You’ve been noticing lately, in Facebook groups or Instagram accounts, people taking off some time to travel and starting a blog to document their experiences. At first, only their family and friends care about reading anything they write, or visit their blogs to see their photos. (Confession – I’m one of those people.)
And then, they return home and this travel bug has bitten hard and they start researching ways to continue traveling while earning some money on the go. They get advised – “start an online business, (insert your name here)“. So, lets break it down – how to create a profitable website that will allow you to continue traveling long-term, if you’re one of those people too?
The web is flooded with “How to Start a Travel Blog” articles, and many of them offer excellent advice on how to start one with minimal monthly expenses, or even for free on blogging platforms like blogspot.
It’s true that the technological explosion in recent years, and especially the widespread usage of the Internet, has changed the landscape of the traditional workforce and job positions worldwide. And you see more and more people abandoning office jobs or other full-time positions in order to become self-employed, choose their own schedule and work from home, take up remote jobs with more flexibility or travel the world long-term, be location independent and live life on their own terms.
Ways to Earn an Income Online
- One great way to become self-employed and generate income online is to market your services (advertise yourself as a brand) on a website. Consultants, freelance writers and graphic designers go this way – they have a profitable skill and they create a website to showcase this skill and get hired by companies or individuals, thus being able to earn an income.
- Another great way is to create your own digital products, or physical products even, and sell them online. Read this post that covers ways to do that.
- And the last way, which can even be combined with the former two, is to educate yourself on Affiliate Marketing. In this case, you help people solve problems in a certain niche by promoting products and services you use and love and getting paid in commissions for your reviewed recommendations.
How to Create a Profitable Website
What will you need to get started with Affiliate Marketing?
- Passion or great interest about a topic
- A laptop
- Internet connection
There are 4 steps you should follow in order to start a website that will generate you money providing you with the freedom to live and work anywhere in the world! Millions of people do online searches everyday for every topic imaginable. Leverage this potential customer pool by following these 4 steps:
- Selecting a niche.
- Building a website.
- Driving traffic to your site.
- Monetizing it.
1. Select a Niche
What is a niche? It’s a narrow topic of interest, a group of people passionate about a specific topic. Making money online is a niche. Another niche is female solo traveling. There are big niches, like healthy weight loss, that you can narrow down to sub-niches in order to attract the right audience. For example “weight loss for women in their 30s”.
It’s very important to be passionate about your niche or at least be very interested in it, because you’ll be required to create content and write and research about it. Don’t worry if you aren’t an expert, you can blog about your personal experiences and views and you can learn more with online research!
And don’t just pick something that you’re not interested in, just because you think it’s wildly popular and can make you lots of money. That’s a mistake and if you don’t genuinely like your niche, you’ll soon quit.
2. Build a Website
Even if you aren’t tech savvy, the WordPress blogging platform makes it easy for anyone to build a beautiful website, choosing from hundreds of available free themes. You don’t need to know anything about coding or website development either. The only thing you need is hosting for your website.
You can host it for free, as mentioned above, but if you need to be in complete control and own it (and finally monetize it), you will need to buy your domain name (your website’s URL) for as cheap as 14 bucks per year, and host it somewhere. I.e. you need to rent out space on the online world and pay for it. I found the most affordable and excellent hosting services and support here.
3. Drive Traffic to your Website
Traffic is the visitors that find your website through a Google search, or click on your website’s links that you post on your social media. The bigger the traffic (the more people that visit your website) the better rankings you’ll get on search engines. And the more established your website gets, the more people will trust you and accept you as a niche authority.
There are many methods to drive traffic to your website, like posting your articles on your social media. Or joining Facebook groups related to your niche and helping people with related issues. Or SEO strategies – selecting suitable keywords that people search and writing posts around them after doing some keyword research.
4. Monetize it
The final step is monetizing your website. This comes after you’ve gained people’s trust by creating new content consistently, being authentic and helping out or solving issues your target audience faces. It takes time to build a nice, substantial website with useful quality content and you should be committed to stick with it for the long run.
This method of Affiliate Marketing isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme, but you wouldn’t want that anyways since those are proven to be scams in 99% cases.
The way you monetize your website is by joining affiliate programs, like Amazon, and placing affiliate links to their products in your posts. Whenever a visitor clicks on an affiliate link in your blog, and ends up making a purchase, you get a commission! That’s why traffic is so important – more traffic, more conversions (visitors that convert to customers).
Take the Plunge and Create a Website for Free
It doesn’t matter if you’re a total newbie in the land of Online Marketing and if terms like “keyword research” are totally new to you.
