Travel Blogging as a Career: What We Actually Do and How We Make Money

What Do We Do for Work?

We normally write about our travels and photography here on the blog, but today we’re trying something completely different: writing about ourselves and our lives.

Why? Because we’ve noticed — in conversations and in emails — that our lifestyle raises a whole lot of questions for most people.

So we want to use this article to finally answer some of the ones that come up again and again.

What do you actually do for work? How are you always on vacation? Can you really make a living from that? How does a travel blogger even make money? And so on.

Imagine this situation: You’re standing in a group of strangers and everyone’s introducing themselves.

After a while, the conversation always steers toward the inevitable question:

“So — what do you do for work?”

Everyone goes around the room. They all share their profession: “I’m a dentist,” “I’m a trained electrician,” or “I work in finance” — and then it’s our turn: “We’re professional travel bloggers.”

You can literally see people’s heads start to spin as they scramble for a quick but appropriate response. It’s priceless!

We usually get one of these two reactions:

“Wow! You can actually make a living doing that? I’d love to do that too. Traveling all year, not working, and seeing the world.”

or

“Aha! Interesting! But I couldn’t do that. Constantly sleeping in cheap hostels and pinching every penny.”

A few years ago, we probably would have reacted exactly the same way — with reaction #1, of course.

Recently, someone said to us: “Honestly — you really don’t come across as kids with rich parents. How do you pull it off?” We found that pretty funny.

So let’s shed some light on this. How do you build a travel blogging career? Do we really spend all our time traveling? How do we actually make money from it?

How Much Do We Actually Travel?

That question isn’t as easy to answer as you might think. We’ll explain why in a moment. But first, we need to get something off our chests — something we find mostly funny and actually kind of endearing on most days, though on some days it genuinely gets on our nerves.

Among the many emails we receive daily, one phrase keeps coming up: “Hope you’re having a great vacation.”

We know it’s well-intentioned, but — even if this sounds a little strange — we haven’t had a vacation in the traditional sense since we founded 22places.

Two years ago, we sublet our apartment in Berlin long-term, packed everything we truly need into two backpacks (you can find our full packing list here), and jumped in at the deep end.

Since then, we’ve been living wherever we feel drawn to. Usually that means places where it’s warm and the sun is shining.

We rent an apartment through Airbnb, pick up a local SIM card, explore the area, and settle into a daily routine within just a few days.

For many people, this falls under the umbrella of “traveling” — but for us, it’s just normal life. The apartments or rooms we rent are our home for that time, and the place becomes our center of life.

The routine we develop no matter where in the world we are is essentially always the same: We wake up (no alarm!), have breakfast — if we have a kitchen, we make porridge with fruit — work, go out for lunch, work, go out for dinner, work, and go to sleep. Sometimes we meet up with friends, catch a movie, or check out a night market.

When we’re somewhere new, we’ll sometimes rent a scooter for the day and go see what there is to discover. We don’t make any distinction between weekdays and weekends. Most of the time we don’t even know what day of the week it is, because it doesn’t really matter for us.

In between these work phases — when we stay in one place for a longer stretch — we slip in travel phases. That’s when we explore a new country or region and usually only stay a few days in each place.

During those times, we also travel to countries where the infrastructure for working isn’t great. Even so, it’s always important to us that there’s at least a minimal internet connection so we can answer emails and stay active on social media.

We just wrapped up a month-long work phase in Chiang Mai. Out of 30 days there, we actually worked from morning to evening for 29 of them.

Before that, we had a travel phase and spent a month traveling through Myanmar. That’s how it alternates — though overall, we have more work phases than travel phases.

So What Does a Travel Blogger Actually Do All Day?

When someone asks what we do all day, we have two possible answers depending on the situation:

#1: We fib a little and talk about how we travel the world all year long, sit on the beach all day, watch the sun rise and set, and live without a care. Being a blogger just means writing a post every now and then — and those practically write themselves anyway.

Maybe we’ll show this photo, and the image of the lazy travel blogger couple is complete. We have to admit, we kind of love that image ourselves!

#2: We tell the truth. We explain that during work phases we put in more than 60 hours a week, that even during travel phases we often still clock 30 hours a week, and that there hasn’t been a single day in two years when we didn’t work. The reaction: Nobody believes us.

Sometimes we show photos of us working on the road. Almost no one actually wants to see them, and even fewer take them seriously.

So we usually end up in a dilemma: Do we tell people the truth they don’t really want to hear — or don’t believe — or do we lean into the image of the perfect dream job? Our answers usually land somewhere in the middle.

The fact is: We work significantly more than we did in our previous jobs. But we’re not complaining about that in the least. Quite the opposite, actually!

