Decades of Travel Publishing with Max Hartshorne of GoNOMAD

Max Hartshorne is a legend in the travel publishing world, easing into retirement after 21 years as a full-time editor, creator, and travel writer online at the helm of GoNOMAD, which he built up for two years before quitting his old job. In that time he has created a large body of work covering most of the world and has launched or aided the careers of more than 100 contributors. 

There are very few people who have been running a website about travel longer than me since I launched my first blog in 2003, but you’re one of them. What’s your story?

I don’t know for sure that GoNOMAD is the earliest dinosaur in the landscape of websites, but our URL started in January of 2000, so there are very few possible surviving travel content sites that were launched earlier. I got to experience all of the great things that happened during that early 2000s era when blogs were just starting and starting to become popular and then direct advertising revenue was so great. I took the site over in 2002 and published non-stop until 2024.

I bought it in 2002 and then it only took two years to become a full-time job. I quit my sales job I had at the time because we started doing affiliate marketing and we started linking out to partners that were paying us well. Airport parking became a very lucrative topic partnership for us, thousands of dollars a month. So we were able to really move forward, then it became just a snowball. Like when you get more traffic then you get more readers then you get more ad inquiries.

I think what set us apart was that we would publish a story every weekday, five days a week, every week of the year. So there was always lots of new content. Then anyway, you succeeded in publishing by being a consistent publisher. If you were an expert and you published interesting articles, you linked out and other articles linked back to you.

When blogging took off more and became more mainstream after that, how else were you making an income?

Affiliate income was good. We used to do pretty well with TripAdvisor and flights, then there was this company Conductor that used to buy text links on a massive scale on all these websites. Business was booming until Google caught on and made it clear that they didn’t like that. So then that company went out of business, but they were a big revenue source for a while.

Like most bloggers at the time, I also ran Google AdSense text ads on the side. And then I got accepted to Travel Ad Network, which preceded the ones we know today like Raptive and Mediavine. They started to really pay us good money for display ads. So we got rid of the little Google ads and we just ran display ads. They’re gone now too, but that worked well for a while.

You’re doing a keynote speech at TBEX North America in Quebec City. What are you going to be talking about?

My TBEX presentation is going to take everybody in the audience on a fast-forward ride. To get them thinking about what happens when they’re at my point in life now as a (mostly) retired publisher and editor. So I’m trying to give people a little idea about what they should be thinking about and planning for in their future, what they could leave as a legacy for themselves. And I wanted people to think about what happens after they’re gone.

I know that’s a kind of a weird thing to say, but what’s the potential that you want to realize? What will happen to all of your things you have built online and off? Who’s going to take over? What will people remember you for?

You could really have an impact over the long run and do memorable things if you think about these answers now.

What are some things you are proud of in your legacy?

I feel really good about how it’s all worked out for me but the best thing wasn’t what I did. It was all the opportunities to have these trips and to send other writers on trips and to give them a platform. Plus a lot of interns have started out writing for me and it made a big difference in their lives. I have met some of them later and they have thanked me for the opportunity even though they didn’t get paid. They say, “It helped me get into this really great college.” Or I’ve had interns who I recommended for jobs and it helped them get the position.

What you could do for others is really meaningful. I was in New York City once and I ran into a woman at bar and she said, “You know, I just got the cover article in Travel + Leisure. You published my first story. You made me believe in myself.”

That’s the best feeling. I want people to think about that feeling of doing something good for others.

I think you and I first met at a travel writers conference 20-something years ago and we’ve gone to a ton of them since. How has going to industry events and conventions paid off for you?

I have a lot of friends and contributors who never attend these things. They don’t think of themselves as conference people and not publishers or business people. They’re at the mercy of the Chicago Tribune, Lonely Planet, or whatever. They’re in the shadows. I think that’s a missed opportunity.

I have gone to Traverse in Europe a bunch and I think 14 TBEX conferences now. I think what some writers don’t understand it that it’s a community. As I got to know all those people in the community, good things happened. There’s no way you could match having a beer with somebody face to face at a conference or going on a press trip with somebody after. You can’t get those same connections holed up in your home office.

Look at us, it’s how we started the multi-blogger campaigns together and sold the first deals with big brands like Trivago and Alamo in a natural, organic way. It wouldn’t have worked if we didn’t have the personal connections.

It’s a lot different working in a community and being at the meetings and showing up in person every six or twelve months as opposed to being somebody that is in the background always working solo. I love these people and this business. Some of my favorite people are travel writers. They’re great conversationalists. They know how to listen. They have interesting stories. They’re generous.

In my experience, I’ve never felt any competition. It’s all been about mutual benefit and these meet-ups have been huge for me. Plus it’s all lots of fun too. Good times with old friends.

