Travel Blog Diary: Week 8 — One More Dollar!

Here’s what happened in the eighth week of my travel blog journey, where I made one more dollar!

Last week I hit $2 in revenue, and this week the momentum continued and I made another dollar! I’m pretty sure it came from my husband clicking on a speaker ad since the timing lined up 😅. While I would’ve liked it better if the money came from strangers, at least my husband found the ad relevant (he’s been researching speakers) and hopefully others will too!

As planned, I also looked into how to grow on Instagram. ChatGPT suggested adding hashtags, engaging with other creators, and making Reels. I’m not ready to make Reels yet since I don’t have many videos from past trips, but I did try to add hashtags to past posts and started following other accounts with travel content.

Here’s a summary of what I accomplished:

Content

UI

Stats

Overall

Cost$67 (Hosting $60 + Domain $7)
Posts Published62 (+5)
Views790 (+40)
Revenue$3 (+1) 💸
Profit-$64

Search

Impressions67 (+20)
Clicks16 (+4)
Average Position4.6 (+2.1)

IG

Posts Published23 (+3)
Followers24 (+4)
Views (Last 30 Days)2450 (+150)

Substack

Posts Published1 (+0)
Subscribers13 (+0)
Views78 (+4)

High / Lowlights

Final Thoughts

I have a newfound respect for creators with millions followers. It takes a lot to stand out among so many accounts with pretty photos or cool videos. From what I’ve seen, popular posts tend to be:

I’m probably not going to compete with professional photographers on pure aesthetics, but maybe I can try to focus on usefulness? I’m not sure how though — something for future me to figure out.

Next week I plan to:

Stay tuned to see if I can earn another dollar next week!

Comments

6 responses

  1. Moussa Avatar
    Moussa

    Do you have clarity on what made a post useful for you? Like what kinds of things you learned? I am guessing you already have a recipe; what made a post useful for you could make it useful for others too. Good luck.

    Also, congrats on your first noticeable outage 🥳

    Reply
    1. Alice Avatar
      Alice

      I’ve been following the format of top 5 things to do and tips, but I might start experimenting with different formats once I’ve covered most of the places I’ve visited using the existing format. Are there other types of content that you would find useful?
      Haha thanks!

      Reply
      1. Moussa Avatar
        Moussa

        We are visiting my sister in PA atm and they live close to the Amish village. Neda was reading about them, made me think: maybe pick a niche of unthinkable ideas about the places you’ve visited. She found that they offer “goat therapy for kids” in their village which would not have come to my mind.

        Reply
        1. Moussa Avatar
          Moussa

          Imo, it is more about the content than the format. Also it really depends on the audience you are targeting. I may be wrong, but with “the top 5 things you can do in xx” you will not build a weekly audience. That is useful for someone who is planning to visit xx and that article should be made optimized for search engine or search-ai chatgpt-like chatbots.

          To build a weekly audience, you will need some kind of a cliffhanger in your content or something that your audience looks forward to reading next week. Like these weekly updates are what I look for. But right now this is not your core product. Do you happen to have journals of your trips? Maybe you can tell the stories in sequel? Iirc, you love nature and that’s what you liked the most about your trips? Maybe write about that? What did you feel when you saw xyz at first? Just some ideas.

          Reply
          1. Alice Avatar
            Alice

            interesting, thanks for the ideas!! I don’t have journals of my trips, just the itineraries. I am going to Mexico City in a month, so I’ll see what it’s like to write more in the moment. So far I’m mostly writing about past trips so it’s easier to do listicles haha

          2. Moussa Avatar
            Moussa

            Fun!! I loved mexico city. Have a lot of fun.

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