). This definitely confirmed our assumptions that less content would mean less revenue.

What revenue to expect for 2022?

We started 2022 back on track on our content schedule, so we are expecting our income to get back to when it was back in Q1 2021. While it is nice for the blog to generate income, this is now it’s primary goal, so we will keep reporting on income but not using this as a success metric for the blog. It is nice thoug to have and we don’t mind that extra cash coming in.

On the positive side, most of our income on this blog is coming from the Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program, which is a pretty generous and recurring affiliate program. We also started creating income via Google AdSense but this isn’t has significant and Traveling Mailbox.

On the negative side the Airbnb Associates Program has been retired at the end of Q1 2021 so we have mostly benefited from this great program for the first part of the year. Airbnb has also shut down the Refer a friend program that never generated a lot of income to us, until this month for some reason. Too bad as we travel the world thanks to Airbnb and we would have loved to be able to get some kickbacks from sharing the best places we’ve been traveling to since 2018. Oh well…

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! What are you waiting for? 

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.