What is one thing you did differently that made a big difference?

From the beginning we were always listed on websites for writers, as a place you could get published, so we were never short of material. We always had tons of articles we could produce. So every week we had new material going up.

But internships have been a huge thing and they’ve had a major impact on GoNOMAD. I’m surprised more publishers don’t hire college interns. We hired maybe 150 different interns over the course of it all and we had at least one intern every semester since 2004. So these writers create content, they work on the website, and they gain experience they can show off later. I would send some of them on trips and get them to write articles, or have them do research about topics I wanted to cover.

What has changed over the years?

There are more ways to make money now but I’d say the reward isn’t as great as it was in the early days when there wasn’t so much competition. I used to get about 150,000 unique visitors a month, which meant thousands of dollars in passive income, but now it’s tough to get that kind of search traffic consistently on a travel blog unless you’re a huge corporate brand. You have to get more creative in the monetizing.

I appreciate these ad networks that never gave up on us after we all lost all that traffic from Google. My network Raptive is still in close touch and really encouraging. I’m sure their revenue went down by half at least too.

What parting advice would you give to someone starting out now?

Maybe don’t start a website. Go buy a website instead. Find somebody that’s burned out and buy their website. That’s what I did in 2002 and it’s an even better strategy today. There are sites like Flippa and Empire Flippers and other places where you could take over and avoid two or three years of building from scratch. Borrow some money or do some creative financing. (Editor’s note: I was advising this in pubic back in 2018!)

Not mine though! People ask me “Why don’t you sell your website?” Well, you won’t pay me enough and it’s more valuable for me to keep it and bank the income. But other people might say, “Sure, I’ll make a deal.”

When I bought my website, I paid her a little bit of money up front, but I sent her $700 a month for two years. She was traveling in Bali and Australia and wherever and was happy to get the regular deposits.

I also think new creators should think about YouTube seriously. You have got to be really careful about social media and putting much effort into that. It gets taken away so often and people are constantly losing their accounts from Facebook and Instagram because Meta can’t stop the scammers. I lost my Facebook page for GoNOMAD and there went my 8,000 followers that I didn’t own. The page taken down for no reason and no human to contact. It’s so hard to get any resolution at all.

Stick to what you can control at this point: a website, e-mail, a podcast, and YouTube to some degree.

And if your site has bit hit by Google and your numbers are down, remember that you still have a domain that’s valuable, you own a platform that people still want to appear on.

It’s the same with one that someone is selling. You could update the stories and you could just pad it out and improve it a little. It’s got a track record already.

I know you’re backing off new material, but what seems to be really working from a Google search standpoint, from what you see?

Using the pronouns “we” and “I” will be crucial and establishing yourself as a writer with authority, creating a personal story that nobody else could write is more important now. If you can do that, you are much harder to copy. And then don’t ever put “conclusion” at the end. Bots love to do that and it’s a giveaway that AI was involved.

I’m basically retired now though so I don’t even look at the stats. The funny thing is, many of the most popular articles on our website are stories that are old. Stories that we published 10 years ago or more. Your story about sadhus in India from 2003 still gets healthy traffic!

I have a story about a nude beach I went to in Florida that’s probably in the top-10 and one about a naked colony I went to back in 2005 is still one of the highest-rated stories. Salacious titles get clicks I guess. But another that did great forever and earned a lot of ad money was about the 10 best tennis resorts. So you never know.

Any parting lessons learned after 23 years of running a content business?

One more thing. I started a little side project website in 2008. It’s called Deerfield Attractions. An intern laid it out and designed it for me. I approached all the businesses in my little town of Deerfield, MA and at the time I had a cafe so they knew me. I said, “Would you like to buy ad space on my little DeerfieldAttractions.com website?”

But here’s the thing. I didn’t sell them one ad. I put up a subscription cost of $200 per year, which is not too high, not too low. Then I kept it at that so I would get easy renewals. Everybody’s been paying me $200 a year since 2008.

So far I’ve made $28,000 from this website with a cost of close to zero to produce and not much to run it. I update it once in a while, but things don’t change much in this small local town. So if you could do something like this in a little town, a little neighborhood, you could sell subscriptions and it’s steady income. I just sent the renewal bills out before I left on this current trip. When I go home, there will be payments waiting for me.

Max Hartshorne is the editor of GoNOMAD.com, with thousands of stories in the archives. You can also look up the GoNOMAD Travel podcast he hosts wherever you get your podcasts. It’s short form five- to seven-minute podcast updated about once a week. With the editor of this blog he founded the 360 Degree Travel Network blogger agency for content marketing.