High traffic and income from travel blog? Don’t believe everything you read

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I always considered “earn money while sitting home” sites as a scam but I never thought that our fellow bloggers can also lie about their traffic and income from travel blog so much.

The fact that some bloggers actually earn money with their blogs is undeniable, but lately, there have been too many who claim to have enormous traffic as a consequence, high income from travel blog. They are attracting new readers by promising to tell them how to boost your blog traffic and so on. Seems like a quick strategy for attracting new traffic to THEIR OWN blog.

To some extent I believe certain bloggers, some are really honest telling about their struggles with the traffic growth and admitting the fact that organic traffic started arriving on their blog after at least 4-6-8 (or more) months of online presence. And with all their organic traffic they could only earn a few dollars. Other bloggers are mentioning sponsored posts. Well, that I believe.

Crazy organic traffic?

However, recently I started encountering bloggers who were writing about vast sums of money they are getting from travel blogging. According to them, just after 3 months of the start of their blog, they already got like 300000 monthly visitors from organic search only and earned like 1000$ per month (including the sponsored posts). I won’t include the names here, of course. You can get a lot of traffic from Pinterest, but probably not as much, when you just started. However, getting so much within the first 3 months of travel blogging from organic search is just unbelievable.

Guess what? At first, I believed them. I thought, what’s wrong with our blog Tripsget when if in the first 3 weeks of our first month of travel blogging we got only 11 visitors who found us in Google? Even if monetizing our blog is not our priority right now, I wouldn’t mind many readers and comments to the posts we write.

I even subscribed to their mailing list because this action promised me an ultimate guide of bringing traffic to my blog. Well, the ultimate guide appeared to be just a weird Google doc file with screenshots from Google Analytics (traffic screenshots) and some very generic tips each blogger already knows. One of the advice was checking SEMrush or MOZ for keywords you can use to use for Adwords and meta tags).

The truth is…

So I decided to check which keywords do they actually use in SEMrush (yes, I have an account but even if you don’t have one, you can make 10 searches for free). Guess what I found?

That their organic traffic was almost zero. Meaning that most probably, the Google Analytics claiming high organic traffic reports were photoshopped or taken from a different company. (Well, imagine using the reposts of the company, where you’re working).

Honestly, I never imagined that somebody of our fellow travel bloggers would be lying so imprudently!

I cannot say “Beware of scam” because at least they aren’t asking you to buy something from them; the only thing they need is traffic to their website so they display adds and get money based on the amount of impressions of an ad. They also want you to subscribe to them.

The main reason why I wrote this post is because I felt cheated on. And a bit upset for a while. So, just be careful about what you read online, don’t let them make you upset because your efforts aren’t noticed yet and keep going!

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High traffic and income from travel blog - don't believe everything you read

7 thoughts on “High traffic and income from travel blog? Don’t believe everything you read”

  1. Thanks for poking this bubble. Can’t agree more. If you read those reports, every blogger is making tons of money while sitting in exotic locations. Some do. Most don’t. And those who do, have to work very, very hard. The couple of Nomandosaurus recently opened up and revealed the truth behind all those smiley pictures. Know what? Just ask yourself: why blog? Me? To learn and to have full creative freedom. That’s it. And hey, if one day that will earn me a few bucks, that’s great. If it doesn’t, fine too. Don’t believe the type. Just rock on.

    Reply
    • Thanks for your comment, Rik! Cannot agree more: blogging must be hobby, passion, desire to express yourself and help the others and so on but not the intention to get tons of money from that. There are some great benefits of being an influential blogger e.g. sponsored stays in hotels and maybe even flights but writing just in order to get that is lame. Unfortunately, many people only see blogging as the potential source of income and they’re ready to lie a lot in order to get more traffic and visitors.

      Reply
  2. Thank you for bringing up the topic and putting numbers back into a correct perspective. As you write, a lot of the data seems more to be from bigger corporations than small newly started blogs. Another thing I believe that people might be using is different bots, but those should not be shownas organic. They would though explain a very high bounce rate that you sometimes can see in the screen shots.

    Myself, I’m quite happy with 10-20 visitors per day as long as they actually find our posts usefull or inspiring. 🙂

    Reply
    • Thanks a lot for your comment, Jesper. I totally agree with you about the bots but many bloggers claim that they get A LOT of traffic from organic search, which should be displayed in platforms like SEMrush, Moz etc. Only the most famous bloggers get monthly organic traffic around 130000, but they really appear on the first position in Google for many keywords. As for the rest – lies 🙂

      Reply
  3. Thank you for writing the truth, I am so tired of the bulls…t stuff bloggers are posting and these stupid giveaways that say the same thing over and over again with different colours. Not to mention everyone pretending just how easy it is to make money and blog.

    Reply
  4. Yeah, I noticed that too. But when you read 10 of those type of articles, you can clearly tell who’s lying. I think it’s cheeky because people just want to get traffic through this type of posts, but it’s not a good strategy long-term I think. And also you get these huge travel bloggers who have great following and probably have huge traffic from google who release those paid articles about how to earn money from blogging after 1 month of blogging or that sort of thing… It just rubs me the wrong way.

    Reply

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