A Couple Travelers By The Numbers: July’13 Income – $14,531

Added by Dave on August 4, 2013

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Traffic and Social Media:

As I mentioned last month we’ve stopped actively trying to build traffic. That’s not to say that we’re sabotaging the site, we’re just less interested in going the extra mile in order to promote our posts. In fact, I never even check Google Analytics anymore except for these updates – something I used to do almost daily. Not surprisingly, this attitudinal change has resulted in a substantial drop in traffic, though realistically one could argue that the lost audience weren’t really dedicated readers anyways.

Social Media goes hand and hand with traffic. Again we’re not looking to build up our social media like we once were in the distant past. We’re more focused on running the blog as a hobby and trying to find enjoyment in other activities. I’m going to stop posting the numbers because I don’t want to imply that we’re trying to build it. Also, I like posting things that can’t be seen i.e traffic and earnings. If anyone wants to see our social media they can just check out our pages (see our sidebar) and old income reports for reference points.

TripGoggles – Shifting Focus:

We’re moving into our third month now and things have been going a bit more smoothly since we switched programmers. Thanks to help from Vicky’s dad we were able to find someone actually competent to take over the programming at a reasonable rate – sometimes elance.com or whatever freelance site you’re using isn’t always the best option, I don’t care how many reviews someone has. Connections still play a role in today’s world. Review websites i.e tripadvisor, elance, yelp, hostelbookers, etc can be tampered with – don’t believe everything you read. People can offer discounts for a good review or for not leaving a bad one and other nefarious tactics – just saying.

Anyways, our most recent update makes it very simple to upload posts. Simply put in the URL from the post and click “get data” and basically everything is pulled for you, including the picture. You just have to set the country, city, and category (all scroll down menus). It’s really nice and makes uploading a breeze. Go ahead and just upload one – it won’t hurt and should take like 30 seconds, just to see how it works.

Moving forward we’re going to shift focus from the bloggers to getting real traffic to the website. Maybe that sounds silly, like we should have been doing that all along, but my thinking was that first I wanted to make it a website that bloggers felt comfortable uploading posts too. We’ve worked out those kinks fairly well (not perfect, but close enough), and now I want to bring traffic to the website to make it more appealing for people to upload posts by being a nice source for referral traffic. This is going to basically revolve around social media marketing and press releases – both relatively new ground for us and it will take a few months to figure out and even longer to build up. That’s traffic for ya, it doesn’t happen overnight. Directionally though, I think we’re on the right track.

Selling The Blog:

Early in the month I received an email from someone interested in purchasing the blog. I practically disregarded this immediately as spam but figured I’d ask what they had in mind. They quoted me 6 figures and wanted to know if I would be interested in speaking on the phone. Needless to say, it caught my attention.

Long story short, after 45 minutes on the phone I never heard back from the guy. I guess I’m not quite the salesman I thought I was – instead of hardball I’ll stick to teeball. That said, I actually don’t think it was spam and I’m fairly certain that the business is legitimate, however, they were slightly mistaken in that they saw that we were making all this money month to month but couldn’t really understand how. Once they saw our traffic numbers and earning sources, well I think that pretty much did them in. Though I suppose after this month they’re going to be regretting their decision (ok maybe not, but we did have a great month)!

It did get me thinking though, what would it take to sell the blog? I’ll say outright that there IS a price. We’re not one of those diehard, $1 billion or bust type bloggers – if you quote me a fair price, I’ll definitely consider it.

But what is fair?

It’s hard to say, the blog itself earns between $3-4k each month. There are also possible renewals going forward since most deals are one year long and we’ve racked up quite a few, but what percentage can we expect to renew after the one year mark? Moreover the blog also helps recruit people to the blogging partnership, so there is value outside of direct sales. Oh, and of course sentimental value.

But then of course there is the risk that everything comes crashing down without notice.

Bottom line, I think anything over 100k would be a definite yes. 50k to 100k would be a probably. Less than 50k would be unlikely, and less then 20k would be a no. As crazy as that sounds, it’s just more worth it for us to see how many people renew at this point. If we get one more year out of this with renewals, well that’s some serious cash an doesn’t require much work (my favorite kind of cash).

