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How We Made Over $22.4K in July – Travel Blog Income Report

Welcome to our blog income reports where we share ways we’ve been making money through the blog, the challenges and lessons we learned each month, and finally to celebrate successes however big or small. Though we have a few side hustles, we’re happy that the travel blog is our main hustle.

Life Updates

In July, we sent Josh & Macy to the Czech Republic to write about Prague and the surrounding areas. Meanwhile, Jacob and I went RVing in Bishop, road tripped the Cabot Trail in Nova Scotia, and had a special project in Chattanooga.

The trip to Chattanooga has been in the works for a while and is in partnership with our friends at Presencia, who is a neighborhood-based tutoring and mentorship program in Atlanta’s immigrant community. We’ll be writing up more about that later, but we’re so excited that we were able to do our first trip. The first is always a learning experience, and we hope there will be many more to come!

In between our travels, we celebrated Jacob’s birthday, I’m still working at the climbing gym, and Jacob has been helping out with our friend’s Youtube channel. Have you seen his Off the Pill interview?

Blog Income Report - How We Made Over $22.4K on the Travel Blog in JulyPin

This post may contain affiliate links, where we receive a small commission on sales of the products that are linked at no additional cost to you. Read our full disclosure for more info. Thank you for supporting the brands that make Local Adventurer possible.

Originally Published: August 10, 2019

How We Made OVER $22.4K in July - Travel Blog Income Report

Why We Share Our Income Reports

If you’re new here, you might be wondering why on earth we would share something so personal. We’ve been hesitant to share our income reports for the last 5 years, and we’re super nervous about this post, but since we’re all about trial and error, let’s see how it goes! We’re putting out these income reports for these following reasons.

To Show You How We Make Income Blogging

We always want to be 100% transparent about how we make money through this blog. The amazing thing about the blogging world is that every blogger we’ve talked to does things a bit differently. There are also countless ways to grow and improve your business. When we started, we made most of our money through affiliate sales. Since then, we’ve shifted heavily to sponsored content. A big part of this is because my background is in sales and it’s what I’m good at. You can learn more about my sale method below. As time goes on, this will continue to change, but we want to share how we focus on our strengths to effectively meet our goals.

To Show You the Potential of Blogging

Whether you have a blog or are starting a blog, we want to show you that you can make a career out of blogging.

Even if you don’t want to blog, there are a ton of ways to be financially and location independent and we hope to inspire others to go after it too. If you want to keep your day job, blogging can be a great way for you to make some extra side money.

Esther started the blog 6 years ago and I joined her full time 3 years ago. Even until last year, our parents were worried about us financially, wondering when we would stop “playing” and start taking our lives and work more seriously. Neither of us ended up being “good Asians” (namely a doctor, lawyer, or engineer). It’s an unconventional job and where most people don’t understand all the work that goes on behind the scenes.

We love that our jobs give us flexibility in what we do, but being your own boss isn’t all that it’s cut out to be either. You have to be disciplined and work hard at your business to grow it.

Note: There are a lot of great blogs and resources out there about blogging, but the tough part is that it’s not always replicable unless you also want to start blogging about blogging. We wanted to show you that it’s possible to start a blog on other topics and still make a living. Though we have an e-course in the works, we want to continue to show you that the bulk of our income still comes from our travel blog.

To Track How We're Doing

I’ve always loved sharing goals online and tracking them. Putting them out in the world (via the blog) has helped me so much with accountability. Since we’re constantly tweaking trying to improve the blog, looking at these numbers will help us learn whether we’ve been making the right changes. It’s amazing to see how the sources of income have changed over time and to see where we still have room for improvement.

Ultimately, our life goal is to make enough to live on half our income (right now we’re at 30%), where the rest will go back into the community or support organizations we love.

