Meet Tim and Ting, a pair of Taiwanese travel bloggers whose content strays from the beaten path – all the way to Middle Earth (read: New Zealand).
Traditional Chinese websites for Taiwanese traveler favorites, like Japan and Korea, were already abundant. The duo thus opted to provide a comprehensive guide to another Asia-Pacific location that’s well worth visiting. In doing so, they’ve carved out their own niche.
What Tim started as a hobby has now become a full-time job for two. That means it has to generate income – and it does. In a single month, Tim Ting Travel generated over $9,000 in revenue on Travelpayouts.
Read on to learn how Tim and Ting use Travelpayouts Drive, including Switch Links, Targeted Offers and Content Analytics, to save time on links and test what works for their cleverly crafted guides.
Finding a niche – and owning it with comprehensive content
As consumers of travel content themselves, Tim and Ting knew first-hand the frustration of trying (and failing) to find all-encompassing guides to the places they wanted to visit.
Even though there were so many blogs out there, not a single one offered a one-stop solution to all our questions. So, if that’s the case, why not create a blog like that myself?
On top of continuing to cover New Zealand, the pair are now branching out to the US. In both cases, they draw from their own experience.
We wanted to create the most comprehensive and complete website possible to address the pain points we’d encountered ourselves.
“Comprehensive” is not a figure of speech here. One of their guides compares 13 car rental companies; another works through six Milford Sound cruise operators. A normal article takes seven to ten days to research and write. A guide the size of the ones mentioned takes two to three weeks. Those two articles are among the best-performing pages on the site.
Since its creators are very much SEO-focused, Tim Ting Travel’s traffic is primarily search-based. Almost all of that traffic comes from Google, and Tim is the first to call that a risk rather than a strategy. For a creator starting out with few resources, he thinks one channel is the right place to begin. For anyone past that stage, he doesn’t recommend copying him and Ting.
Diversifying through other channels is the only way to avoid the risk of relying on a single source of traffic – for example, the impact of Google AI Overview has been quite significant.
But they don’t write articles purely with search performance in mind: the goal is first to create articles that address readers’ real needs:
The most important point really comes down to this: ‘Do you understand your readers? Can you solve their pain points?’
Getting the manual work off the table
Tim and Ting weren’t new to affiliate marketing before joining Travelpayouts. Previously, they relied on the Pretty Link plugin, managing the process manually by removing existing affiliate IDs, wrapping links, and inserting them one by one – just three steps, but repeating them over and over was time-consuming.
The pair found out about Travelpayouts by accident, after coming across a monetization opportunity on the platform. They moved over gradually, shifting part of their affiliate partnerships from other programs to Travelpayouts. They then decided to try Drive – Travelpayouts’ AI-powered monetization system, which helps bloggers automatically find and add relevant affiliate links across their content. Marketing representative Danil recommended the tool to them. Eugenia, Travelpayouts’ partnerships manager, then helped Tim fine-tune the setup. Along the way, they ran several rounds of on-off tests of Drive features and adjusted the settings as the data came in.
At the time, we found the tool’s mechanism quite appealing because it allowed us to generate more affiliate opportunities without affecting our readers. Plus, after reviewing the setup instructions, it didn’t seem too complicated.
One function that stood out for Tim and Ting was Switch Links, which removed the need for their old manual process.
We can simply paste the link and it’s automatically converted into an affiliate link – this has definitely saved us a lot of time.
Switch Links converts the links already in an article into affiliate links automatically. The income from those links still depends on the article and its search traffic. But the tool takes over the repetitive part, so the time goes into writing instead of managing links.
Checking the data instead of guessing
The other function that caught Tim and Ting’s attention was Content Analytics, which they say is more detailed than analytics they’ve encountered on most affiliate platforms. They can break down performance by article, tool, order type, and affiliate partner.
This allows us, for the first time, to use such detailed data to conduct multi-faceted cross-validation and analysis, which is extremely helpful for optimizing our content overall.
They don’t use data simply to track results. They use it to test whether new monetization opportunities are genuinely adding value. For example, they’re currently analyzing the Targeted Offers function:
We’re still conducting more in-depth testing in this area, particularly focusing on whether Drive’s Targeted Offers affect the conversion rates of the original products featured in our articles.
Switch Links has become Tim and Ting’s biggest Drive earner. The over $9,000 their site generated on Travelpayouts in a single month is the result of how the whole site is run and of a gradual move of affiliate partnerships to the platform.
Targeted Offers is still a work in progress. They have switched it on and off several times, adjusted the settings with their Partner Manager, and checked the numbers after every change. Drive has also shown them monetization opportunities they hadn’t expected, such as Trip.com.
Turn on Drive, and you’ll get access to Switch Links and Targeted Offers. Then use Content Analytics to see which ones work best for your site.
From blog to a wider travel business
Besides running the website, Tim and Ting also offer other products and services. These include e-books, consulting services, and customized itinerary planning, which they also integrate affiliate links into.
The pair didn’t launch these products simply for the sake of additional income:
I personally believe that market feedback was a key catalyst for launching our own products.
However, in addition to giving their audience what they want, branching out has brought them new opportunities. As a result, they have diversified their revenue streams.
As for the future, they are currently working on expanding both in terms of the destinations they cover and audience they can reach:
In addition to writing articles about Europe, we’re also developing our own AI tool to see if we can make our content accessible to audiences in different languages. This is a project currently in the testing phase.
As you can see, AI is becoming essential. It can not only help create content, but also analyze and monetize it – as Content Analytics and Drive from Travelpayouts demonstrate.
Lessons from Tim and Ting
Tim and Ting’s approach to travel blogging comes down to a few specific principles:
Start with the reader
Create content that solves genuine problems instead of chasing products with the highest commissions:
First, focus on solving readers’ pain points – conversion rates will naturally follow as a byproduct.
Focus instead of trying to cover everything
Look for an information gap you understand and build comprehensive coverage around it before expanding too broadly:
‘Focus’ yields results faster than ‘broad coverage’; a niche market doesn’t mean no traffic – it could be another blue ocean.
Use data for guidance
Don’t assume which monetization strategies are working. Test them and look at the results, and then adjust accordingly. Tim and Ting did this with Drive: they switched features on and off, compared the results by article in Content Analytics, and adjusted the settings with their Partner Manager.
And if you’re not sure how to get started with analytics, check out our guide for some useful tips.
Bonus: don’t rush to go full time
Before relying on blogging financially, it’s better to gradually establish two things:
- Whether you genuinely love creating content, or if it’s just a passing fad.
- Whether you’ll stay motivated to keep going in the beginning – when there’s absolutely no income or encouragement – or if you’ll quickly lose patience because you don’t see results and give up early on.
Tim and Ting’s journey shows that blogging can become a full-time business – but there’s no single path to getting there. They built their site, niche, audience, and overall business over time, following the approach that worked for them. Instead of copying them step-by-step, let yourself get inspired and see what you can adapt to your own site.
For Travelpayouts partners, the key takeaway is simple: create content that serves a clear audience and use data to see what actually works. If you’re not using Drive yet, this is another reason to give it a try: alongside new monetization opportunities, you’ll get Content Analytics to gain insights into performance and make informed decisions about your site.
Every site is different, so test the features, compare the results, and keep what works for yours.
