Blog Income Report – Q2+Q3+Q4 (EOY) 2022

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 last three quarters of 2022 (which covers the period from 4/1/2022 to 12/31/2022). 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:

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 book and complete a stay (or other product provided by Booking.com) we get paid a 10-15% commission.
• What do you get? You get access to the place we enjoyed and highly recommend though 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 (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 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 Q2 2022, Q3 2022 and Q4 2022 respectively.

Q2 2022

Here is the breakdown of our revenue in Q2 2022 per source of blog income:

Our blog income for Q2 2022 (per source, ordered per performance for this quarter starting with the best performing one to the least performing one)

• Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program (making 67.3% 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 (20.3% 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. 
• Booking.com Affiliate Program (9.4% 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 (9.4% of our blog income for this quarter). A great quarter from this affiliate program. 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 Q2 2022: 

• 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.
• Personal Capital RAF (0% of our blog income for this quarter). 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.

Q3 2022

Here is the breakdown of our revenue in Q3 2022 per source of blog income:

Our blog income for Q3 2022 (per source, ordered per performance for this quarter starting with the best performing one to the least performing one)

• Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program (making 71.0% 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 (19.9% 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 (6.5% 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 (2.6% of our blog income for this quarter). 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 2022: 

• 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.
• Personal Capital RAF (0% of our blog income for this quarter). 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.

Q4 2022

Here is the breakdown of our revenue in Q4 2022 per source of blog income:

Our blog income for Q4 2022 (per source, ordered per performance for this quarter starting with the best performing one to the least performing one)

• Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program (making 60.3% 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 (13.8% 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 (13.6% of our blog income for this quarter). Our best month yet with Booking.com!
• Amazon.com Associates Program (12.2% of our blog income for this quarter). A solid month with Amazing associate program due to the Thanksgiving period. 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 Q4 2022: 

• 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.
• Personal Capital RAF (0% of our blog income for this quarter). 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 Q2+Q3+Q4 2022. For the previous quarter, check out our earlier blog posts (Q1 2022 blog income report, Q3-Q4 2021 blog income report, Q2 2021 blog income report & Q1 2021 blog income report).

Q2 2022 Blog Income

So here you have our numbers for Q2 2022:

This blog across all sources of revenue has brought in Q2 2022: $320.30 (or $107 / month). 

Program	Income earned in Q3 2022	Change QoQ
Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program	$215.60	-$99.10
Booking.com Affiliate Program	$29.97	+$6.88
Google AdSense	$65.05	+$13.30
Amazon.com Associates Program	$9.68	+$0.28
Bluehost Affiliate Program	$0.00	N/A
Personal Capital RAF	$0.00	N/A
Grand Total	$320.30	-$78.64 (-20%)

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

Q3 2022 Blog Income

So here you have our numbers for Q3 2022:

This blog across all sources of revenue has brought in Q3 2022: $321.69 (or $107 / month). 

Program	Income earned in Q3 2022	Change QoQ
Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program	$228.50	$12.90
Booking.com Affiliate Program	$20.95	-$9.02
Bluehost Affiliate Program	$0.00	N/A
Google AdSense	$64.00	-$1.05
Amazon.com Associates Program	$8.24	-$1.44
Personal Capital RAF	$0.00	N/A
Grand Total	$321.69	$1.39 (+1%)

Here is our income breakdown for this quarter

Q4 2022 Blog Income

So here you have our numbers:

This blog across all sources of revenue has brought in Q4 2022: $275.92 (or $92 / month). 

Program	Income earned in Q4 2022	Change QoQ
Traveling Mailbox Affiliate Program	$166.48	-$62.02
Booking.com Affiliate Program	$37.64	$16.69
Bluehost Affiliate Program	$0.00	N/A
Google AdSense	$38.15	-$25.82
Amazon.com Associates Program	$33.65	$25.41
Personal Capital RAF	$0.00	N/A
Grand Total	$275.92	-$45.77 (-14%)

How much money did our blog earn so far?

This blog across all sources of revenue has brought us since inception in July 2018: $6,171 (or $115 / month).

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

• Q1 2022 – $375.85
• 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

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

Since we did not posted as much in 2022 as we used to do, this might have driven a drop in revenue. Do we care? Not really as we do not need the income from this blog to support our lifestyle.

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 2023?

2023 will be an interesting year. We did not stick to a regular posting schedule in 2022 and yet we managed to generate almost as much income as we did during 2021 when we were much more consistent. We have new content line up for 2023 so it will be interested to see if our income increase based on our content.

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. You might want to check them out if you also have a blog you would like to monetize!

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.