Can a New Blog in 2024 Make Money?

The short answer is yes, I’ve done it, I’ve proved it. In February 2024, just before the catastrophic March Google update that killed off incomes for so many bloggers, I started a new blog or website. This was purely coincidental, I didn’t know that update was coming. I just felt like making a new one because that’s what I do on a random Tuesday morning. In this post, we’ll go into how I did that and how much money I’ve made from that site so far.

I’ll say up front that I’m a one person operation, I do not use AI, I have not used outside writers and I have no staff. I used to have a small team when blogging was booming (circa 2018- early 2020) but those days are gone. I’m just a mum working from home with a laptop and some skills I picked up along the way. So let’s get into it!

A New Blog in 2024, Making Money

I have not put a lot of time into this new site. It’s existed since mid February 2024 so it’s about 6 months old. For one of those months I was travelling and did no work at all, nor since.

You’ll see on the graph that traffic is dropping off into September, we’re coming into the low season, rankings haven’t dropped, they’re climbing. I also haven’t worked on that site at all since the start of August.

This new site only gets search traffic, mostly from Google. While I have created social media accounts and linked them, I’ve really not used them. Life is too short for social media.

I don’t think social media works any more unless you really invest time into it and publish something at least daily. I’m never going to do that.

I’m collecting subscribers and I have a couple of hundred but I haven’t been using email to reach them.

So this traffic is all through SEO, mostly Google. A lot of people will tell you that’s not possible any more, but it is.

How many hours have I put into it so far? I don’t know. Not many. Setting up a website takes a few days of tinkering. Adding each post may take anything between an hour and several days depending on the amount of research you have to do, facts you need to check, etc.

With this new site I was able to re-purpose a lot of old content from this big site and move it across. Each post was updated, got new photos and was polished up. Some I redirected (I think only 2) some I just moved the canonical links. Some I duplicated but changed so that the two posts could co-exist for slightly different keywords. There was no syndication involved.

You never want to compete against yourself for the same term and you cannot create duplicate content.

My last post on this big general world travel site took 3 days to finish, it was a labour of love. Not 3 full days, but 3 days of only working on that post. I work however many hours per day I feel like working. That’s one of the beauties of my job, I’m my own boss.

It was this one, you’ll see there are a lot of photos, a lot of facts, prices, tours, long words. It wasn’t one that I could just pull out of my head.

It did require me to go to Thailand and visit the place, so if you’re not a travel nerd you may not see a few thousand $ on flights and hotels as a good investment in creating a blog. To me it’s always worth it.

This post is easy to write and won’t have many photos, it will take me an hour or two. I’m just pulling words out of my head and I probably won’t include any affiliate links. I could, I could link to Generate Press, Siteground etc. Actually I will include 1. You need to join Stay22, after 100 bookings they’ll give you an extra $100 if you use this link!

Stay22 is by far my biggest income stream in the hotel booking sector. It turns every page into a potential earning page, even those without hotel links. It’s a game-changer.

The new site, to date, has just 57 published posts and 8 published pages. I’m going to estimate that I’ve spent maybe 200 hours on it in total. So if I take the rough amount of money it’s made so far divided by 200, that’s just $5 per hour. Not much, but I don’t see working on websites as work. I do it for fun! $1000 is a nice lump of cash for having fun.

Creating an income from a blog is a challenge, and I love a challenge.

If I stopped working on it today it may continue to make $400-$500 per month forever more. That suddenly becomes a very good return on 200 hours of work! But of course, it may not, Google could crush it tomorrow. If that happens I don’t mind too much, it still made me over $1000. It was easy money and I had fun, helping people in the process. It was a cool little experiment.

What about costs and overheads? So far there have been zero costs other than the $10 or so to buy the domain. It’s hosted on my existing hosting platform, I already owned the theme. I’ve bought no paid tools for it other than those I already own.

If you’re starting a new site and you’re not already a blogger there will be costs, but you should be able to buy a theme for $30 or so (I’m using Generate Press Premium – the free version isn’t enough, but you could use a free theme) and get hosting for about $20 a month. It’s not a huge investment. We have a post on starting a blog from scratch here.

But what you do need is know-how. And that’s what I have through years of trial and error.

How much has this new site made so far? Between $1000 and $1500 in Affiliate sales and about $130 (all US) in advertising revenue. This site has only been monetised with ads since July, so that’s only 2 months of showing ads. My ad revenue is low on the new one, much lower than on this big site. That’s for a lot of reasons I’m not allowed to talk about because I signed a thing saying I wouldn’t. So no more on that!

Let’s talk about affiliate sales as they make up much more of my income on every site than ads.

For the record, I have sites on Mediavine, Ezoic, Adsense and Mediavine Journey. Pick whichever one you prefer, but Mediavine needs a very high level of monthly page views to qualify, way more than the new site has.

On this new site, the ad revenue is trivial compared to the affiliate revenue. It may not be entirely bad to just not monetize a travel site with ads at all.

