When Ting first set up her travel blog back in 2012, she’d already worked for years in UK magazine publishing. But she found she needed a creative outlet she wasn’t getting from her nine-to-five.
I felt I wasn’t flexing my creative writing juices enough (as a sub you don’t get to write as much) so I decided to set up the blog as I was getting frustrated. It was the best decision I ever made.
Back then, she didn’t have a social media account, let alone know how to build a blog and take photos or think about SEO. Fifteen years later, she does all of it on her own for My Travel Monkey.
The blog has made me do better, to learn so much over the past 15 years, and in doing so, my skills have improved.
Ting builds her site around useful, evergreen information on destinations she has visited – from London day trips and things to do in Las Vegas to Paris with kids and what to eat in San Sebastian. She aims to be a comprehensive source, going beyond individual posts to create full guides that help travelers plan their trips. As a result, her articles continue to attract readers long after she publishes them.
Discover how Ting turned all her content – old and new – into a growing source of affiliate income.
Fifteen years of posts – and she still does everything by herself
My Travel Monkey began as a family travel blog. But as time has passed, Ting has expanded into area guides, honest hotel reviews, food guides, and independent travel.
Over the years, I’ve traveled independently a lot, with friends, work, or with my husband, and I felt that there was so much content to write about it would be a waste not to feature it.
And having her own blog means she can let it evolve with her life.
I imagine, as my kids get older too, and they don’t travel with us anymore, there will be a shift again. That’s the beauty of having your own blog.
But that freedom comes with a workload. Ting writes, researches, edits photos, and manages the site herself.
You’ll often see me with a laptop in hand, watching TV, during the day, over the weekends and even while we’re away. It’s a 24/7 job.
With Ting handling everything herself, creating long-form content like blog posts can take days or even a week.
Search still matters – even in the AI era
For Ting, keyword research is still an important part of the process. Even as the search landscape changes, she continues to use SEO to understand what people are looking for and shape the articles she writes.
Yes, I still do that even in this AI world, because you still need to answer a question that someone is searching for.
Though organic search currently brings her the most traffic, she is uncertain about its future:
I am concerned that we cannot rely on search engine traffic, and changing algorithms, things are changing constantly.
That’s why she’s giving Pinterest another go. It’s uneven (“very hit and miss for me”), but she’s determined to build a second route to her content. Plus, growing her email subscriber list. The rest of social media takes a back seat.
When you can’t control where your traffic comes from next year, earning more from the readers you already have starts to matter a lot more.
When affiliate income became the more dependable earner
Last year, Ting was made redundant from her job as content lead at a large UK travel company. She went full-time as a blogger and freelancer – “it’s the best decision I made” – and stable income stopped being a nice-to-have.
She’s tried most monetization options available. Display advertising through Raptive was her main earner on the site for years. Sponsored posts, guest posts, and link insertions come in constantly, and she’s become selective.
I tend not to do them anymore, unless I have full editorial control. And also, I find many of those who approach me are not willing to pay enough to be featured on the blog.
Brand and tourist-board campaigns are still exciting when the right ones appear, but she’s offered something worth doing maybe once a year. Affiliate marketing has turned out to behave differently.
Affiliates are a regular passive income which is definitely more stable and consistent, which, when you have a family, is the most important thing.
And it has now overtaken the earner it used to sit behind.
“I’m super lazy”: an automated way to earn from old posts
Ting joined Travelpayouts about four months ago and switched on Drive, our AI-powered content monetization system, on day one. Her reason was refreshingly blunt.
Purely for the fact I am super lazy, so if I can have an automated system that does it for me, why wouldn’t I try it?
This is where 15 years of posts stop being a problem. Ting never opened those articles to add affiliate links, swap old ones, or rewrite guides so they’d earn.
I found it super easy. Drive has basically done all the hard work for me.
Her one worry was that Drive would scatter links all over the site and annoy readers. In practice, she doesn’t notice them: from her own observations, they aren’t intrusive on her pages.
It also didn’t disturb anything she already had running. Drive works on top of Ting’s existing setup, alongside her Raptive display ads – she didn’t have to choose between the two, and neither one got in the other’s way.
Because she enabled Drive from day one, Ting has no before-and-after to compare. But four months in, her earnings on Travelpayouts are already at a level she’s happy with.
I can see now income is beginning to hit over $1,000 per month – and I am hoping this will continue to rise. I view that as a win. It’s an extra substantial amount on top of all my other earnings.
Drive is free, and turning it on takes a few minutes – no coding, no changes to your content.
How Drive works across her archive
Ting’s main Drive earnings come from the Targeted Offers and Link Relevant Keywords functions.
Link Relevant Keywords reads her articles and turns travel-related phrases into affiliate links by itself. A hotel mentioned in a guide she published five years ago becomes something a reader can book through — and Ting earns from that booking. She doesn’t add the link, and the sentence stays exactly as she wrote it.
Targeted Offers works differently. It uses visitor behavior to identify readers showing high buying intent. It then presents them with a relevant offer in a new window, without changing the content of the article itself.
But while being able to earn more from her existing content is valuable, it’s not the only reason she keeps doing what she does.
A blogger who keeps going despite the uncertainty
After 15 years of blogging, Ting has seen plenty of changes in the industry. And in 2026, she finds the uncertainty hard to ignore:
Blogging is scary in this world at the moment, where so many factors outside of my control can affect what I do.
The evolving landscape can be difficult to navigate, as Ting knows from experience.
I go through waves throughout the year, and it’s very disheartening when you see traffic dropping, all algorithms and AI affecting everything you do. And you hear of awful stories where bloggers have lost all their livelihoods.
But in spite of all that, Ting strives forward. The reason is much simpler, yet perhaps far more meaningful than traffic or revenue.
At the end of the day, I do it because I love it. And to be paid for it is a huge, huge bonus.
Another decade – and maybe retirement in the sun
Looking further into the future, Ting already knows what her heart is set on.
I actually had the blog valued the other day, and if I can keep going for the next decade or so, maybe I can retire in the sunshine. Now that’s a dream I am aiming for!
After 15 years of running My Travel Monkey, Ting isn’t looking to make blogging more complicated. She wants to keep creating content she loves while finding smarter ways to earn from what she has already built.
Ting’s experience shows that a large back catalog doesn’t have to mean a big manual workload. She switched on Drive across her existing content and let it add new affiliate opportunities for her.
If you have years of content that gets traffic but isn’t earning what it could, that’s the same starting point Ting had just four months ago. Follow her lead and give Drive a try too.