Not that anyone is interested mind you. This is a personal blog that makes money in a unique and risky way and it is not likely that anyone at any point will ever want to buy it. Just some food for thought.

Buying Blogs:

Last month I talked about our method for earning more and concluded that buying blogs was probably the best way to increase your income if you’re interested in this advertising and have the contacts. The reason was that it is quick, they are readily available, already established, and you get to keep 100%. You just have to be willing to put down a little bit of money, and of course be able to evaluate them.

So I put my money where my mouth was and bought a blog off of flippa.com (side note, I have also been told that GoDaddy auctions are quite good for this).

The blog doesn’t look that nice and doesn’t have much traffic. The content is pretty skimpy too. But the SEO metrics are solid – it’s PR3 plus a few other things. This makes it a nice experiment into seeing how far one can go with “just” the numbers (and none of the quality, so to speak).

The transaction cost me $695 after a slight bidding war. Actually, it was slightly higher than I was expecting because something about this particular site really appealed to one bidder who drove it up like $200 on the last day. Still, I probably would have paid $1k for it as I was pretty confident I could get more than that. I then had to pay Host Gator $40 to help with the transfer.

All and all it took about 3 weeks to get settled because neither I nor the seller knew what they were doing. Let me just say that in this instance you probably should just hire someone to do the transfer for you. It’s a real pain in the butt dealing with hosting companies from abroad, then sellers, time differences, business days, etc. I bought a website before (not a travel blog) and the guy knew what he was doing and within 20 minutes he went into my backend cpanel and just put everything where it needed to be. It’s tricky though because you do have to give someone permission/access to all your stuff though…

And then I got down to business. Within two days of pitching I had my money back, a few more days and we cleared $1k in profits on this site. Between committed deals in July/August I think we’re good for $2k on this one, of course you never know, but it definitely paid off. Also, you have to remember that the blog is a sellable asset. If I buy a blog for $700 and it is just content and a website, then in theory I should be able to resell it for a similar price, probably at least $400 (as this one was a bit more expensive than it was worth), so the amount I “paid” for it is not as much because it’s mine to sell later on should I choose to do so. What I’m trying to say is that if you buy something at face value it’s almost like getting it for free. In this case, since I’ve just started monetizing it it’s actually increased in value since we bought it (before the seller claimed no income).

As you can see this went a lot better than when we tried to start another blog. Mainly it was quicker and we profited more. It also gives you a reason to connect with advertisers again, which resulted in a few other deals on our main websites. Anyways, this was my point all along. I preached it last month and put it into practice this month.

So now what? Well, if I was smart, I’d take some portion of the profits from this transaction and invest into another blog – wash, rinse, repeat, until it doesn’t work anymore. This way I’m only working with the money I’ve made from this transaction and not putting anything else down. Maybe hire some writers to help keep the sites going, outsource all of it. Then sell off all the blogs or better yet hold them for renewals down the line.

So that’s what I did.

I just bought another one with the profits from this one. The metrics aren’t quite as good but it’s still PR3 and looks really crisp. I paid $950 for it. We will see if we can make a profit on this one but I’m optimistic I can at least break even, and again, the blog is always there to be resold down the line.

Let me just say that I by no means am trying to state this like I’m the first one to come up with this idea. I suspect some Travel Bloggers have been doing this for quite some time, it’s just that no one really talks about it (until now). It took us quite some time to figure it out ourselves to be honest. If anything, I should have been more savvy to have done this months ago when we really started earning on our blogs and had the contacts. Better late than never though.

Google Page Rank: 3/10

Domain Authority: 41/100

Advertising: On A Roll

For starters, I want to clarify that I am now combining the two income reports I used to do (acoupletravelers and avocadopesto) into just one, which is like a general income update. We’re really moving beyond this stuff being acoupletravelers or avocadopesto at this point having multiples side websites and all – it’s just Vicky and my monthly earnings plain and simple. Also, I never really felt like we were getting much love on the food blog – people just weren’t interested in these monthly ramblings, so why bother?

