Over the years, travel bloggers have had to change dramatically how they monetize their business.
NB: This is a viewpoint by Matt Kepnes, founder of Nomadic Matt, Superstar Blogging, and author of How to Travel the World on $50 a Day.
When I started Nomadic Matt back in 2008, the best way to monetize was to sell text links. These helped companies rank higher in search engines, so they were willing to pay good money for them!
Over the years, Google evolved and got smarter. Sponsored content replaced paid links as the best way for bloggers to earn money, which led to blog posts becoming harder for readers to detect than paid links.
That model has also died slowly over the years - the rates for branded posts have gone down and Google is now better at spotting that kind of content and keeping it out of search results.
Sponsored or branded content still exists, but it’s no longer a good enough model for bloggers to rely on. Many have gone “out of business” as their main source of income has dried up.
As a response, over the past few years, monetization has shifted toward paid trips, where bloggers visit a destination in return for a fee (and their travel expenses).
While I disagree with this practice (I don’t think DMOs get a lot of bang for their buck and I think it compromises the integrity of bloggers), it is one of the major ways travel bloggers earn a living.
But this approach creates a problem: bloggers end up trading too much time for too little money.
Money is an infinite quantity — you can always earn more of it. Time is finite — you can’t earn more time, and press trips take up a lot of time. You can be on a heavy schedule and don’t got a lot of down time during the trip itself to start on the writing.
Since you can only do one trip at a time, the only way to scale is to charge ever more money.
But eventually you will hit a wall. As companies refuse to pay a better rate the bloggers are limited in their growth.
But increasingly more bloggers are realizing this and are taking matters into their own hands by developing their own courses and products. For example, besides offering e-books for sale, I’ve also started Superstar Blogging, a travel media school that teaches people video, writing, photography, and marketing skills.
My goal was to create higher-end, more detailed courses that help people master online media. Whereas e-books are about volume, these courses allow me to make more money by selling fewer, since they are higher priced.
Fellow bloggers are also branching out:
This is all in the name of owning their own income and developing passive streams of income, so they can own their own time, not become beholden to others, and not make every trip work related.
This is not to say the current press trip model is dead, but as more bloggers realize that trading so much time for so little money is not sustainable, they will begin to turn to not only other monetization strategies but also say no to more trips.
Therefore, brands and DMOs have to offer more than just a free trip if you are looking to bring in top-tier bloggers. And just retweeting my photo doesn’t light my fire or move the needle for me — or most people, for that matter.
You need to do more.
Instead of saying “we want you to come visit our destination”, DMOs need to find ways for more integrated cross-promotion, factoring in the bloggers' other ventures as well as the trip itself,
So as bloggers stay at and explore your destination, you will have to not only share their articles on social media but also promote their other projects and products while finding ways to offer special deals and discounts to their readers.
Mentioning me in your destination’s email, sharing a blog post on your Facebook page, and promoting my books or products does light my fire. It makes me more committed to your destination while allowing me access to a wider audience and, hopefully, new readers.
Partnerships are a two-way street, and as more bloggers create their own products, they will be more inclined to work with brands and companies who promote their other initiatives.
Brands and DMOs will need to become true partners with bloggers and cross-promote heavily.
Too many brands or destinations think along the lines, “we invite you, you get a free trip, you write something, the story is over.” But if you want to attract higher-profile bloggers operating within these new parameters then a comprehensive promotion plan for with bloggers and influencers is needed.
Because the more bloggers monetize outside of press trips, the more time we reclaim — and the more picky we are going to become about giving up our time for money.
NB: This is a viewpoint by Matt Kepnes, founder of Nomadic Matt, Superstar Blogging, and author of How to Travel the World on $50 a Day.
NB2: Image by Daviles/BigStock.com