Keys to Travel Blogger Success in the New Environment

Thanks to all the negative changes that Google made starting in September of 2023, along with AI stealing our content and reproducing it to benefit the AI bots, 2024 was a tough year for a lot of travel bloggers. It especially hit those who relied on listicles and ranking for high-volume search terms, getting the bulk of their income from display ads and affiliate ads. So what are the travel blogger success strategies now?

That was the subject of my talk late last year at the TBEX Summit in Alaska. The conference room shots were boring, so the one above is on an epic hike in Alaska instead.

Titled “The Muddy Path Forward After Googlegate,” it went into detail (with audience discussion) on two aspects. First was how to diversify your income as a travel blogger, something I’ve been preaching on here, in my travel writing income course, and in three editions of my travel writing book since 2010.

Some travel bloggers didn’t listen were too busy counting their cash from Raptive or Mediavine and now they’re trying to figure out how to cope. If you were getting 80% of your income from display ads and your traffic dropped in half, 2024 was gloomy indeed. If you were getting income from 15 different sources, Google’s actions might have hurt, but they were by no means fatal.

The second part of my presentation was on how to still get search traffic from Big Brother of the internet, what has worked for people who recovered, and what the best practices are moving forward. If you were at that TBEX Summit, you have access to the recording of it. If you’re in my Travel Writing Overdrive course, you’ve got an abbreviated version of it in the last module.

For everyone else, here’s a summary of what you should be doing this year and onward, at least until things drastically change again.

Diversify Your Blogger Income Streams

The whole focus of my Travel Writing Overdrive course is to help my students add more income streams, increase the money coming from the ones they have, and increase their average earnings per hour of work. In the end, the main theme of my Travel Writing 2.0 book has been along the same lines. Just one or two income streams, no matter how healthy they feel at the time, are precarious.

I will try to keep this section brief since the post before this was all about travel writer income diversity  Read at that link to dive in more.

Thankfully, a lot of travel bloggers acted on what this old guy who has seen it all presented over the years and most of them have come through all this relatively unscathed. If you also do a bit of freelancing, sell your own product(s), lead tours, and do direct brand deals, for example, display ad income is just a slice of the pie. It’s not the whole pie, so if someone comes and eats that slice while you’re not looking, you still have most of the pie left.

And you have the skills to bake more. Over and over again.

Sure, there’s a risk of Shiny Object Syndrome where you’re chasing something new all the time, but if you do it right, it’s just low-investment experimentation and acting on results. You do more of what’s making you money and less of what’s not over time. You spend your valuable time on tasks with proven leverage in terms of income—not just likes and hearts—and not on tasks that don’t ever fatten your bank account.

For some travel bloggers that might be social media brand partnerships and better affiliate placements. For others it might be improved e-mail marketing. Or finally finishing that book that’s been in the works for years. Others might want to double down on YouTube and try to get paid clients for video work.

New opportunities are popping up all the time. Some of them might be a waste, but it’s hard to know until you try. The two hosts of the Niche Pursuits podcast started new side hustles after the HCU changes hurt some of their sites. One is earning thousands per month from the Facebook bonus program from reaching millions of people on one fan page. As in close to $5K in December.

The other earned more than $40,000 in 2024 from review videos—but not on the social channels you’re probably thinking of. He’s earning consistently each month by posting short horizontal videos, mostly unedited, in the Amazon Influencer Program. Enough to pay the mortgage and bills…from a side hustle.

I’ve met travel bloggers who sell travel itinerary downloads or consult for trip planning. I’ve met ones who sell t-shirts or info cards. Others have parlayed their skills into building websites or running social media campaigns for organizations or brands. Some are doing great on Substack.

There are plenty of ways to make a buck. The more of them you can string together, the more immune you’ll probably be from AI-driven algorithm changes. Some take very little time too or can be at least partially outsourced. Join me here if you want some personal help in making this happen over the course of months or a year.

Reduce Dependence on the Big G

Few experts ever expect results from the Google monopoly to return to where they were in the display ad heyday for travel bloggers. You can get much better search results now from Bing, Duck Duck Go, and even ChapGPT search than you can from the dominant player. Regardless, relying on random queries to bring people to your pages should not be your main strategy even if those alternatives steal half the market share. Take that traffic when you can get it, but don’t try to use it to drive your whole business.

Neither the advertisers nor the ad platforms care where your traffic comes from. They pay per thousand visitors. As you can see from that example above, some months Google is only accounting for half my display ad revenue in Mediavine for my Cheapest Destinations Blog. That’s good, that’s healthy. If yours is all from one place (or was before you got whacked), you need to work on that.

Also, revelations that have come out of leaked documents and antitrust docs show that Google pays a lot of attention to what happens on your site when users get there. Remember, they have all your data via Search Console and Analytics. Plus despite what they said in public, for years they’ve been using reams of data on user behavior in the Chrome browser to see what visitors do after clicking on search results.