We love working a lot, because we’re working for ourselves. We work so that we’ve been able to live life on our own terms for two years now. We work so that we get to live in wonderful, magical places around the world — places where it’s warm and the sun lifts our spirits.

That little thing called work — unfortunately — doesn’t quite take care of itself!

Since it’s probably hard to imagine from the outside what it actually means to work on a travel blog, let us walk you through what we do all day.

Writing posts

What you see as a reader are, of course, all the articles we write. That alone takes up a huge amount of time.

Over time, our own standards have kept getting higher. It’s not unusual for us to write 2,000 to 3,000 words per article these days.

Depending on the post, we spend about four to eight hours on it — for particularly complex articles, sometimes two full days.

Beyond the actual writing, there’s still a ton to do for each post.

We have to format the article and add it to our website’s backend so it looks good for you. (Quick explanation for anyone who doesn’t work online: the frontend is 22places as you see it; the backend is what it looks like on our end when we’re working on the site.)

We also have to select the right photos, edit them, compress them, and insert them into the post.

Building the blog’s audience

Writing posts is just a small part of running a website or blog. Writing alone doesn’t get you anywhere, because without readers, none of it makes much sense.

And readers (unfortunately!) don’t just show up on their own. There’s a huge amount of work behind that: search engine optimization (SEO), maintaining a presence on every social media channel, interacting with other bloggers, writing guest posts, and so on. Classic online marketing, in other words.

Managing our social media channels alone is a real time sink — after all, there are a lot of channels to keep active: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest.

That means creating relevant images, posting our own photos and articles, responding to messages, commenting on other people’s posts, and staying active in relevant Facebook groups.

And then we had the absolutely brilliant idea of also starting to make YouTube videos. Now we understand why being a YouTuber has become a profession in its own right — because that alone is essentially a full-time job.

Filming (we’ve completely rediscovered our camera) and editing the videos is so much fun that we haven’t thrown in the towel on YouTube just yet.

That said, we definitely can’t keep up the high frequency we started with, and we’re still figuring out what kind of videos we enjoy making the most.

Speaking on camera has also helped free us a little from our reluctance to get more personal on 22places. At least a little!

Our newsletter in particular was never quite as personal as we would have liked it to be. It’s still a little strange knowing that thousands of people read our posts, watch our videos, and follow along with our lives.

But hey, that’s part of it — and we’re getting better and better at “being personal.” Starting recently, there’s now a personal newsletter every Sunday where we share our thoughts and ideas alongside great travel and photography tips.

Answering emails

We used to smile whenever big travel bloggers claimed their email inbox was overflowing. We genuinely thought it was just some arrogant “look how important I am” act. These days, we get so many emails ourselves that it really does take a significant amount of time to respond to all of them.

We truly try to respond to every single email and every comment on our blog in a timely manner, because we’re incredibly grateful that our readers — that’s you — share their enthusiasm and opinions with us. We’re happy to answer all your questions, even when it takes a lot of time.

Growth and development

Like any other business, a travel blog always needs to keep evolving. So it’s not uncommon for our morning breakfast to turn into an extended brainstorming session, at the end of which we have lots of great new ideas and a longer to-do list.

Unfortunately, we have way too many ideas in our heads, which makes it hard to focus on one thing at a time. But hey, nobody’s perfect. We’re working on it!

Our website is also something we continuously develop and constantly optimize. And when we say “constantly,” we mean constantly.

A blog like ours is one big work in progress — we’re never completely satisfied, and even when we are, that feeling doesn’t last long. But that’s actually a good thing, because each time, 22places gets a little more polished and a little bit better.

Administrative stuff

And then, of course, there are all the administrative tasks that every self-employed person has to deal with.

We’re not exempt from that either, and we regularly wrestle with thrilling topics like monthly sales tax filings, scanning and archiving invoices, and keeping expense reports up to date.

If you’re still looking for good bookkeeping software, by the way, we can highly recommend Lexoffice. It makes the whole bookkeeping grind at least somewhat bearable.

We could probably list many more little things that are all part of professional travel blogging and running an online business, but we don’t want to bore you. So let’s move on.

How Do We Afford to Travel So Much?

A lot of people are genuinely amazed at how we can afford all this traveling. At first glance, it really does sound unaffordable.

The thing is, we’ve sublet our apartment in Germany, which means we have almost no ongoing fixed costs anymore: we no longer pay rent in Germany, we don’t have a phone contract, no car, no gym membership, no magazine subscriptions — and when we’re outside of Europe for more than three months, we don’t pay German health insurance contributions either.

The only things we still pay in Germany are taxes and the premiums for our personal liability and household contents insurance.

