How To Fund Traveling Around Asia With Your Own Travel Blog
If you’ve always wanted to travel around Asia, but worried that money could be a problem, there is a way to fund your traveling expenses without having to resort to a boring job. For many travelers around Asia, in fact, starting their own travel blog online has given them enough money for all their traveling expenses. Sometimes for years.
Here’s how to go about starting your own travel blog so you too could soon be on the Asian trip of your dreams.
Buy a laptop
Don’t rely on being able to find an internet cafe to update your blog. While they are everywhere in Asia, you will also want to be able to work in beach-side cafes, on buses traveling across the continent and in your hotel room.
You can buy an excellent netbook (small and lightweight) for less than $500, and it will last you for several years.
Start your blog before you go
Don’t start a blog when you are already on your trip. Blogs can take six months or more to start making money, so you want to have a blog well established before you go.
Start your blog with initial information about your planned trip. Talk about which Asian countries you plan on visiting. Tell your readers about what you will be packing, about the research you have done on each country, the process for applying for travel visas and on and on.
If you do this every day, by the time you leave for your Asian travels you could have several thousand daily readers and be well on your way to earning money with your blog.
Add Google AdSense and affiliate links
Once you have at least 10 posts on your blog, apply for a Google AdSense account so you can start putting advertising on your blog. It’s the easiest way to make consistent money and, in some cases, can be lucrative. Add affiliate links as well featuring travel-related products, and see your earnings rise even more.
Blog every day
As soon as you start your trip, blog every day. Even if it’s just a quick post about your latest hotel and a photo of your room, or a note about the US embassy being closed, it will give your readers an incentive to keep coming back. Plus, the more daily visits you have the more money you will make.
Put up lots of photos
Photographs are what many blog readers look for. They don’t just want to hear about your Asian trip, they want to see it. Take photographs of every dish you eat in every country you visit. Photograph the people, the places, the temples, the tuk-tuks, the elephants, the beaches and, of course, the weird and the odd.
Your readers will come back every day, sometimes several times a day, if your blog is being constantly updated with new photos.
Open a YouTube account
People also love to see videos of where you are. Take videos of street scenes, restaurants, the people, your hotel room, the nightlife, the markets and, yes, the strange food, and put it all on your YouTube account.
Link to every video from your blog, and you’ll soon get even more viewers who find you on YouTube.
Don’t forget, you can also add Google AdSense to your YouTube videos, making your vids another great revenue source.
Consistency
Finally, don’t forget about consistency. While, of course, the point about traveling Asia is to see the world, you won’t make any money blogging if you only put up a new post once a week.
Decide upon a set time each day where you work on your blog (it can be as short as 15-30 minutes) and, unless you are physically curled up in a ball suffering from horrendous food poisoning or dying, stick to it.
Consistency makes your readers keep returning again and again. Consistency will help you make money and you’ll soon find that trip that was meant to last two months has now lasted two years as you are making so much money from it it’s better than a full-time job.
