Earning money from our travel “blogs” is just one of many ways we can earn income from the internet. Part of my plan this year is to create a number of niche travel sites that are less work than full blogs and bring in passive income from a variety of strategies such as
getvietnamvisa.com pay per click, advertising and good old Adsense. I was inspired by the Affiliate Marketing for Beginners course that I took when I travel to Vietnam with the service of
visa on arrival Vietnam, and now it is time to earn my money back with a niche site…or four!
In the spirit of openness and friendly competition that I believe is the foundation of Travel Blog Challenge I decided to kick start my own goals and hopefully yours as well with a public Niche Travel Site Battle. Inspired by the niche site dual over at Smart Passive Income, the only real difference is that our sites have to be Travel Related.
Expanding the number of travel related sites, you have is one of the best ways to scale up earnings. For instance, when an advertiser contacts you it is just better when you can sell ads on more than one site. And for us, it makes sense to keep these all travel related so that we maintain our core audience across multiple platforms. It means less work in the end as well.
How to Join the Battle
I am inviting 4 members of the Travel Blog Challenge to join me in this Battle. A few people have already expressed interest in the forums but to join you need to Contact me and commit to the rules below. While I will only pick 4 to be featured on TBC, others are free to join in and post their progress in the comments or in the forums. To be considered you need to:
a) Be a current TBC 1000-1000 Challenger
b) Be an active participant in the forums
c) Be subscribed to either the TBC mailing list or the RSS feed; and
c) Be willing to follow the rules of the Battle (yes, there will be no collateral damage allowed!)
Niche Travel Site Battle Rules
A few rules will help keep us on track and will make it easier for readers to follow along.
1) Must be a niche site (meaning no more than a 10 pages)
2) Must be travel related (feel free to be creative)
3) You must only use ethical tactics. No black hat SEO crap here.
4) You must have a keyword or words strategy (so we can measure progress on your google search ranking)
5) You can employ any type of monetization strategy or a combination (but you need to document and write about it, basically tell us your game plan)
6) You can only spend a maximum of 4 hours per week on it (who wants to spend all their time at the computer?)
7) You will write a blog post about your progress, strategies, income etc on the 5th of each month. You can post it on the TBC if your Travel Blog is not an appropriate venue. I will dedicate a page here that links to all of our updates and tracks our progress.
What does this all mean? It means that we will each create a niche site, describe in detail our strategies and tactics, our ups and down. We will only spend 4 hours a week max (I hope less) on our projects and at the end of 6 months we will see who is the “winner.”