There has been speculation that Google is penalising sites with ads. I don’t subscribe to that theory.

How To Make Money on a New Site

My biggest earner is hotel sales.

You need to pick a hotel booking platform that suits your audience. I use Agoda a lot on this site, it works for an Asian audience and travellers in Asia. This new site uses Booking dot com and occasionally Expedia, where a particular hotel isn’t on Booking.

The second biggest earner is sales of tours, for this we use Viator, GetYourGuide, and Klook. Klook works for Japan, the new site hasn’t had a single Klook sale. You have to test which platform works for the audience it attracts.

After these two (which are all very expensive purchases, so good commissions), there is a smattering of car hire sales and a few Amazon sales.

I make very little from Amazon today, I used to make a lot. But I also put barely any effort into earning from Amazon now because the commissions are just cents. A single hotel sale can (and has) brought me a $500 commission. I’ve even seen a $1000 commission, just once. My biggest single commission on the new site to date is $300 on a hotel sale.

We have a post here on making money with Amazon affiliates but hotels are much more lucrative.

How Is The Process Different in 2024?

I don’t think SEO has changed, but I think Google is demanding higher quality posts and pushing blogs down the page. Blogs are getting less traffic in 2024 because Google puts its own results and AI responses at the top of the search results.

And of course, Google loves Reddit and YouTube – because Google owns both.

Here’s a post on the basics of SEO.

Smart searchers are scrolling past all that stuff, so aim your site at those people!

My new site is sparkly and new, every post has plenty of big images. Images at least 1200 px wide are required now, as stated in Google’s own guidelines. This site is 12 years old, it has a lot of very small images from the early days of blogging. It would take years to replace them all. I’m working on it.

The new site has no broken links, no missing alt tags and hopefully no errors at all. I’ve built it in 2024 for 2024. The World Travel Family site started life in 2012! And honestly, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing back then!

This year I ran full SEO audits and technical audits on all of my sites. I fixed every error I could, but on a site as old as this one you’ll never get them all.

The new site has no hotels that no longer exist or factually inaccurate information. Things change over the years in travel blogging. For instance, the Bangkok to Chiang Mai train now departs from a new station. We had to take that journey again recently to fully update that old post. It’s here.

Travel blogs are never “done once and earn forever”. There is no truly passive income.

This is one of the problems with creating a genuine informational travel blog. You have to keep travelling! We’ve been to Thailand around 30 times now and that’s required to keep things real. Because that’s just how we roll.

I think I worked out recently that the travel has more than paid for itself over the years. I crunched the numbers on how much money one blog post can make. We were going to travel anyway, it was never about the money.

So, a few quick ideas on how to make a site and make a profit this year.

1. Keep it niche. This big site is general world travel covering 50 or so countries. That’s too much work and you can’t cover each destination in sufficient depth. The new site is one destination. You can cover that easily, from every angle. I also think that having every post on a site be relevant to every reader helps keep people on the site longer. That’s good for them, good for your sales, and good for your SEO.

2. Pick an expensive destination. The more expensive the hotels and tours, the bigger your commissions.

3. Write about a place you know well and can visit often. You will need to keep everything updated. You will need photos and videos and you need to stay abreast of what’s going on there and post accordingly.

4. Your chosen destination must be popular with Americans, US visitors bring the big RPMs. If you can’t do that, pick Canada, the UK and maybe Australia.

5. Have a plan to avoid seasonal drops in traffic. If a site covers only one place, it will probably have a busy season. Think about what people could need to know about in the off-season. Fully cover holidays like Christmas, Easter and Halloween. If you can’t get traffic in the off-season, start another site for a place with opposite seasonality. This big world travel blog has never had any seasonality issues because we cover 50 plus countries. We’re not about summer vacations!

6. Have a backup plan or a diversified income. If your travel blog income is crucial for paying your bills you’ll be in a whole world of pain if Google cancels you out of the blue. Be ready for that. Have alternate income streams or be prepared to get a job. I’m lucky, I can play around with websites for fun and I have a lot of them. If one goes down normally one goes up. Or I can just start another one and see how long it takes me to make another $1000!

Over the years I’ve made enough money with our websites to support a family of four travelling full-time. I’m not making that sort of cash today, but I’m making a helpful amount. We live on a farm and we’re fairly self-sufficient, our costs are low. I can afford to be a stay-at-home-farmer. Our farm is here, on yet another website!

That site was totally obliterated in the March update and I haven’t touched it since. Maybe one day it will recover, maybe not. But still, it makes a few bucks here and there. Do you see that “shop” item in the top menu? That page makes sales.

So travel blogging today is different, it’s unreliable, but I don’t think it’s hard. If you have a bit of know-how and time on your hands you can easily make some extra money on the side. If you need to know more just ask in the comments and I’ll keep this post updated with earnings going forward. And don’t forget to join Stay22!

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