If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you know that I love my job. I mean, I would keep working on it even if I didn’t get paid, but luckily we do get paid 😉.
The job is travel blogging and Dariece and I have been doing it for over a decade, which means we would be considered what the kids call “OG Travel bloggers.”
In other words, we are old.
In this post I want to share with you exactly why we love this work 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 form). niche).
watch the video
10 reasons why travel bloggers will never return to a 9-5
Okay, so now that that’s out of the way, let’s get started. Here is my list of 10 reasons why I still think travel blogging is the best job in the world.
1. It pays well
Don’t judge me because I put income first! Listen, if we hadn’t made money from our blogs, there’s no way we would have been able to continue traveling, working, and living abroad for the past fifteen years.
When we worked in Canada, I sometimes worked 80 hours a week and managed to earn a pretty good wage. What amazes me is that with our blogs we often only work 15-20 hours a week and we have had some months where we took home what I earned in an entire year.
I’m incredibly grateful for the way our blogging career has turned out, and I still pinch myself every now and then when I think about how we’ve managed to turn this lifestyle into a business over the years.
2. It doesn’t feel like work
The job of a blogger involves taking photos, writing articles, sharing on social media, and in some cases managing a team. For us, these are all things we like to do.
Even if I were retired and had all the money in the world, I would still want to work on a passion project from my pajamas every morning and right now our multiple blogs are the perfect project.
3. Work anywhere
We’ve had some crazy offices over the years. From a tree house in the jungle of Ecuador and a bungalow on the edge of a volcano in Guatemala, to apartments in Rome, villas in Bali and luxury homes with infinity pools overlooking the Caribbean Sea.
It’s fair to say that we’ve been quite blessed with what we’ve been able to work with over the years.
But more than the accommodations themselves is the actual freedom to work anywhere. I still thank the Wi-Fi gods every day for the freedom to live and travel literally anywhere in the world.
4. Choose their own hours
This is still one of my favorite parts of the job. Maybe not everyone is as lazy as I am, but I often hated going to work when I worked at a plastic packaging plant in Calgary.
My alarm went off and it always felt like it was an hour early.
I was slow to get out of bed and for the first hour at work I was in a zombie state.
Now we don’t set an alarm unless we have a flight in the morning (or I’m following a new morning meditation routine I’ve read about).
We get up when we want. We make coffee slowly. When we travel, we go for coffee in whatever historic city we are visiting, and then come back to work when we feel like it.
As someone who is bad at clocking, this is a great benefit 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 Workweek) was Pat Flynn. This man was like the magician of wealth without work and I followed him religiously.
With a blog you see that there are countless ways you can make money while you sleep. Check out one of our recent posts explaining some of the ways travel bloggers make millions.
Some of the best are advertising and affiliate marketing.
In-content advertisements
With ads, once you get a certain amount of traffic, you can just hit a switch on your website and you can start making money overnight from every visitor you have.
If you have very few visitors it will probably be pennies, but if you have a lot of visitors you can make thousands of dollars a day from ads.
We are fortunate to have three profitable advertising websites.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is when you recommend a product or service and if your readers or viewers click on a link and make a purchase, you receive a small commission.
Again, if you only have a few readers, you might only make a few dollars from this. For us, it is still our main revenue generator across all our sites.
It’s a win-win because we introduce people to products and services 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 fine. I just hated having to answer to someone for everything I did within the company.
Now I am my own boss. Well… Dariece is my boss, but she’s nicer and prettier than my boss in Canada, so I’m fine with it.
We decide every day what we want to do. And that is an amazing level of freedom.
7. Hire and empower people
When we were new bloggers, I never imagined that one day we would have a team of twenty people across all our websites.
I probably thought I would hate the responsibility. But in reality, being able to hire and empower people on your team is great.
We taught our team new skills and they also showed us things along the way.
During COVID, when so many companies were laying people off, we were hiring and it was great to be able to help people during those tough times. In some cases, we’ve 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 their content. Not us. We’ve doubled the amount of human-generated content because we believe it’s more important than ever.
Hiring writers and giving them an income while all their other employers are laying them off is a great feeling. Giving people a creative outlet that they can work on to grow with us… is even better.
8. Freebies for bloggers
I’ve started dozens of blogs over the years and currently run and manage several of them at the same time. Between them, we quite often get emails from brands offering us free stuff.
In terms of travel, these are of course the best emails because they often come from tourism agencies, airlines, hotels and tour operators who pay us cash to enjoy free travel.
These jobs are straight out of a dream.
We’ve flown to Japan and paid to soak in onsens, we’ve been paid to stay at luxury dive resorts all over Indonesia and go on a massive shopping spree at Macy’s in Chicago.
The list goes on, maybe that’s another article video I have to write…crazy press trips we’ve had over the years.
It’s not just us either. I would say we do very few of these paid press trips compared to our blogging colleagues.
We know some people who are flown first class around the world on back-to-back trips virtually all year round, getting paid very well along the way.
Blogger freebies are definitely one of the top job perks that keep travel bloggers from returning to a 9-5.
9. Building an asset
When my blogging students first join our travel blog Kickstarter course, one of the things I explain to them is that they are not just building a blog to earn a paycheck every month, but they are building a valuable asset.
There’s a reason why people call websites “web properties.” They build equity in much the same way.
If you build your site to be monetized, 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 earn per month from your blog can be multiplied by an average of 40 and considered as added value to your business, your “property” and your assets.
We have always enjoyed communicating with people. I’m the more introverted person and usually write these articles in my man-cave in our house here in Bulgaria, but we both love talking to people online, especially when it comes to blogging, online entrepreneurship and the remote lifestyle .
If you build a brand around something you’re passionate about, you’ll ultimately grow an audience around that topic and have endless people to bounce ideas off of, learn from, and grow with.
It’s a blessing.
The verdict
So that’s it, these are my 10 favorite things about travel blogging.
If you’ve ever thought about starting your own blog, or if you already have a blog and want to grow, click here to check out a ton of great free resources to help you get started, grow, and succeed in blogging.
Make sure to watch the video at the top of this article and if you have any questions about blogging or becoming a digital nomad, ask on YouTube or follow us on Instagram and TikTok to learn more.
Thank you for reading!