A Travel blog that makes $80k/year

The story of how she started her business is rather boring. Julianne was working as an attorney and had no idea how to make money online.

She was making good money and was happy; however, life was boring.

One of her colleagues suggested something:

“Hey Julianne, what if you start a blog?”

Julianne also wanted a hobby, so she jumped on the idea.

She really liked traveling. One morning, she Googled “how to start a blog” and created a blog called Pints, Pounds & Pate.

Check out her blog here: https://www.pintspoundsandpate.com/

It is a blog about traveling, but primarily European travel, as that was the only thing Julianne had any interest in at the time.

She started the blog and began writing about her traveling journey.

She wrote about everything:

• The places she wanted to visit
• The places she visited
• How she felt about a place, and so on

There was no format.

And there were no visitors.

Nobody read her blog, but she was fine with it.

Six months later, she saw some people visiting the website.

She had no idea how those people found the site.

Eventually, she decided to do two types of marketing:

1. Pinterest
2. SEO

She was a big Pinterest user and knew exactly the type of images that do well on Pinterest. So, she started adding beautiful travel photos to her blog and pinning them on Pinterest.

That got some traction.

She also started learning SEO from Google and began optimizing her blog posts so more people could find her online.

But more importantly, she kept writing.

She wrote hundreds of blog posts on her website, and eventually, after a year, the blog started making money.

How?

If you read one of her articles, you’ll see it is filled with ads (she makes an average of $10–12 USD for every 1,000 visitors). You will also see product links in her posts (she earns affiliate revenue when someone buys through those links).

This tiny little blog she started in 2019 made $80,000 USD in 2023.

At this moment, Julianne’s main traffic comes from SEO and social media.

Unlike many bloggers, she didn’t focus on SEO traffic alone. She also tried to grow her Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. However, if you visit her social media, you’ll see the numbers aren’t that big.

She only has a few thousand followers on Instagram and Twitter.

This tells us that you don’t need a huge following to get a lot of traffic from social media to your website.

All you need is 4–10 semi-viral reels or posts on social media. These are easier to achieve with travel content as well.

Was she lucky?

For sure.

Did she work harder than you?

Yes, she did.

And that’s why she made it happen.

We found this story inspiring because we can actually see everything.

We can see the terrible first post she wrote, the blog’s traffic, the social media struggle, and even some bad comments.

All in all, this is yet another indication that blogging is alive and well. Blogging is definitely not going anywhere.

Out of all the side hustle ideas that rely heavily on the internet, blogging is by far the best one (in our humble opinion).