Blog Income Report 2023

As we like transparency in what we do, it is this time of the year to share with you how much we made from our blog. Our numbers aren’t mind blowing (yet?) but you might be interested to see that we do generate some income that requires little effort to maintain once they have been properly set up. Although truth be told, we put a lot of effort into creating content that we think will be helpful so if you calculated the income on an hourly rate, it would definitely be less than minimum wage!

Creating 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 if you want a BIG boost) 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 2023 (which covers the period from 1/1/2023 to 12/31/2023). Are you ready to dive in?

Table of contents hide

How do we monetize our blog?

Affiliate Marketing

Display advertising

Referral

What works and what doesn’t?

Show me the money

How much money did our blog earn so far?

What revenue to expect for 2024?

Would you like to start your own blog?

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.

Remarkable Affiliate Program: we have been using Remarkable since 2021 and we love it!

What do we get? Every time someone purchase a Remarkable II using our offer ($40 off), we get $40 USD back towards our order (up to the total order amount)
Want to know more? We wrote an in-depth r eview of Remarkable II as our ultimate note taking device as nomads. It is quite a powerful device and it keeps improving month over month thanks to pretty impressive software updates!

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 2023.

Let’s start with our source of blog income:

Our blog income for Q1 2023 (per source, ordered per performance for this quarter starting with the best performing one to the least performing one)

Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program (making 69.9% 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.
Google AdSense (21.1% 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.
Booking.com Affiliate Program (5.1% of our blog income for this quarter). Booking.com is finally picking up on our blog. Not sure why but this is nice to see that people are booking stays through our links!
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 2023:

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 2023.
For the previous quarter, check out our previous income reports.

Here you have our numbers for 2023:

This blog across all sources of revenue has brought in 2023: $1,322.98 (or $110 / month).

Program	Income earned in 2023	Change YoY
Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program	$924.60	-7.8%
Google AdSense	$278.53	+27%
Booking.com Affiliate Program	$68.01	-42%
Amazon.com Associates Program	$51.84	-18%
Bluehost Affiliate Program	$0.00	N/A
Personal Capital RAF	$0.00	N/A
Grand Total	$1,322.98	$126.98 (+39 %)

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: $7,563 (or ~$115 / month).

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

2023 – $1,322.98
(Q1 2023 – $452.86)
2022 – $1,395.11
(Q4 2022 – $325.88 / Q3 2022 – $323.01 / Q2 2022 – $318.58 / Q1 2022 – $375.85)
2021 – $1,892.73
(Q4 2021 – $277.22 / Q3 2021 – $350.12 / Q2 2021 – $633.62 / Q1 2021 – $619.42)
2020 – $1,704.71
(Q4 2020 – $450.33 / Q3 2020 – $465.28 / Q2 2020 – $447.91 / Q1 2020 – $342.00)
2019 – $1,205.71
2018 – $39.90

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 2024?

Well it turns out that publishing new content in 2023 might not have made much of a difference to the amount of traffic our blog received. For 2024, we are going to experiment with trying to publish different types of articles, focusing on the one that has been performing the most in 2023.

Here are our top 10 performing blog post of 2023 based on page views:

Interesting to note that 50% of our most popular content was written in 2023 but the other 50% was 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.