Nope, the title isn’t a typo.
A quick heads up before we start: we usually write about wins – record traffic, big monetization jumps, the kind of stuff that makes you want to start a blog tomorrow. Today we’re switching things up a bit and looking at failure instead.
This time we asked experienced travel bloggers to tell us about the travel blog mistakes they made along the way. Think of it as a little collection of real travel blogging tips and lessons from people who lived through it and came out the other side.
And if any of these stories sound a bit too familiar, don’t panic. Most blogging mistakes can be fixed. Keep reading so you can avoid them, or maybe spot one you already made and figure out what to do next.
1. Forget about your audience
A travel blog might start out as something just for you, but sooner or later, your readers become part of the picture too. Once you find your niche, it’s worth thinking about both sides: what you like writing, and what your audience actually wants to read.
That choice ripples further than the writing itself, straight into how much the content actually earns. Two sites can get the exact same number of visitors and end up with very different results. We touched on this in our article about the trends we picked up at TBEX, but real examples make the point much clearer.
Firstly, forget where your audience comes from
Not all traffic is worth the same. Where your audience is from can seriously change your ad revenue, even if your number of sessions doesn’t move at all.
“A mistake I made during my blogging journey was thinking all traffic was equal – I wish someone had told me at the very start of my blogging journey that RPM’s for ad networks vary depending on where your audience is from. For example, when I look at my RPMs now, my US audience pays me more than double what most other countries’ audiences pay me for the same number of sessions – so for maximum monetisation, the trick is to figure out where a US audience travels!”
Amelia Austin
Quick explanation: RPM stands for revenue per mille, basically how much a site earns per 1,000 sessions or pageviews, depending on how the ad network counts it. So an RPM of $20 means a website earns around $20 for every 1,000 sessions.
Secondly, forget about user experience
If you want people to click onto your site and click right back off again, this is a good way to do it.
“For years I chased Google AdSense. Every time I read another article about increasing ad revenue I’d tweak something else, add another advert or move things around, convinced I was making the site better. Looking back, I was doing exactly the opposite.
Eventually I decided to remove AdSense completely. It was a bit scary because I’d had adverts on my sites for years, but I finally admitted that they weren’t creating the kind of websites I wanted to build.
Now my articles are so much cleaner. People can actually read them without adverts breaking up every section, and the whole experience feels far more enjoyable. Instead of thinking, “Where can I fit another advert?”, I started thinking, “What information would genuinely help someone visiting this place?” Ironically, that change of mindset worked out much better for me.”
Clive Muir
Every element on the page should earn its spot – ads included. Figuring out whether it actually does is simpler than it sounds, and we’ll get into that further down.
2. Use every affiliate program you can find
When monetization isn’t working, adding more affiliate programs and more links can feel like the obvious fix. But more options don’t automatically mean more bookings, especially if the content itself isn’t built around what readers are actually ready to click or book.
“I earned my first $100 after about one year through a sponsored banner on my website. However, despite having good traffic, I was not earning much money. One of my biggest mistakes was focusing on traffic without properly understanding monetization. I added affiliate links throughout my articles and joined many different programs, including CJ, direct affiliate programs, and Travelpayouts. However, my articles were not properly optimized for affiliate conversions, so the links did not perform well.”
Katarina Komazec
How many programs you’ve joined matters less than whether each recommendation actually fits, is easy to find, and shows up right when the reader might need it.
And you don’t have to be the one who remembers to fix recommendations either. Travelpayouts Drive quietly finds the old articles that need a fresh link or a new recommendation and updates them for you – so a post you wrote three years ago can still earn today, without you touching a word of the text.
3. Don’t install Drive
Since we already brought up Drive, let’s stick with it for a second.
Here’s a fun exercise: open your analytics, find your best post from two years ago, and check whether its links still work, its tours are still running, and it’s still recommending the right hotel. If that made you wince, you’re not alone.
You can keep checking old posts by hand. Or let something else do it, for free, while you write the next one.
That’s what Drive is for. It finds the spots in your existing content where a booking option is missing, a tour listing is missing details, or a link isn’t monetized yet – and fixes it without touching your actual words. It also adds relevant links and recommendations to posts that never had them in the first place.
“But I already monetize my site,” someone might say.
