If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that I love my job. I mean, I would keep working at it even if I wasn’t getting paid, but luckily we do get paid 😉.
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The job is travel blogging and Dariece and I have been doing it for over a decade, which means we’d be considered what the kids are calling “OG Travel bloggers”.
In other words, we’re old.
In this post, I want to share with you exactly why we love this job so much and why I think more people should start their own blogs to enjoy the creativity, location freedom, and income that can come from running a successful blog (in any niche).
Watch The Video
10 Reasons Travel Bloggers Will Never Return To a 9-5
Alright so with that out of the way, let’s get started. Here’s my list of 10 reasons that I still think travel blogging is the best job on earth.
1. It Pays Well
Don’t judge me for putting income as number one! Listen, if we didn’t make money from our blogs, then there’s no way we could have continued traveling, working, and living abroad for the past 15 years.
When we worked in Canada, I was working 80 hours per week sometimes and I managed to earn a pretty good wage. What blows me away is that with our blogs, we’re often working only 15-20 hours per week and we’ve had single months where we have taken home what I used to earn in an entire year.
I’m incredibly grateful for the way things have turned out in our blogging careers, and I still pinch myself sometimes thinking about the fact that we managed to turn this lifestyle into a business over the years.
2. It Doesn’t Feel Like Work
A blogger’s work is taking photos, writing articles, sharing on social media, and in some cases, managing a team. For us, these are all things that we LOVE doing.
Even if I was retired and had all of the money in the world, I’d still want to have some passion project to work on from my pajamas every morning and right now, our multiple blogs are the perfect project.
3. Working From Anywhere
Over the years we’ve had some insane offices. From a treehouse in the jungles of Ecuador, and a bungalow on the rim of a volcano in Guatemala, to apartments in Rome, villas in Bali, and luxury houses with infinity pools overlooking the Caribbean Sea.
It’s fair to say that we’ve been pretty blessed with where we’ve been able to work from over the years.
But more than the accommodations themselves is the actual freedom of being able to work from anywhere. I still thank the Wi-Fi gods every day for the freedom to live and travel from literally anywhere on earth.
4. Choosing Their Own Hours
This is still one of my favorite parts of the job. Maybe not everyone is as lazy as me, but I often hated getting up for work when I worked at a plastic packaging plant in Calgary.
My alarm would go off and it always felt like it was an hour too early.
I’d sluggishly get up from bed and my first hour or so at work I was in a zombie state.
Now we don’t set alarms unless we have a flight in the morning (or I’m on some new meditation morning routine that I read about).
We get up when we want. We slowly make coffee. If we’re traveling we’ll head out for coffee in whatever historic town we’re visiting, then come back and get to work when we feel like it.
As someone who sucks at punching a clock, this is an amazing perk of being a travel blogger and working for ourselves.
5. Passive Income
I remember when we first started blogging one of my heroes (aside from Tim Ferris who wrote the 4-hour work week), was Pat Flynn. This guy was like the wizard of wealth without work and I followed him religiously.
You see with a blog, there are tons of ways you can make money while you’re sleeping. Check out one of our recent post that explains a few ways that travel bloggers are earning millions.
A couple of the best ones are ads and affiliate marketing.
In-Content Ads
With ads, once you have a certain amount of traffic, you just flick a switch on your website and overnight you can start earning money from every visitor you have.
If you have very few visitors, this will likely be pennies, but if you have a lot you can earn thousands of dollars per day from ads.
We’re fortunate enough to have 3 profitable ad websites.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when you recommend a product or service and if your readers or viewers click a link and purchase, you get a small commission.
Again, if you only have a few readers, you might only make a few dollars from this. For us, it’s still our main income generator across all of our sites.
It’s a win-win because we introduce people to products and services that we use and love, and we earn an income in the process.
Pat Flynn would be so proud!
6. Not Having a Boss
I hated having a boss at my job in Canada. I didn’t hate my boss himself. He was alright. I just hated having to answer to someone for everything I did within the company.
Now I’m my own boss. Well… Dariece is my boss, but she’s nicer and better looking than my boss was in Canada, so it’s ok with me.
We decide what we want to do every day. And that’s an amazing level of freedom.
7. Employing & Empowering People
When we were new bloggers, I would’ve never thought that one day we’d run a team of 20 people across all of our websites.
I probably would’ve thought that I’d hate the responsibility. But in reality, having the ability to employ and empower people on your team is a wonderful thing.
We’ve taught our team new skills and they’ve shown us things along the way too.
During COVID, when so many companies were laying people off, we were hiring people and it was great to be able to help people during those difficult times. In some cases, we hired people right after they were laid off from their regular 9-5.
Now with the invention of AI, many bloggers are firing their writers and using free AI tools to write all of their content. Not us. We doubled down on human-generated content because we feel it’s more important than ever.
Hiring writers and giving them an income when all of their other employers are firing them is an amazing feeling. Giving people a creative outlet that they can work on to help grow with us… is even better.
8. Blogger Freebies
I’ve started dozens of blogs over the years and currently, we fully run and manage a few of them simultaneously. Between them, we’re quite often getting emails from brands offering us free stuff.
Of course, in the travel space, these are the best emails because they’re often from tourism boards, airlines, hotels, and tour operators offering to pay us cash to come enjoy free travel.
These jobs are straight out of a dream.
We’ve been flown to Japan and paid to soak in onsens, we’ve been paid to stay in luxury dive resorts across Indonesia and to go on a massive shopping spree with Macy’s in Chicago.
The list goes on and on, maybe that’s another article video I should write… crazy press trips we’ve had over the years.
It’s not just us either. I’d say we do very few of these paid press trips compared to our blogging colleagues.
We know some people who are being flown around the world first class on back-to-back trips pretty much all year, getting paid very well along the way.
Blogger freebies are definitely one of the main perks of the job that will keep travel bloggers from going back to a 9-5.
9. Building An Asset
When my blogging students first join us in our Travel Blog Kickstarter Course, one of the things that I explain to them is that they’re not just building a blog to earn a wage every month, they’re building a valuable asset.
There’s a reason people refer to websites as “Web Properties”. They accrue equity in much the same way.
If you build your site to the point that it’s earning money, you can sell it for around 35 – 45x your monthly profit depending on the market at the time of the sale, and the strength of your brand.
Every dollar you make per month from your blog, you can multiply by 40 on average and consider it equity you’re adding to your business, your “property”, and your net worth.
10. The Community
We have always loved to communicate with people. I’m the more introverted one, typically writing these articles in my man cave in our house here in Bulgaria, but we both love talking to people online, especially when it’s about blogging, online entrepreneurship, and the remote lifestyle.
If you build a brand about something you’re passionate about, then you’ll also end up growing an audience around that topic and you have endless people to bounce ideas off of, to learn from, and to grow with.
It’s a blessing.
The Verdict
So that’s it, those are my 10 favorite things about travel blogging.
If you’ve ever thought of starting your own blog, or you already have a blog and you want to grow, Click Here to check out lots of awesome free resources to help you start, grow, and succeed in blogging.
Make sure you watch the video at the top of this article and if you have any questions about blogging, or becoming a digital nomad, ask them on YouTube or follow us on Instagram & TikTok to learn more.
Thanks for reading!