Detailed Look at Quarterly Blog Income Report – Q1 2021

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 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 first quarter of 2021 (which covers the period from 1/1/2021 to 3/31/2021). 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.  

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? 

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).

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?

Here is the breakdown of our revenue in Q1 2021 per source of blog income we just discussed:

Our blog income for Q1 2021 (per source, ordered per performance for this quarter starting with the best performing one to the least performing one)

• By far, Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program (making 66.8% of our blog income for this quarter | +19.30% QoQ) is 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.
• Airbnb Associates Program (making 2.9% of our blog income for this quarter) this quarter. While we are still dealing with the pandemic, I’ve been pleased that people have been using our site to book stays or experiences on Airbnb. 
• Google AdSense (10.8% of our blog income for this quarter | -5.10% QoQ). We are pretty happy with this source of income as we don’t have to do anything to maintain it. 
• Amazon.com Associates Program (1.1% of our blog income for this quarter – -8.20% QoQ). This is a pretty significant drop in revenue since last quarter. Might be related to the fact that we haven’t been promoting many Amazon affiliate links recently (like our Men packing list for long term travel or our Women packing list for long term travel).

We did not receive any income from the following sources this quarter: 

• Airbnb RAF (0% of our blog income for this quarter).
• 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 because we reached that cap. We are migrating to Mrs’ NN account.
• Personal Capital RAF (0% of our blog income for this quarter). 

Show me the money

So here you have our numbers:

This blog across all sources of revenue has brought in Q1 2020: $619.42 (or $206 / 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 Q1 2021	Change QoQ
Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program	$413.90	+$200.2
Airbnb Associates Program	$131.71	+$48.66
Bluehost Affiliate Program	$0.00	N/A
Google AdSense	$71.72	-$4.62
Google FI RAF	$0.00	-$40.00
Amazon.com Associates Program	$6.71	-$35.15
Personal Capital RAF	$0.00	N/A
Airbnb RAF	$0.00	N/A
Grand Total	$619.42	+$169.09 (+38%)

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

This brings the total for 2021 to $619.42 so far.

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 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:

What revenue to expect for the rest of 2021?

Great question! Assuming we keep posting on a weekly basis and people still enjoy our content, we expect this income to keep growing slightly but still don’t expect to make any significant income.

On the positive side, we have growing income coming from the Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program ($413.90 this quarter). Google AdSense ($67.10 this quarter) has also proven to be a decent revenue source that we will plan on keeping.

On the negative side, the Airbnb Associates Program is being retired at the end of Q1 2021 so we won’t be able to get much more income besides the pending bookings that have been made. That is a bummer since we have been earning more than 20% using this program by introducing it in Q4 2020.  

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? 

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.