In one irony that dovetails nicely into the need for different traffic sources, it turns out that Google itself looks at where people come from to get to your website. If it’s a nice mix of social, direct traffic, e-mail, and referrals, they take that as a positive sign, especially if a human quality rater gets involved. If it’s 90% from search, for a bunch of queries that don’t show authority in a specific subject area, that’s bad news.

Many SEO sites have done deep analysis on correlations between sites that were hit hard and those that weren’t and many have found this to be a factor. Smaller sites that looked to be just chasing SEO terms on a wide variety of subjects, with the purpose of gaming search, seemed to suffer more than really focused ones getting traffic from a variety of places.

Also, with that Chrome data, Google is paying attention to how fast people leave and go back to the search results, known as “pogo sticking.” Or how fast they leave your site to go somewhere else. One blogger I invited to present at TBEX a couple of years back was putting a tour affiliate link in a separate call-out box at the beginning of her posts and encouraging people to click out to this “best tour.” That made her a ton of tour commission money before the HCU update, but this would not be a good strategy now.

My strategy has been to go even harder into e-mail marketing, where I can see what’s working and what’s not easily and I don’t have to depend on the whims of some tech bros and their AI minions. I can communicate with my followers when and how I want and anywhere from 35 to 55% of them will see what I post. Compare that to social media, where you’re lucky if 1% of your followers see what you put up.

If I send out a newsletter to 6,500 people and get a 35% open rate, that means 2,275 people read it. If I get a 2% overall click-through rate, that’s 130 people who came to my website or sales landing page. Meanwhile, if I put something up on Instagram, here’s how many people saw my most successful post of the month according to IG:

I’ll do the math for you. If 446 of my 6,572 Instagram followers see my posts, at best, that’s a reach of 6.7%. Huge by Instagram standards, but lousy compared to my very worst e-mail newsletter of all time. That is the opposite of leverage, even if it did only take 10 minutes of my time to post.

That 10 minutes of time, at my regular work rate, equates to $10 in a slow week, more when things are hopping. Would you spend $10 on ads to reach just 446 people with a photo if it wasn’t a brand obligation?

Also, e-mail is a great sales platform since your biggest fans tend to open what you send every time. I’m getting ready to run my third and fourth travel tours this quarter and they were marketed almost completely by e-mail. It’s also how I get at least half of my book sales, especially the packages with consulting, and generate a lot of my affiliate income.

Perhaps for you it’s Pinterest. Lesli Peterson launched a new website, only promoted it via Pinterest, and got it into Journey by Mediavine in less than two months from launch. I’ve heard other stories where people replaced all their lost Google traffic and then some just by changing their focus to Pinterest instead.

I’ve never had that kind of success with Pinterest, but I’ve never put a huge effort into it either, so maybe this year I’ll dabble more and see.

Still others have had big success with Facebook groups or pages, by running well-leveraged ads with a low budget, or finding a way to connect on Flipboard, Medium, or Newsbreak.

The key is to adapt, to experiment, and to take a clear-eyed look at bad assumptions. We are flawed humans so we believe all kinds of fallacies without thinking about them. It’s what the great book Thinking, Fast And Slow is all about.

One of these is the primacy fallacy, which I was reminded of a while back in an e-mail newsletter from Jon Dykstra of Fatstacks. We tend to remember the first and most recent events or pieces of information, forgetting all that came between them, and that first one can really hurt us.

Watch out for primacy fallacy. If you find yourself ever saying or thinking “that won’t work because I tried it before” step back and consider it further.

How long ago was it?

Are you doing things differently today than you were then?

Avoid assumptions, especially assumptions based on recognized fallacies.

For nearly all of us, times have changed. Maybe that e-mail list or digital product or consulting pitch didn’t work 5 years ago, but maybe now it will.

We need to operate differently than we did in 2023, even more so than we did when I started back in the ’00s. Though funny enough, the ’00s blogging style might be coming back. Which leads us to…

The Welcome Death of Super-long Travel Blog Articles

This article was clearly not written to game the search engines of 2025. For one thing, it’s too long.

For a while there, Google was clearly rewarding long articles. The SEO experts were giving advice like, “If the top-ranking article for the keyword phrase you want to rank for has ’27 things to do in X,’ and is 3,000 words, then your article should be ’31 Things to Do in X’ and be 4,000+ words in order to outrank them.”

Many bloggers ate this up and the end result was predictable: the top-10 results in Google were basically the same article, but with an ever-escalating arms race of information. There would be 40 more people in the following pages all trying to outdo each other with a longer article than those ranking on the first page. The numbers kept going up, even if there were really only 6 things to do in X that were worth the reader’s time and money.

Thankfully, those days seem to be fading into the rear-view mirror. An AI bot can write that 4,000-word article now in a few minutes because of all that source material that’s already out there, thank you very much you generous content creators. It won’t be great since the AI was trained on what was already published but the human-written ones weren’t all that great either in most cases.

Most of those long listicles were wordy instead of succinct. An e-book of information instead of a carefully curated list based on personal experience. In other words, overkill.

Google has made it clear that it wants to reward articles that get to the point and answer the searcher’s questions. Overall word count has declined in what’s showing up on the first page of Google’s organic search results and almost nobody thinks this will reverse anytime soon.