Anyways, we really blew it out of the water this month. A lot of things came together. We had the new site, some good deals on our main blogs, and really fine tuned the blogging partnership to give everyone the best bang for their buck. In fact, concerning the partnership, we really put this into practice last month but because of the general process delay i.e payments and correspondence it kind of spilled over, so now we’re reaping the benefits of efficiency improvements from last month going forward. Surprisingly, our average commissions are lower than ever before and overall everyone is making more money (us and the bloggers, though of course it varies case by case). I was actually quite impressed to see that since we started only around 4 months ago we’ve brought in nearly $80k in advertising dollars through this partnership for us and the blogs we’ve worked/are working with. In fact, the two blogs that we have been with the longest (starting in March/April) have taken in over $6k and $8k respectively after commissions – not bad, especially one of them was looking to sell his blog on flippa! Pays to get in early I guess. It’s nice to think that we’re helping people make money. Not to say this is a charity or anything, it isn’t and we’re paid well for it but I like providing services on a commission because I feel like everyone walks away a winner. It made me think the other day that a good idea could be a course that charges a commission based on the future earnings that come out of it…

I have to say, I’m about as perplexed at how high the earnings were this month as I’m sure many of the readers are. I was almost certain that as we disclosed more and more on these income reports (about how this advertising works, about the blogging partnership, etc) and the more people we introduced to advertisers the less we’d see directly on our own blog. As demand increased, supply and price should decrease. Now we just gave away our latest blog buying secret and created more competition for us on flippa!

Strangely though, earnings have been steadily increasing and now this month – another record high. It doesn’t make much sense except to say that I guess its karma for giving out so much info in these posts?

But if you don’t believe in that, I’ll offer another interpretation.

I’ve noticed lately that a lot of advertisers have been coming back to us over and over again in a sort of relationshipy way to provide us with posts and such. I can’t really explain this but my guess is it has to do something with the fact that we’re not fuzzy.

We get posts up right away

We accept pretty much everything

We don’t have a long list of guidelines/criteria (or any for that matter)

So I think we’ve established ourselves as those easy to work with guys who you can throw stuff to whenever you just want to one and done it. That wasn’t our intention as much as its just who we are but it might be working to our advantage.

Then again, maybe we’re just lucky.

Naturally our business costs are higher than they’ve ever been before. That’s partially inflated due to the fact that we bought a website for 700+ this month and we pay one of our assistants a very decent rate to help with tours for Vadovia (in fact she gets more for them than we do). I know that we could lower these costs by hiring cheaper labor, for example by targeting poorer countries (i.e the Philippines not Spain) but I just don’t really have it in me. They do a good job and we make more than enough. I think the focus should be on earning more revenue, not cutting costs, as the former is boundless. A good assistant is really invaluable in some ways – we’ve been very lucky with ours picks. Without them there is no way Vicky and I could manage our current operation – we’d have to scale back.

Breakdown:

ACoupleTravelers – $14,143

Direct Advertising: $3750
Vadovia: $768
Blogging Partnership: $9,625

AvocadoPesto – $1444

Direct Advertising: $1328
Google Adsense: $48
BlogHer: $66
Amazon $2

TravelExplosion – $1665

Total Business Costs: $2721

Virtual Assistants: $1682
Website Purchase: $740
Other: $299

Total Value Received: $0

My Philosophy On Opportunities:

The end of July marks one full year of advertising on our site. If you look at old income and traffic reports you’ll see that we first started earning in August ($42). It’s hard to really gauge what our expectations were at the time but I believe I was hoping to make around $500 a month once we got going and around $5k over the course of two years. After all, we did have decent savings over two years ($45k or something) and we’re planning on spending it all. Naturally, despite wanting to earn on the blog, we really had no idea of how we would do this aside from things like adsense and affiliate income.

However, as I keep some rough stats around trip earnings and spending I’ll break it down for you now.

Total Earned = ~80k

Total Spent (Travel) = ~$31k

Total Spent (Business) = ~$6k

As you can see, our expectations were way off and for once in a good way.

So what’s the takeaway here?

I remember once sitting in my office back home and talking about this trip to my manager. He wanted to know what, if anything, our goal was. I explained to him that although we didn’t have any specifics in mind, we were hoping that just by being “out” here, seeing things, talking with people, networking, that opportunities would present themselves and we would take advantage of them. I don’t remember his exact words but it was something along the lines of

“Maybe, but probably not.”

