Hao knows that reliable traffic doesn’t just come overnight. He had already built a thriving site once, before the pandemic brought international travel – and much of his traffic – to a halt. But instead of switching to topics that might bring in readers more quickly, he chose to weather the storm and stick to what he knew best.
Today, Hao is based in Australia, where he works full-time in e-commerce while running Just a Traveler as a passion project and additional source of income. His site primarily serves Traditional Chinese-speaking readers aged from 30 to 40, covering destinations he knows first-hand across Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Japan.
From practical planning guides to detailed comparisons – particularly based on locations like Okinawa – his articles are rooted in personal experience and supported by his own photography from his travels. By combining first-hand knowledge and useful information with SEO, he has developed a site where Google search makes up 80% of traffic.
That success also made him protective of the visibility he’d worked so hard to rebuild. After seeing his traffic disappear during COVID, he knew how quickly a successful travel site could be affected by circumstances outside his control.
Here’s how Hao regained his traffic after COVID – and later earned $13,619 with Travelpayouts.
A site shaped by first-hand experience
Hao doesn’t choose topics based on whatever destination is trending. Instead, he writes about places he knows personally and has spent significant time exploring.
This hands-on approach helps him answer the questions that travelers are actually searching for.
And with his wife being Japanese, he gets deeper insights into one of the destinations he covers:
Through a local’s perspective, I sometimes get to understand viewpoints very different from what tourists usually see, and that becomes useful content I can share with readers.
That combination of personal experience, local insight, practical comparisons, and his own photography gives Just a Traveler its particular angle.
Hao’s focus on destinations he really knows and enjoys writing about proved crucial when his site faced its biggest challenge yet: the period when the world stopped traveling.
When years of traffic disappeared overnight
By 2019–2020, Hao had already built a successful travel site. Then COVID hit.
As international travel came to a standstill, so did much of the traffic his site depended on. Hao thought about changing direction, but ultimately realized that writing about something he was less passionate about for the sake of traffic wasn’t the answer.
If I had deliberately changed topics just to chase traffic, I probably wouldn’t have done it well, and I wouldn’t have been happy either. So in the end I stayed focused on travel.
The decision meant accepting that recovery would take time, but Hao already had something worth returning to: real expertise in a subject he cared about and a site built around it.
The experience also influenced his wider philosophy about running a successful content site:
You really need genuine interest in doing this before thinking about how to monetize the traffic you gradually build – not build traffic purely to monetize it.
But to secure a sustainable audience, Hao needed more than useful content. He also had to make sure the people searching for the information he offered could actually find it.
Learning to make traffic work for him
SEO was a steep learning curve. Once Hao realized just how many factors can affect a site’s visibility, he got serious about research and testing – from site design and article structure to user experience.
I studied many successful sites first, then adapted what I learned into my own style. Eventually that experience became my own skillset.
His approach was shaped by both his professional background and the data that people actually search for.
I combine my marketing background with research into which topics have high search volume, while also being areas I’m personally familiar with – those are the topics I prioritize writing about.
Hao applies SEO to articles that answer specific travel questions – whether comparing places to visit or helping readers decide where to eat, shop, or stay. That gains him visitors primarily through search rather than social media. Today, at least 80% of his traffic comes from organic Google search.
For a site that relies so heavily on search, protecting traffic wasn’t just a technical concern – it was central to Hao’s business model. But once he had his audience, he faced a different challenge: finding effective ways to monetize it without adding more work for himself.
When monetizing traffic became a job of its own
Hao didn’t start monetizing immediately. After two to three years of writing articles, he discovered Google AdSense and began exploring affiliate programs for hotels and travel services.
Gradually, this expanded to include booking links, hotel OTAs, rental cars, and dedicated promo code pages. But the more opportunities he added, the more he had to manage.
Hao still maintains various promo code pages that generate decent income. But keeping them useful means regular updates.
The promo code pages do eat into the time I could spend creating other content. So I try to prioritize longer-lasting promo codes over short-term ones.
Hao has struggled to keep on top of numerous promo code pages, but we’ve gathered everything together in one place. Check out the Promo Codes section in your Travelpayouts personal account.
The same issue applied more broadly to affiliate marketing. Managing links and programs across multiple platforms can quickly become a job in itself.
And when Booking.com discontinued its affiliate program, Hao needed to find an alternative that would let him keep monetizing his existing travel content.
Travelpayouts has all the same affiliates
Booking.com’s decision to close its affiliate program prompted Hao to look for a simpler way to manage travel partnerships.
