{"id":16942,"date":"2022-11-03T18:47:56","date_gmt":"2022-11-03T15:47:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.travelpayouts.com\/blog\/?p=16942"},"modified":"2025-07-23T17:08:00","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T14:08:00","slug":"the-story-of-theworldtravelguy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.travelpayouts.com\/blog\/the-story-of-theworldtravelguy\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Grew My Travel Blog in Three Years \u2014 The Story of Theworldtravelguy.com"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How It All Began<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Navagio\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Navagio Beach in Zakynthos, Greece<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I first fell in love with travel on a trip to Colorado in 2015. Then, after several years of overseas experiences, I started my travel blog<\/a> in 2019 to document my own travels and try to help others explore foreign countries on a budget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was originally a solo travel blog, but now it\u2019s becoming more of a couple travel blog. I\u2019m sure, someday, when we have kids, we\u2019ll cover our family travels as well!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m an American currently based in Bali, Indonesia, where I met my wife Intan (a Bali local). Now, we travel the world together and try to document the most scenic destinations by creating articles, photos, videos, and guides for other travelers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We go on all kinds of hikes, visit beaches, waterfalls, volcanoes, castles, temples, and monuments, and see wildlife and many other interesting sights. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our Travel Style<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Hobbiton\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Hobbiton movie set in New Zealand<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We’ve been blessed with some amazing experiences in our travels around the world, including completing a fair number of bucket list items like Angkor Wat, the Taj Mahal, Angels Landing<\/a>, and some amazing Utah hikes<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our favorite continent to explore is Asia, and we especially enjoy tropical islands for the sun and warm weather. As a result, we’re usually traveling in Southeast Asia, in beautiful and affordable places like El Nido Palawan<\/a> in the Philippines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Destinations\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Destinations page on Theworldtravelguy.com<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

More recently, we’ve been trying to branch out and cover new countries on our blog in order to help diversify our content. We just visited Zakynthos Greece<\/a> and Maya Bay<\/a> in Thailand. Earlier this year, we went to Machu Picchu in Peru.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even though we prefer to travel in tropical Asian countries, and even though it’s smart to focus on a special niche, I also think it’s a good idea to have a wider range of content so your travel blog will be interesting for a bigger audience around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Traffic<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

My travel blog is attracting almost 200,000 monthly page views according to Google Analytics, and more than 230,000 according to SEMrush<\/a>. That number is steadily increasing as I write more content. The majority of my traffic is organic from Google.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Organic\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Organic traffic for Theworldtravelguy.com, SEMrush<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

You can monitor your website traffic with Google Analytics and SEMrush, along with plenty of other tools out there. Some of these tools also allow you to estimate the dollar value of keyword traffic, although I haven’t found the estimates to be exact all of the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How I Grow Traffic <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

To grow my traffic, I focus on writing high-quality content, building good backlinks from authoritative websites, and studying keywords using sites like Moz<\/a> and SEMrush. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It can be pretty difficult starting out as a blogger because most keywords have already been covered hundreds (or thousands) of times by other travel blogs before you. In addition, the number of competitors is growing every day. To unseat your competition, you will need high-quality content with great photos and lots of detail. Try to write guides that other sites will be proud to link to!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t be afraid to chase keywords with lower search volumes. If the keyword hasn\u2019t been covered as much by other travel bloggers, it may have less competition and will be easier to rank for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is especially true if you just started a travel blog because your domain won\u2019t have much search authority yet. So, as a newcomer, it\u2019s a good idea to focus on easier keywords at first, and then chase the big ones later. You can find keyword difficulty ratings and other info on sites like SEMrush.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many travel bloggers seem to swear by Pinterest integration and other social media referral traffic. We haven’t really worked on that too much yet, but it’s something we’re hoping to look into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve also dabbled in other things like drone videos and photos, which have occasionally gone viral and brought our website some extra traffic and valuable leads. This has been a fun connection that happened naturally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Website traffic is closely tied to monetization because increased traffic means more people will see ads on your website and click on them. With our current monthly traffic levels, we\u2019ve been able to earn a full-time income from our blog, which is something we never thought would be possible!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Monetization<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We work with a bunch of affiliate programs on our travel blog, including Amazon<\/a> and those available through Travelpayouts<\/a>, such as Booking.com<\/a>, GetYourGuide<\/a>, and Viator<\/a>. Travelpayouts is an affiliate platform with over 100 trusted travel brands, so you can track all of your earnings in one place.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Our most profitable affiliate niche is currently tours and activities<\/a>, followed closely by hotels. We occasionally get free sponsored trips from official tourism bureaus or private tour companies as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’ve also been approached by some small companies who wanted to work with us as affiliate partners. These collaborations have been surprisingly profitable. For example, we work with a small tour boat company in the Philippines and they give us 20% commissions, which is a big chunk of each sale. In addition, all of the boat trips they offer are multi-day tours, so each sale is worth a good amount. Most big travel affiliate programs<\/a> provide a much smaller commission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We hope to pick up more affiliate programs as we go. It really doesn’t require much work to join an affiliate program or incorporate them into our website, which does most of the work for us, since our traffic is mainly organic from Google.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How I Embed Affiliate Tools on My Blog<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

For affiliate tools, I often use the activity widgets from GetYourGuide. I think these widgets work great since they have pictures of each activity they offer. I like to arrange mine in rows of three or six activities that are relevant to the subject, and then I place the widget near the start of the post. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, in a blog post about how to visit an island or national park, I\u2019ll place the affiliate widget near the start of the blog post so people have an easy option for going there with a tour. Later, in the blog post, I will also explain how people can go there without tours if they prefer. That way they have both options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also supplement my affiliate widgets with affiliate text links in some places, because it\u2019s occasionally (in rare cases) possible for the widgets to glitch or not show up on the page. In such cases, it\u2019s good to have affiliate text as a back-up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are a couple of example posts on my travel blog where affiliate widgets or text have always performed well:<\/p>\n\n\n\n