I have been living overseas in Thailand for 2 years now, having done mulstiple visa runs to Singapore, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Laos. I have ridden to the north of the Thailand and to the south, ridden from Thailand to Shangri-La in China (near Tibet) and also ridden the Leh-Manali highway and Rohtang Pass in India on a Royal Enfield.
So the million dollar question is how do I generate revenue while traveling overseas. What many people do obviously is to invest money in doing a TESOL course and go and teach English here in Thailand as a full time job.
Now I have thought about doing this, but if you have seen photos of me, I am not what you would call visually appealing for a teaching role. That and the fact if I was to take up a teaching job, there goes 50 hrs of my week and I lose the flexibility to move from place to place at a whim.
The second option is to build yourself a travel blog and Youtube pressence. I am fortunate enough that I started a Jeep specific vbulletin forum back in 2002 which is Australian based, I have learnt a lot over the years running this, plus it still generates some income for me even today. One major thing I became knowledgeable on is driving Google AdSense revenue.
Google Adsense ads are all those ads you see appearing, well everywhere all over the internet. Small amounts of money are generated from displays, but larger amounts are generated from clicks made by users who search from within Google itself.
Now when I look at my forum, I am pushing though massive amounts of traffic per month, but the actually CTR is very low, because everyone who visits the forum knows about the ads and frankly have no interest in them, ad blindness 101.
When you look at a travel blog, you may be only generating 100 unique clicks on your site per day, but if 10 ads are clicked on, you have a rather high CTR, which in turn will generate a larger sum than say my other example.
Now where do we get this traffic? Well if you are sharing Instagram photos, Youtube videos, Twitter posts and have a Facebook page, you are an audience which you can direct to your stories. Growing that is simply a matter of putting in some time and generating valuable content.
Now expecting to be able to blow $2500 a month on traveling just from blogging itself is going to be an unrealistic expectation, but what you are doing by building your blog is learning about making money on the internet, and by doing this, doors will start to open, and opportunities will start to present itself that may not have come your way otherwise.
If nothing else comes of it other than a bit of extra money, at least you have a fantastic journal of your traveling journey.
Another widely publicised option could be affiliate marketing. Amazon Associates is one of the first online affiliate marketing programs and was launched in 1996. Amazon offers some simple tools that you can use within your blog to link to products on their site, or you could go one step further and build your own Amazon online store with niche selected items that would appeal to your growing followers and audience.
Building any of these revenue streams will take time and effort on your part, investing money into the long term can be one way to speed up the process. Working with Facebook ads, targeting people that your blog, Youtube channel or Facebook page will appeal to is one way of doing this. I have personally found the best CPC rates to be had on Facebook ads is for boosting video posts.
Youtube is probably one of the biggest things to be happening to the travel industry in the last couple of years. Backpackers and such are no longer going for the perfect photo to accompany their written blog story, they are now running around with selfie sticks and a Gopro and Vloging their little hearts out.
The big key to becoming popular on the Youtube travel blogging scene is getting your face in front of the camera. It has been documented that Youtube viewers connect better with a video when they actually see the person, as opposed to the first person shooting style. For me on Youtube, I ride a motorcycle and most of what I shoot is first person view, and to be honest the getting myself in front of the Gopro with a selfie stick just doesn’t appeal to me.