Every “SEO expert” (is there even such a thing anymore?) has quickly done a 180 on their advice. Focused articles that address the user’s needs are more in favor than exhaustive “everything you ever wanted to know” ones, especially ones that take the form of listicles.

Write for People, Not Algorithms

You have to remember that you can’t look at what big corporate sites are getting away with as a guide to what you should be doing. Google is more of a “Do as I say, not as I do” kind of organization because they give big sites with a high domain authority a lot of slack in their algorithm. They also lie a lot, as shown in recent document leaks and antitrust evidence.

This is a case, however, where we small publishers do need to take them seriously when they say to “write for people instead of trying to game the system.”

Again, big and crappy sites are clearly trying to game Google and are still getting away with it, in some cases with hilarious results. This terrible article was ranked #1 for a very competitive keyword last year for months on end in Google, just because they had a high DA. They tried to do everything wrong, on purpose, just to prove the algorithm was flawed.

The only way you can come close to competing with this is by being the go-to site in your niche and being a brand that people search for by name. The brand issue does seem to be a factor that tripped up a lot of travel bloggers trying to write about anything and everything. All of their traffic was from random searchers who didn’t stick around, not real fans or followers gathering around a person or subject.

We small publishers can’t get away with relying on a Domain Authority of 80, so we need to play to our strengths. As small one- or two-person operations, we are nimble, adaptive, and very focused on what’s happening with our readers. If were are really living our niche, we know what our readers want and we’re listening to their reactions.

We also have real fans and followers who care about the subject. I doubt anyway has ever said, “I really love Forbes.com. I feel like I’m part of a real community there.” People do really care about your niche though I bet, and by extension, you. So connect with them and produce content that will resonate.

Travel Blogger Success is not Dead, Just Different

I’ve gotten in Facebook fights with people spouting off that “blogging is dead,” the future is bleak, we can’t compete with big sites anymore, blah blah blah. I’ve been blogging since 2003, so I’ve pivoted and adapted more times than I can count. This is just another adjustment.

On top of that, December was my best month in three years for search traffic on my Cheapest Destinations Blog. Two articles in particular helped with that because the subjects were in the news, but the point is it was Google search traffic that spiked, showing we can still rank if we’re not pursuing competitive listicle subjects or keyword phrases that a bot can easily answer.

The following is all my opinion, but is based on what I’ve seen and heard from paying more attention than most. If you want a second opinion, which has some overlap with mine and other experts, check out this article that ran in Travel Payouts.

– Writing the old-school way we did when I started out is in vogue again. Mix your advice with personal experience. Be opinionated. Stand for something. Don’t talk about what you don’t know about. (Or about places you haven’t been to.)

– Writing for an avatar, your ideal reader, will be much more effective than writing for search intent. Search traffic should be treated like a bonus outcome.

– Writing to answer readers’ questions will be far more effective than creating article ideas based on keyword research. You do leave your comments turned on, right? You do survey and invite feedback from your e-mail subscribers, right?

– Focused articles that say what they need to say and then stop are going to do better than laundry list novellas.

– Be very clear about who your site is for and what it is about. If you are all over the map, you are going to struggle in the current environment. A random visitor should know as soon as they land on your site what your focus is, or at least your point of view/angle.

– If you have an urge to be wordy, do it on your About page. That should show who you are, what you have accomplished, why you are an expert, and what you care about. A personal back story doesn’t hurt either. It makes you human and believable.

– Posting stock photos or AI ones in any article you post should be a last resort. Show us you were there or that you used the product!

Raw, emotional, storytelling articles fell by the wayside pre-HCU for a good decade there after the advent of tools like Ahrefs, SEM Rush, Market Muse, and RankIQ that encouraged us to copy, not be original. The one site of mine that has increased in traffic the past year and a half is one that did almost everything wrong in the gaming Google days: Perceptive Travel. It’s up by a third in Google search results since all the changes went through. While others got bloodied, that anti-SEO one soared.

I’ve got to think our focus on narrative travel stories from book authors on the magazine side and a focus on the unusual and “small” on the Perceptive Travel Blog is why. Here are a few of the posts getting the most hits lately on the blog thanks to an increase in search traffic:

A Day Trip to Loch Lomond from Edinburgh

Austin Rocks: Why I Love the Driskill Bar

Taking the Coast Starlight Train – Portland to Los Angeles

Why Raglan is New Zealand’s Coolest Small Town

Is the Hippy Village of Pai, Thailand Worth the Wild Drive?

Mont Tremblant, Quebec: Much More Than Skiing

I went to Rome recently but the last thing I wanted to write was some stupid long listicle. So I only wrote an article about a bike tour on the Appian Way. Small, focused, and based on personal experience.

Time to wrap this up but I hope you found this guide to travel blogger success in the new era to be helpful. Join me for the next round of Travel Writing Overdrive if you want to dive more into the practical side of these changes and how to implement them.

Or at the very least, get on my list for the monthly Travel Writing Success newsletter.