Good! Drive isn’t there to replace your current setup. It works alongside it and helps cover more of the trip: flights, hotels, tours, buses, eSIMs. It’s free to turn on, and you decide which parts of it you actually want running. It’s also how you find out which content is actually working – which matters more than most bloggers realize. Lana learned this the hard way.
“I don’t even want to know how much money I’ve lost as a result of not looking at my data in the beginning of my blogging journey!! It’s definitely in the thousands. I’ve had posts ranking on Google for months without being optimized for affiliates. I’ve had broken affiliate links or tours no longer running on my site because I didn’t check often enough.
But the biggest lesson is what I’ve learned from digging into my data through the Travelpayouts Content Analytics tool. I can spot conversion issues easily thanks to the click–through rates for each blog post. I can see what posts are getting the most bookings and actually figure out why instead of guessing! Overall, there is so much value in the data if you actually LOOK. I wish I had been paying this much attention from the start of my blogging journey!”
Lana Sitler
What tripped Lana up wasn’t the writing – her posts were really good. She just never went back to see what they earned.
And a good post can keep earning for years after it’s published. But once you’ve moved on to the next one, it’s easy to lose track of what’s actually earning money and why.
Drive handles both sides of that problem: it keeps old links and recommendations up to date automatically, while Content Analytics shows which posts convert, which drop off, and where the money is – the simple answer to that ad question from earlier. Together, they turn what you’ve already written into income you’re not actively chasing.
4. Ignore SEO
There are two pretty reliable ways to mess up travel blog SEO.
One is assuming a great story will find its readers all on its own. The other is following every keyword tip you come across, even when the article that comes out of it isn’t useful or interesting, or something you even want your name on.
SEO can help people find your work. It can’t replace real expertise, or a reason for someone to keep reading.
“When I started out I didn’t know anything about SEO – I thought I could write about anything and that my writing style and passion meant that an audience would find me. So I wrote what I thought were entertaining, quite funny articles about my travels and for two years I basically didn’t get many visitors. It was only after I started reading about SEO and eventually taking a course that I realised I couldn’t just use my blog as my diary. I could still write articles in my voice but they also had to be helpful to people and answer their questions.”
Sasha Kasthuriarachchi
Jessica, another blogger we’ve featured, wishes she’d started SEO much earlier too.
And although everyone still ends up choosing their own path, SEO genuinely helps people find an audience faster. The tricky part comes once things actually start working – it’s easy to get ahead of yourself and…
5. Quit your job without a plan
Nothing says main character energy like torching a steady paycheck on a hunch.
Leaving a stable career for a brand new blog sounds either brave or reckless, depending on who’s telling the story.
The decision itself is only half the story though. What matters more is everything behind it: savings, family support, freelance work on the side, realistic expectations, and being willing to spend years building something before it actually pays off.
Sometimes the risky move works out. That doesn’t mean it was easy, or fast, or something everyone could pull off.
“I quit my 15–year, stable six–figure career in Technical Project Management to blog full time. I had only been blogging for six months. Red flag alert. Big mistake. Or was it?
The first year, I made exactly $0 from my blog. Instead, I focused on building it in the background, and I survived off freelancing. By the following year, about 11% of my income came from the blog. By the third year, that number had grown to 68%. This year, I’m currently tracking at 80%. This just goes to show that what may seem like a mistake to some people, always has another side of the coin. Do what makes you happy, learn along the way, and there’s no such thing as failure.”
Maria DiCicco
What looked like a mistake from the outside turned into a real business. But Maria’s story also involved financial backup, freelance income, several years of work, and a whole lot of uncertainty along the way.
Nobody’s saying you should quit your job after six months. There’s just no universal moment when a blogger suddenly becomes “ready.”
6. Follow basic rules
Some bloggers grow through SEO. Others build an audience somewhere else entirely. Some pick a narrow niche right away. Others only find theirs after writing about all 195 countries first. Some quit their jobs early. Others wait until the numbers make the decision for them.
There’s no one right way into travel blogging. You kind of make up the rules as you go.
So if you’ve been waiting for a sign to just start, maybe this is it. Write the article with imperfect SEO. Treat your blog like a diary for a while. Add a banner you’ll probably rip out six months later. Make the mistakes, fix them, keep publishing.
And maybe in a few years we’ll be interviewing you for an article about successful travel bloggers, and the travel blog mistakes that got them there.
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