While researching, I found that Travelpayouts offers this kind of one-stop management platform, and in some cases the commission rates are even higher than the brands’ own official affiliate programs.
Travelpayouts let Hao bring his affiliate programs together and manage his links in one place, reducing the fragmentation that had been adding to his workload.
Before, I managed these links directly through each brand’s own official affiliate platform. After consolidating into one place, it did become somewhat easier.
But the most significant improvement was financial:
The most noticeable change was that income clearly increased.
Now that he was already a Travelpayouts partner, the bigger question was whether he could automate even more of that monetization without hurting his traffic.
Stable traffic, stronger monetization
Since Hao’s site depends heavily on SEO, rankings, and user experience, introducing a new monetization system wasn’t a decision he took lightly.
I was worried at first that it might slow down the site or hurt user experience, which could send bad signals to Google and affect rankings.
But Hao’s experience after enabling Drive – Travelpayouts’ free AI-powered monetization system – set his mind at ease. His rankings and traffic remained stable, while his site received more conversions from its existing audience.
I noticed a clear increase in bookings within about the first month. It accounts for roughly 30% of my income.
Drive’s impact came from helping Hao make more of his site’s existing traffic. With sustainable visibility already in place, Drive added new ways to monetize the readers already coming to his site.
The results were significant. From April 29 through August 25, Hao earned $13,619 through Travelpayouts, with $4,442 coming from Targeted Offers alone.
Why Targeted Offers stood out
Before Drive, Hao’s affiliate programs generally gave him familiar tools to monetize his content: links, banners, and widgets. Targeted Offers added another layer, letting him access opportunities that those programs didn’t cover.
Targeted Offers analyzes each reader to select the most relevant deals for them, then opens the offer in a new window. This gives visitors an opportunity to book without changing the content or layout of Hao’s site itself. Since the offer opens separately from the page, Targeted Offers doesn’t disrupt the site experience or interfere with the SEO setup.
This is particularly valuable since most of Hao’s audience arrives through Google while actively researching and planning trips. When readers reach his site, they are often already looking for practical information about hotels, activities, or other travel services.
I really like the Targeted Offers feature – it captures conversions as much as possible without disrupting the user experience.
That balance is what makes the function stand out for Hao, since he was wary of adding anything that could alter the experience visitors came for. Along with the substantial extra revenue it has earned him so far, it’s what makes Targeted Offers his favorite Drive function.
Simplifying years of accumulated affiliate links
While Targeted Offers brings Hao extra revenue, Drive’s Switch Links function provides him with more efficiency.
Switch Links helped him convert all the old links he was managing through different platforms to Travelpayouts ones. This means he no longer has to handle them individually, which frees up more of his time. Further, the process was simple, and Hao doesn’t have to worry about other brands closing their affiliate programs since all the links come through Travelpayouts.
It was very easy to enable. I only had to slightly adjust some of my old affiliate links from various programs so Drive could correctly detect and convert them.
Together, Targeted Offers and Switch Links show two sides of what Hao added to his business with Drive. One helped create new earning opportunities, while the other made the opportunities he already had easier to manage.
But in Hao’s case, neither function would have had the same impact without everything that came before it: establishing useful content and attracting a steady audience.
Traffic first, monetization second
Hao’s philosophy on content creation and affiliate marketing can essentially be summed up by the advice he’d give to his past self:
Keep holding on to your interest and passion – that’s the only way to really sustain it long-term.
He could have given up – or switched focus entirely – during the pandemic. Instead, his love for travel pushed him to continue developing a useful site that people genuinely want to visit.
That same long-term mindset applies to traffic. SEO matters, but Hao has found that sustainable growth also takes patience, dedication, and a willingness to keep learning.
Traffic growth takes time and consistent effort, and staying focused on creating genuinely useful content. It also helps to make good use of AI and Google’s data analysis tools to understand why certain articles rank better – over time, you naturally pick up the knack for it.
For Hao, monetization comes after that foundation is in place.
As for affiliate income and the rest, as long as the site genuinely brings in traffic, that will naturally follow.
Building on what you’ve already created
Hao’s story shows that better monetization doesn’t necessarily have to come at the expense of the visibility you’ve worked hard to earn. Enabling Drive left his rankings and organic traffic intact while bringing him extra opportunities.
Drive didn’t replace the years he spent learning SEO, refining his site, and creating useful travel guides. It simply helped him gain more from the work he’d already put in.
If you’ve already managed to attract a steady readership and are curious about whether Drive could add more value to the traffic you already have, Hao’s experience suggests that there’s only one real way to find out: try it for yourself.
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