What in case your passion project could change into a full-time income source in a few years?
That is what Shelley Marmor did when she began her travel blog as a side hustle. The previous corporate employee and travel magazine editor turned her Travel Mexico Solo and Travel Blogging 101 web sites into a thriving online business.
Today, Shelley’s ventures generate over $50k monthly in revenue. She talks about it on a recent episode of The Side Hustle Show.
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Origin story
Through the spring of 2020, firstly of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shelley was at a profession crossroads. She’d been working 15 years in corporate America and felt “chewed up and spit out” by her job.
Around this time, she’d been traveling solo in Mexico. She joined Facebook groups for travel bloggers, noticing that some were still earning good money with affiliate marketing online through the pandemic—getting paid commissions by Airbnb when readers booked long pandemic getaway stays. She registered the domain in March 2020 and launched the positioning a month later.
Early learnings
Initially, Shelley wrote posts about her travels in Mexico. But she soon realized, “No person cares about me traveling around Mexico. They care about how I will help them travel around Mexico.”
On advice from other successful bloggers, Shelly invested in blogging courses to learn web optimization and decided to focus just on Mexico.
She realized: “I cannot compete with 15-year-old sites like Nomadic Matt’s. But in a area of interest, I can cut to the front of the road and find unicorn keywords with high search volume but low competition.”
Shelley focused on questions and keywords travelers search for when planning Mexico trips, reminiscent of where to remain, what to do, is it secure, and packing suggestions. She didn’t earn money in 2020 but began seeing profits in 2021.
Internet online affiliate marketing
Shelley didn’t depend on ad revenue as her primary source of income. She focused on affiliate marketing online commissions.
She now has three sites on Mediavine and Raptive (former Adthrive). These are two premium ad networks for sites that provide industry-leading RPMs (revenue per thousand impressions).
By leveraging multiple ad networks, Shelley advantages from competition between the platforms and diversification. If one network’s RPMs decrease or they lose major advertisers, she had a backup flow of ad revenue.
Shelley uses Affilimate, an affiliate management plugin for WordPress.
“I began being profitable before I had much traffic. The income got here first, then traffic grew over time,” she says.
In truth, she never had a viral “traffic explosion” moment. As an alternative, it was many small wins that compounded.
Keyword research
For keyword research, Shelly uses KeySearch. For brand new sites, she suggests filtering for competition levels below 30.
If monetizing with affiliates, Shelly will optimize for buyer keywords even when it only has ten searches per thirty days. She ranks quickly for high-ticket tours that pay $500 commissions.
Shelley has written 180 posts, specializing in topic clusters reminiscent of “things to do in Cozumel with kids / at night / when it rains.”
Shelly says you could have to “crawl before you walk.” Rating #1 for any keyword builds momentum faster than waiting for significant keywords. Traffic and income grow through small, compounding wins.
Related: 8 Things I Wish I’d Known Before Starting Affiliate Marketing
Growing her team
After about a 12 months and a half, Shelly hired writers to assist create content. She now has a team of 4 writers, an editor, and a blog manager.
Shelly focuses on writing content herself for Travel Blogging 101, where she shares firsthand experiences and reviews products she uses.
Travel Mexico Solo is now three years old. It has about 180 published articles and gets 300K monthly pageviews.
Shelly estimates that is about 1 article per week on average over three years. She advises starting with what you may sustainably write yourself without burning out. Do exactly one quality post every two weeks if that is your limit since the articles compound over time.
By creating content tailored to specific audiences, you may recommend affiliate hotels that completely match their needs. “The riches are within the niches,” Shelly says.
Listed here are the highest affiliate opportunities within the travel space:
- Travel tours
- Hotels/accommodations
- Travel Insurance
- Physical products
- Automotive rentals
Link-building strategies
Early on, Shelly did many guest posts to construct backlinks, regardless that many avoid it since it looks like extra work for little payoff. Backlinks signal authority and trust to search engines like google and yahoo like Google. The more reputable sites linking back to you, the upper you may rank. Writing guest posts got her backlinks from established sites, essentially “voting” for her site.
Email marketing
For email marketing, Shelly has about 8,000 subscribers total across her sites. Her travel blogging list of 1,500 subscribers is more monetized than her Mexico travel list to date.
Shelly has multiple opt-in offers tied to specific guides and content topics. A generic opt-in hasn’t generated as much success for a vast region like Mexico. Opt-ins designed for specific niches deliver higher conversion rates.
Shelley has seen tremendous success through her weekly email campaigns. She structures her emails with a 50/50 split – delivering free, helpful tricks to readers in addition to promoting relevant products.
This balanced approach keeps her community engaged while also driving revenue (She recently generated $3,500 in sales from a single product launch to her list).
The travel area of interest tends to be “one and done” visitors from Google. But email subscribers engage ongoingly no matter algorithm changes.
- Google rolls out a whole bunch of updates per 12 months. In case your website gets caught in a single, your organic search traffic could vanish even when you did all the pieces right. You could never know exactly why.
- Facebook adjusted its algorithm years back. Facebook pages went from reaching all followers to only reaching a fraction without paying.
- Pinterest updated its algorithm, and bloggers lost massive amounts of traffic literally from sooner or later to the subsequent. These weren’t spammers or low-quality sites; Pinterest simply deprioritized their content.
While social and search algorithms are out of your control, Shelley emphasized email marketing as probably the most direct audience connection.
Collecting emails from website visitors allows ongoing communication no matter future algorithm changes.