Travel Blog Income Report: How I Earned $2,338.15 Blogging in June 2019

Welcome to the 2nd edition of the Expat Kings Income and Traffic monthly report.

I decided to start publishing this report to provide transparency and inspiration for you guys out there who want to travel around the world and earn some extra income with a side hustle or internet business.

Blogging is one of my favorite ways to make money online and you can create your own money making website for just $2.95 with Bluehost.

This is also a great way for me to track my progress and improve this website in the future. We’ll be covering overall website traffic and income/expenses broken down by category along with my successes and failures along the way.

Traffic and Income Summary

June was another stable month where earnings remained stable while traffic dipped back down a bit overall. One of my goals is to publish more often on Expat Kings so let’s dig right into the traffic numbers to see how the site performed in June.

Website Traffic (ExpatKings.com)

Our traffic for July 2019 was 66,679 page views (According to Jetpack stats). This was a 7% decrease from May 2019 (72,231 pageviews) and an 8% increase YOY from June 2018 (61,868 page views). Total site visitors was 39,950.

June 2019 Blog Traffic

The majority of traffic once again comes from Google and Facebook. Here’s a complete breakdown:

June 2019 Blog Traffic Sources

I’m thrilled to maintain similar traffic levels compared to May 2019 when my Thai women vs Filipino women went viral on Facebook. Traffic usually levels off in the following month after going viral but it looks like I continued to do well in Google search (the bulk of this site’s traffic).

I published a total of 8 articles (published 6 in May 2019) and will continue to work closer to more frequent publishing to increase my total content output. One thing I’m trying as of late is to hire more freelance writers to help publish more content. Outsourcing is a great way to scale your site without doing all the writing and editing work by yourself.

Youtube Report (Subscribe to my channel)

I reached 1,757 subscribers in June but haven’t added any content to my Youtube channel as of late. It’s becoming difficult to manage everything since I still work with clients in my freelancing business. Video is the future of web content and I’m not focusing enough on this powerful distribution channel to reach more people and attract more non-readers to the Expat Kings brand and content.

At first, I thought about 3 to 4 videos per week but I think I’ll try 1 to 2 videos per week until I build up some momentum.

Income Report – $2,338.15

June 2019 was another solid month for earnings growth. I received a decent sized affiliate payment from Agoda and dating affiliate revenue remained consistent. Here’s a quick breakdown by income source:

  • ExpatKings Premium: $25
  • Affiliate Income: $1,394
  • Amazon Affiliate Income: $40.65
  • Sponsored Guest Posts: $720
  • Google Adsense: $158.50

My Premium Membership

Expat Kings premium did much better in June but I really need to work on improving the content offered and finding out exactly what people want to pay for. In the long run, I want Expat Kings Premium to earn the bulk of this site’s revenue. This is definitely a project in the making.

Affiliate Income

Affiliate marketing continues to earn the bulk of this site’s income and I earn through 2 primary sources: dating affiliate program and hotel booking affiliate programs. That makes a lot of sense because my audience is mostly single male travelers who want to visit foreign countries and meet beautiful women on their vacation.

I have plans to add a lot more affiliate programs in the mix including things like tours, flights, etc. Right now, I’m focusing on dating sites because that’s where most of my earnings is being made.

Some of my top affiliate programs are:

Amazon Associates

Amazon affiliate revenue grew a bit but I haven’t posted any Amazon product reviews in a while. The income is rather small (under $100) but Amazon is a trusted brand and I always buy stuff from Amazon before my overseas travels.

Sponsored Guest Posts

Guest post revenue remained stable in June 2019 . While I receive a ton of guest post pitches, I reject most of them. Most guest post pitches are filled with low quality articles for the sole purpose of building backlinks. These articles provide little value for my readers and thus I only accepted 3 guest posts in June.

Google Adsense

Adsense income declined because pageviews are directly correlated to Adsense earnings. However, I began testing out more ads per page to increase my monthly ad impressions. Hopefully, this will increase revenue without annoying readers. I’ve noticed a lot of big publications using 5+ ad blocks per page and I will test this strategy as well. So far, I’ve noticed some substantial gains and I’ll provide more info ASAP.

Expense Report – $137

Here’s a breakdown of my overall expenses for running ExpatKings.com:

I decided to keep Siteground cloud server for the time being because I do love their customer service and have a lot of websites to transfer.

Lessons Learned in June 2019

  • Track Everything – While it does take some time to write this report, I am benefiting immensely from a detailed analysis on my blog’s progress. Tracking your income & expenses forces you to identify what works and what needs to be improved. It’s helped me concentrate on the most profitable tasks and gives me an honest overall of my business.
  • Scale What’s Working – It’s easier to make money by improving what is already working. For my blog income, affiliate sales is my bread and butter. For traffic, Google is sending most of my visitors. My focus now is on affiliate income and improving my SEO so visitors and Google love my website. If you are struggling to drive traffic or make more money, figure out what your site is doing well right now. Make a goal to improve your strengths.

Goals for July 2019

In my May 2019 income report, I posted too many goals and failed to achieve most of them. In this edition, I will make 1 or 2 big goals then really focus on seeing them through. Launching new products and my upcoming course will be postponed until September when I have more time and energy to focus. Right now, I want to get my affiliate income over $2,000 per month and improving my Adsense income.

Conclusion

None of this would be possible without your help and the power of blogging. Making over $2k with this site has me very excited and I’m thrilled to see how well I can do for the rest of 2019. My next goal is to get income well over $3,000 per month with a longer term goal of hitting 5 figures ($10,000) per month.

Start Your Money Making Blog Today

Blogging is a proven way to make money online and travel to wherever you want in the world. I’ve been able to visit exotic countries like Thailand, Brazil, Senegal, Colombia, The Philippines, France and many more thanks to the power of owning my own income generating asset.

Best of all, you can still make money with your day job or other side hustles. This is a high revenue, low expense business for anyone even if you don’t have writing or web design skills.

All of the work can be outsourced to freelancers and you are able to sit back and collect checks!

Want to Start a blog? Click Here to Start Your Blog for Only $2.95 Per Month with Bluehost

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4 Comments

  1. Hi Tarik!
    I am in the process of starting my online travel niche website and I haven researched the industry for a while. I found your income reports thanks to google and I must say that it inspired me a lot, however I have one question: have you considered switching to a more generous ad network? I am seeing that you have the traffic and, based on other incomes reports that I have been reading, networks like Ezoic or MediaVine can pay you around $10/15 per thousand page views.
    Sorry if this comment bothered you but I am seeing that you have a lot of potential to grow your income and I hated to see you leaving money on the table lol