How I Made $1,625.37 in May 2019 – Travel Blog Income Report

Welcome to the 1st 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.

Income & Traffic Overall Summary

May was a strong month for overall traffic since one of our most recent articles, Thai women vs Filipino women, went viral on Facebook and drove over 11,000 visitors in less than 2 days. I’ll dig more into the specific traffic numbers below but we did pretty well while not posting that often to the website. My goal in June is to publish more consistently and aim for at least 20 to 30 articles this month.

Income was stronger as well since we referred more people to sign up for online dating websites, closed a few sponsored posts deals and increased Amazon affiliate & travel booking income.

Let’s dig into the numbers below.

Website Traffic (ExpatKings.com)

Our traffic for May 2019 was around 72,231 page views (according to Jetpack stats). This was a 40% increase from April 2019 (51,232 page views) and a 47% increase YOY from May 2018 (48,881 page views).

ExpatKings.com May 2019 Traffic

Over 46,000 people visited Expat Kings this month and I’m thrilled to reach that many people with this site.

The majority of our traffic comes from Google and Facebook. Here’s  a quick breakdown:

It’s quite a surprise since I’ve been working with some clients on my other business and didn’t get a chance to update the website as much.

I only published 6 posts this month but am way behind my goal of increasing my annual output YOY. In 2018, I published a total of 165 articles but only have 42 so far in 2019. So I need to publish around 20 to 30 articles per month for the rest of 2019 to hit my goal of increasing output every year.

Youtube Traffic (Subscribe to My Youtube Channel)

I’m currently sitting at 1,586 subscribers and plan to hit 2,000 by July. It’s only my 2nd month as a Youtube partner so here’s a breakdown of my May 2019 performance:

ExpatKings Youtube May 2019 Traffic

Youtube is another part of our future content strategy since many of you comment on our Youtube page regularly and leave positive comments on our videos. However, I haven’t set aside enough time to update the channel but we still hit over 1k subs last month.

The best Youtube channels are updated weekly (sometimes daily) and I’d like to post at least 3 to 4 videos per week starting in June moving forward. While I love writing, I now realize most people prefer watching a video over reading an article. This shift in content consumption makes Youtube a must for any serious online business in the future.

Income Report – $1,625.37

May 2019 was another solid month for Expat Kings in terms of revenue. We earn money through a lot of different sources so I’m going to list the overall numbers by category rather than breakdown each dollar based on an individual source.

  • Expat Kings Premium Membership: $10
  • Affiliate Income: $952
  • Amazon Associates Income: $24.32
  • Sponsored Posts: $470
  • Google Adsense: $169.05

My Premium Membership

Expat Kings Premium is my monthly membership service for paid subscribers who want to access all parts of the website. I only have a few subscribers who pay $5 per month but plan to expand the content offerings in June.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing makes up the bulk of our income and we recommend products and services for our growing audience of travelers and expats. Online dating websites make up the bulk of the income since most guys want an easy way to meet women once they get their money right and start traveling around. 

Some of my top earning affiliate programs are:

Amazon Associates

Amazon Associates used to earn decent revenue back in 2018 but the earnings have fallen out drastically in 2019. However, I always buy a bunch of stuff from Amazon before any trip so I recommend doing some shopping on there before you travel. I need to go through my current Amazon “Best of” posts and start adding more content and improving the pages.

Sponsored Guest Posts

Sponsored post income has really taken off lately since I’ve been turning away low budget guest post resellers to work directly with better brands. I’m also a lot more careful just posting any links on the website so I now personally review every link before I hit publish. If I don’t like the product or service, I won’t post it on Expat Kings.

Sometimes, advertisers will ask you to post questionable links like gambling, adult or casino links. While the money looks good in the short term, I think it’s best to maintain your integrity and only accept sponsored posts for the benefit of your readers.

Adsense

Google Adsense income was surprisingly up a lot since last month even though I made zero efforts to optimize my ad placements. Of course, I saw an increase in traffic but Page RPM was up as well. I cannot post Adsense screenshots due to the terms of service but I’m now approaching $200 per month in Adsense, which is a nice chunk of change for just pasting a javascript code on my site.

Expense Report – $137

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

My biggest monthly expense is my $80 per month Siteground cloud hosting server. This is more expensive than Bluehost who I’m thinking about switching to in order to cut costs even further.

I spend money on freelance writers but that expense was down a lot since I didn’t publish many articles to the website.

I canceled my $99 monthly Ahrefs.com subscription but am thinking about resubscribing since overall revenue is way up.

Lessons Learned in May 2019

  • Research Your Competitors Most Viewed Pages: Even though I only posted 6 articles in May, I got a lot more traffic due to the Thai women vs Filipino women article going viral. I got the idea for this article because I did some research on smaller travel blogs. A SE Asian travel blog was getting a lot of traffic for their Thai Vs Filipino Girls article so I wrote an article on the exact same topic. Find out which topics drive the most traffic for your competitors then create something on the same topic.
  • Optimize Your Website for Viral Traffic: Expat Kings crashed a few times on May 13th & 14th because my site couldn’t handle all the traffic. I optimized my site caching plugin to fix the problem but I made the mistake of not doing this in the beginning. Make sure you use a good caching plugin and optimize your website for heavy traffic.
  • Improve Conversion Rates: You don’t make any money if people don’t buy. One tip I learned was to improve conversion rates by removing distractions on your sales pages. I removed the sidebar on my blog inner pages and hid things like my email list form when I compare different products on my “Best of” pages.
  • Get to 1,000 Youtube Subscribers ASAP: My Adsense income grew mainly because I reached 1k Youtube subscribers and joined the partner program. Youtube is powerful and I’ve seen some vloggers earning $10k+ per month with their channels. If you’re just starting out on Youtube, do everything possible to reach 1k subs to start making money.

Goals for June 2019

  • Post Consistently on ExpatKings.com & Youtube: I haven’t been very consistent lately so my goal is to start posting more regularly by planning content in advance and answering your travel & making money questions with articles/videos.
  • Scale Affiliate Income: I know about several affiliate programs who want to work with our brand so I need to produce content on these subject and add the links to the site. This will take some time to carefully review each product and only recommend it if it actually works. I highly suggest you test any product/service before you become an affiliate.
  • Participate in the Forum: Last month, I set up a brand new forum for our community but haven’t had any time to contribute. My goal is to start posting 2 to 3 new threads per day and become more active in the forums.
  • Launch my first Teachable Course: I’ve been putting this off for months but many of you are asking to buy an affiliate marketing course from me. I plan to show you how I’ve been making passive income online since 2006 using the power of affiliate marketing. Stay tuned for more updates.
  • Launch Expat Kings Gear: I want to get more involved with ecommerce during the 2nd half of 2019 so I will be launching some clothing gear for the Expat Kings community.
  • Launch a Family Oriented Black Travel Website: Lately, I’ve been receiving a lot of emails from black women asking about travel recommendations. Also, I want to publish some family friendly content for married couples or travel groups. I’m planning a brand new general travel website with more tips & advice on things to do in USA & all over the world. Stay tuned for that.

Conclusion

Overall, I am pleased with my May 2019 progress although I need to improve on several aspects of the business. I’m currently traveling in SE Asia so I will be posting more content related to SE Asia before I head to either South Africa or Malaysia next 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!

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4 Comments

  1. Will you be posting a new income report for the month of June and so on?

    These income reports are quite interesting and provide some insight for those of us thinking about making a switch to this “digitial nomad” career path.