There is an Online University where you can learn from scratch everything you need to know to succeed, and the best part is that you can try it out and create a website for FREE!
I know – there’s no such thing as a free meal in this world! That’s true in this case too. If you decide that this is something you want to try out and accelerate the growth of your online business, then you will need a monthly or yearly investment, for things such as hosting and support.
BUT! You can use the Wealthy Affiliate platform for free for a week, and as a Starter member you can go through the first level of the Online Certification course and even create 2 websites on the platform.
For free and without shady practices like providing ANY credit card information that will lead to monthly charges unknown to you, or any upsells along the way! I’m confident that you will be impressed with the quality of the training and the helpful community of success-oriented people.
*** Click the Sign Up button below and give yourself a chance – nothing to lose! ***
Are you ready to create a Profitable Website?
If you need more information about my #1 recommendation on the best Online Marketing training and hosting platform, read my review here.
And if you have any questions or queries, drop me a comment below or send me an email at nicky@laptoplivingfree.com and I’ll be happy to clarify and help you out!
Cheers to working online and to your personal and financial freedom!
Hi Nicky,
There is so much sheer nonsense written about making money online. Most of them seem to be scams trying to draw you in and part you from your hard-earned money but Wealthy Affiliate appears to be legit and I am grateful to you for bringing it to my attention.
Great article,
Thanks
You’re welcome Howard, and thanks for your comment.
Yes, it’s sad how so many people fall prey to scams and lose so much money! The Wealthy Affiliate platform – online university and community of successful entrepreneurs – is one of its kind, and anybody can see for themselves trying it out for free for a whole week. No strings attached!
Hi Nicky,
Great idea! If you want to earn extra money so you can travel more than definitely a blog is the way to do it!
Best thing I like about blogs is that you can work on them anywhere in the World that has Internet connection.
No traveling to work, no answering to some ungrateful boss, no timetables, no deadlines and certainly no stress.
The main steps are easy to follow and once you put in enough work, the website will generate a full time income for you!
I admire anyone doing this and I can say it really is a brilliant idea you are proposing here Nicky.
Want to travel more? Build You Website Now!
Regards,
Philip.
Thanks for commenting, Philip!
You’re absolutely right, working online affords you the freedom to be your own boss, live according to your own schedule and travel whenever and as often as you want to! All you need is access to your online business wherever you are, i.e. internet connection.
That said, it takes time and hard work to grow your website and generate a full income. But if you start it as a side-hustle and keep reminding yourself why you want it so bad, it’s all worth it in the end!
Hi Nicky,
Great and informative article, strait to the point and no wasting time, it’s true there are so many scams on line and unfortunately so many people get caught up with them.
Keep up the great work, I look forward to reading more.
Regards
Darryl
Hi Darryl, thank you for your comment.
I’ve been scammed a couple of times and lots of people without much online experience get duped by get-rich-quick schemes. It’s really sad and makes you very skeptical towards any other online opportunity you meet! But also makes you realize that no program will turn you into a millionaire over a month with hardly any effort.
Growing a successful website takes time and dedication, but Affiliate Marketing – when done correctly – is a sure way to success! Especially if you have the right tools and extremely helpful and supportive community, like what I found in Wealthy Affiliate 🙂
Thank you Nikki for the great post, I would love to start a travel blog, financially not able to do that yet, but some day. I understand about all these scam artist who just want to take your money and really don’t show you how to make money on-line. I was duped numerous times throughout the year and a half that I was looking to make money online, until I found WA. Legit program and now I feel I am helping people in the golf world as well as giving them a chance to learn some things as well..
Hi Bobbi, thanks for your feedback!
Yes, there’s too many scams out there and I’ve got burnt a couple of times too. There’s much misinformation and people promoting the idea of getting-rich-quick. There’s no such thing (unless you win the lottery!) and everyone who’s promising otherwise is lying.
I am glad you found a legit opportunity in Wealthy Affiliate! The tools, hosting services and motivational community are great and the training can turn even total newbies into successful online marketers. It takes hard work and dedication but it can be fun too, and in the end it’s totally worth it! Keep it up with your golfing website, all the best 🙂
Hi Nicky, thank you for this informative article. We live in a time where we have resources available to us that make it possible to create a lifestyle and live any way that we want. Affiliate Marketing has true meaning to me. It has taught me that no matter how grim things look in life, even if it feels like nothing will get better, it is truly possible to turn everything around and end up living beyond the desires that our imagination can produce.
Thank you for the insightful comment, Jacob! It’s true that we are living in interesting times and that the progress of technology and the online world can afford more and more people the opportunity to chase their dreams and create a suitable freedom-lifestyle!