If you’re not getting the results you want, again, keep in mind that we’ve been blogging for 6 years now and the first month I tried monetizing my blog, I made less than $20. Give it more time and failing in the process is okay. I didn’t have the correct tools that are out now and a lot of it was trial and error. Consider it all an A/B test to figure out what will best work for you.

Breakdown of Income for July 2019

In July 2019 we earned a total of $22,450.77

Affiliate Income
Sponsorships
  • Sponsored Product Posts: $12,991.61 
    *our fave marketplace lately: IZEA
Display Ads
  • Adthrive: $6,919.63
Income Comparison to Other Months
  • Total in 2019 Year Income: $157.576.26
  • Last Month Income: $13,160.63
  • Difference: 70% decrease from last month
Expenses

TOTAL EXPENSES: $6,818.96
TOTAL NET PROFIT: $15,631.81

*Roughly 30% of your income will go to taxes at the end of the year. The number above shows the money set aside for taxes to offset how much we have to pay at the end. It makes it less painful at the end of the year.

July 2019 Blog Traffic Breakdown + Stats

  • Monthly Pageviews: 712,191
  • Daily Average: 23,264
  • Monthly Sessions: 554,289
  • Monthly Unique Visitors: 461,560
  • Social Media Followers: 321,007
  • Email Subscribers: 8,583

Goals for August 2019

Blog Goals
  1. Log hours to see where I’m spending the most time.
  2. Put together a bucket list for Nevada.
  3. Update hotel links for the top 50 posts.
Life Goals
  1. 2 date nights
  2. Finish reading a book
  3. Start intermittent fasting to see how that helps my health.
What's Working on the Blog

I decided this month, I’m going to try logging my hours and seeing where I spend too much time for the blog. I need to cut hours in certain areas that don’t benefit the blog as others.

One of the areas I spend the most time is Pinterest. I tried to pass off some of my tasks to Jacob, but ended up seeing a huge drop in impressions and traffic. Now, that I’m back on it again, our monthly viewership has gone from 4 million to 7 million again.

The analytics below shows you the increase in daily viewers over the past 3 months.

Pinterest Monthly ViewersPin
What Didn't Work + Lessons Learned

I’ve been working on updating our affiliate links, especially on our top performing posts. It seems like there is an increase in affiliate earnings from some of our affiliate partners, but then a few of them just dropped off the map. We’re going to have to do some digging why the links haven’t been tracking or generating commission.

The chart below shows what our affiliate income has looked like for the past year. These numbers will be a little different from how we do our income report, since the chart reflects the sales and commission made the same day, while we calculate the amount for our income report from when we receive the money in the bank. 

Black: Total Affiliate Income Per Month, Darker Blue: Avantlink, Yellow: Amazon, Lighter Blue: Shareasale, Orange: Affiliate Window.

Affiliate Income ChartPin

HOW TO WORK WITH SPONSORS​

The e-course is out! Are you a content creator and want to learn how to work with brands?

If you look at our income reports, we make a majority of our income from sponsored posts. We used to do many one-off partnerships with brands, but over the years we’ve been focused on longer term partnerships. Most our brand sponsorships are over $20k, and one of our most recent ones was over $35k.

With over 10 years of trial and error working in corporate and managing our first business, Jacob has figured out the best ways to pitch and work with brands.

At first we were reluctant to put out just another e-course in this oversaturated, dog-eat-dog market, but we’ve seen our coaching and course actually help people quit their jobs and start their own businesses. How cool is that? Plus, all our students who have put our course to action have made their money back within the month, and one of our students using the e-course has already booked $11k in sponsorships. So effin’ excited to see them conquer this new chapter in their lives. If you’re interested to learn more, see the intro video here.

What have you been up to last month? Any fun plans next month? What are some of your goals next month?
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Esther + Jacob

Esther and Jacob are the founders of Local Adventurer, which is one of the top 5 travel blogs in the US. They believe that adventure can be found both near and far and hope to inspire others to explore locally. They explore a new city in depth every year and currently base themselves in Las Vegas.

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