He wasn’t being a jerk. He was trying to say, don’t count on opportunities just slapping you in the face and saying “come on, let’s go!”

This probably sounds like negativity, harsh realism, etc but even after the monetary success we’ve been experiencing with the blog I still agree with what he said.

The reality of our last year shows us that opportunities rarely present themselves so directly as to make it impossible to miss them. Yes, when we started this travel blog we didn’t know anything aboutthis advertising, where they came from, how to get them etc. And yes, it was advertisers who first reached out to us with offers. Still, it was through aggressive/proactive tactics that we really got to the state we are in today. That we were able to amass the contacts we did, in the time we did, and to get in the circles that we did. We saw that there was something here that we wanted and we went and got it. The blogging partnership, which we just started a few months ago and has already brought in ~$80k in advertising revenue was not the result of a bunch of people saying “hey, can you market our blogs and take a commission?” but a few people saying “hey, how can we make money on our blogs?” and us connecting the dots, coming up with the terms, proactively soliciting people to build it up, and fine tuning it month after month. Opportunities are there but they’re much more subtle.

Of course, all of this is a result of us taking the leap of faith to go travel the world, but believe it or not, many have done the same and not ended in our position. That alone isn’t enough.

In fact, we see opportunities quite often but rarely get to pursue them. For example

1. Who are writing these posts for the advertisers? Why not offering our services as writers to the advertisers to write the very posts that they are offering to other bloggers? Outsource it and scale it.

2. Numerous times I’ve had people ask me about assistants; where to find them, what terms to use, if we know any one personally. Why not a business where we find assistants for people? Set them up, walk through the first tasks with them, etc. Say for the first 10 hours take a cut on both ends, charging a bit extra for the customer and taking a cut out of the assistant earning – brokering, and then let them do their business without an intermediary after that.

3. We see tons of cool, unique souvenirs all the time being sold for really cheap in Asia that would sell for a lot of money in Western stores. There has to be an import/export business here even at the individual level that we could take advantage of. In fact, we met a guy who was doing just that in Burma. He travels for half the year and spends the other half selling his goods in stores in Canada.

These are just a few of the ideas that have come to us over travels. They’re not flushed out or anything and we probably won’t do all or even any of them (if you like one of them, go ahead – we don’t own them). No one stood up and said “do this”, but people did come to us asking for help finding assistants, asking us to write posts for them, asking us to bring them souvenirs. Little things like this spell one word – “value”. Someone is asking for a service that you can provide, therefore you are providing value. Where’s there’s value, there’s potentially a business.

Of course, it doesn’t always have to be about money, but how many things have you paid for and said – “that was great value, I’d gladly have paid more for that”. There’s nothing wrong with charging for something if you are providing great value. If something is your business, you’re probably doing a better job at it anyways.

Donations:

This month we donated $110 to Eco Friendly Learning Center for Malnourished Guatemalan Families. Vicky read about the effort on almost fearless in this article. As stated in the campaign, UNESCO rates Guatemala as the 4th highest malnutritioned country in the world, and the highest in Latin America. This campaign is run by two American families who want to create a model farm to show Guatemalans better and more sustainable techniques.

“As a natural, environmentally friendly farm, it will provide hands-on training at no cost, and education on things such as square-foot gardening, vermicomposting, permaculture, animal husbandry, grey water filtration, drinking water filtration, composting toilets, alternative energy, and more. We will also teach skills classes on things like soapmaking, food preservation, hygiene, recycling, and emergency preparedness.

The locals will have the opportunity to ‘learn-and-earn’, exchanging time spent working and learning on the farm for seeds, garden boxes, chickens, grey water and drinking water filtration and composting toilet systems, among other things.

Not only are we teaching skills, we’re also providing necessary resources, without giving ineffective or inappropriate handouts.”

They have ambitious goals and a great cause so we were happy to donate. I usually aim for 1% and fell short of it a bit this month because the campaign was ending early and I had to project what our total earnings would be for the month – I figured it would be like last month’s. Next month I’m going to be better about that because I want to stick to the 1% mark for now.

UPDATE: I have actually gotten in touch with the family running this and will see if I can donate the remainder – sweet!

Find previous traffic updates:

Previous Income Updates (Food Blog)

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