January 12, 2026

Travel Blog Diary: Week 15 — Money in the Bank

Here’s what happened in the fifteenth week of my travel blog journey, where I received my first affiliate payout!

Last week I found out I had made my first affiliate income 🎉 and wrote about my Mexico City trip. This week I went back to my full-time job, and didn’t create much new content. I did setup my Viator payment method and got paid for December’s commission — my first money in the bank! It was nice to see Viator pay out immediately, unlike Google AdSense which requires hitting $100 before cashing out. I also thought Viator would exclude my own bookings at pay out time, but looks like they didn’t. I’m not going to complain about the extra money 😛, but now that I know how it works, I’ll be more careful about keeping my tracking clean going forward.

Content

Created another IG post for Mexico City and shared to FB.

Stats

Overall

Cost	$67 (Hosting $60 + Domain $7)
Posts Published	81 (+1)
Views	1120 (+40)
Revenue	$12 (+0)
Profit	-$55

Search

Impressions	196 (+15)
Clicks	23 (+0)
Average Position	27.9 (+1.1)

IG / Facebook

Metric	IG	Facebook
Posts Published	31 (+1)	18 (+4)
Followers	32 (+0)	23 (+0)
Views (Last Month)	360 (-130)	230 (-120)

Substack

Metric	Amount
Posts Published	3 (+0)
Subscribers	13 (+0)
Views	161 (+1)

High / Lowlights

✅ Got paid by Viator!
❌ Revenue stayed flat this week.
❌ Saw another drop in IG/Facebook views. I tried to schedule some Facebook link posts during the week since they’re easy to create, but those got very few views.

Final Thoughts

I was hoping that my Mexico City tour and food posts would rank higher on Google because they’re more niche, but Google has still only indexed 40 of my pages and it doesn’t seem like those new posts are indexed yet. Interestingly, Bing has already indexed both posts, and my Expendio de Maiz review shows up as the first result when I search by post title! Too bad Bing gets way less traffic than Google…

Also, my scheduled link posts got so little views on Facebook that I don’t think they’re worth creating anymore. Going forward, I’ll schedule photo posts instead since they perform better without requiring much more work. Reels still get the most reach on both IG and Facebook, but they take significantly more effort to create so I probably won’t make them unless I have good source material.

Let’s see what next week brings!