We’re often asked how we can afford all the traveling. But really, the question itself is off base. We’re not traveling — we’re living location-independently, and so we simply pay the monthly living costs that we would otherwise have at home, just in whatever place we happen to be at the moment.

Our monthly living costs

Right now, for example, we’re in one of our all-time favorite places: Chiang Mai.

Many people who live and work location-independently spend their winters here. The quality of life is excellent, you feel at home right away, and for some reason we’re able to work with a lot of focus here.

We rent a nice little apartment for a month (about $400), get a local SIM card with a data plan (about $20), and occasionally rent a scooter ($5 a day).

Anyone who knows us knows we love food — so that’s actually the biggest chunk of our expenses, somewhere between $600 and $900 a month.

That could obviously be done much cheaper, but we’ll admit it: here in Chiang Mai we do love going out for burgers, sushi, or pizza, and that just costs more than Thai food.

For comparison: in Myanmar we spent $400 on food and drinks over four weeks. If we only ate at basic Thai restaurants, we could probably cut that cost in half. But we don’t want to, because eating out is one of life’s great pleasures!

On top of local expenses, there are things like our long-term international health insurance (70 euros a month for both of us combined), a health insurance continuation policy (100 euros), and the costs of flights and getting from A to B.

Otherwise, we really don’t spend all that much. Since we live very minimally and don’t need anything beyond what fits in our backpacks, we don’t have any urge to buy things. Of course we’ll catch a movie occasionally or buy a new T-shirt (but we always swap one out when we do).

Larger amounts are really only ever spent on photography gear or flights.

Our monthly blog costs

A travel blog — or any business, really — has an appetite, and 22places is just as hungry as we are.

Just for administrative costs, we spend about 130 euros a month. That covers our tax advisor, our bookkeeping software Lexoffice, and the utterly pointless Chamber of Commerce membership fee, which we could rant about for hours. Aaaaaargh.

About 120 euros a month goes toward software licenses — things like Photoshop, Lightroom, our newsletter tool, and various paid plugins for our blog.

We spend about 60 euros a month on web hosting. That also includes the cost of about 30 domains we’ve bought over the years, because whenever we have a great idea during a brainstorming session, we immediately register the domain.

Bottom line: We don’t need to “afford” all the traveling as some extra expense, because we’re simply spending our money on living in other places.

If we were living in Germany, our expenses probably wouldn’t be any lower.

How Does a Travel Blogger Make Money?

Okay, now we’re getting to the part most people are really curious about. It’s also the hardest part for us to explain, because it’s not easy to describe exactly how making money as a blogger actually works.

We’ll give it a shot. First things first: after two years of 22places, we now earn roughly what we used to make in our regular jobs.

It did, however, take almost two years to get to that point — and in our very first month, we probably made about 20 euros from the blog. Making money as a travel blogger definitely doesn’t happen overnight, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

Now, on to our income streams. We don’t rely on just one source of income — we have three different types:

1. Online photography course
2. Affiliate marketing
3. Services

Our online photography course

Our first income stream is probably obvious to everyone. We have an online photography course that we sell through our blog. The course is, so to speak, our own product.

Affiliate marketing

Another increasingly important income stream is what’s known as affiliate marketing. If you’re not from the online world, this probably needs a bit more explanation — so here it is:

We link to relevant products (cameras, lenses, travel guides) or services (hotels and accommodation, tours, travel credit cards) in our articles, and when you purchase something through those links, we receive a small commission. Nothing changes for you at all — you don’t get any disadvantages, and it doesn’t cost you more.

Affiliate programs, as long as the website owner uses them responsibly, are really a win-win situation (ugh, we hate that phrase, but it genuinely applies here).

By “using them responsibly,” we mean that we only ever recommend products and services we truly believe in and think will make you just as happy as they’ve made us.

For our thoroughly researched articles — like our camera buying guide — you essentially thank us by purchasing your new camera through our affiliate link.

We’re genuinely grateful for every single person who appreciates our work, finds valuable information and tips here, and then orders something through our links. It shows us that we were actually able to help you.

We do the exact same thing ourselves, by the way. When we search for something online, we’re happy to order through another blogger’s affiliate link if their article helped us. For us, that’s a way of saying thank you to the person running the site.

Services

Our photography course and affiliate links are our two most important income streams. Beyond those, we also earn money through various other things, which we’ve grouped together under “services.”

These vary quite a bit from month to month. We occasionally write copy for company blogs, sell the odd photo, produce videos, and give talks. We also offer consulting around blogger relations and online marketing.

Another component is brand collaborations. Think of it like this: companies reach out to us and ask whether we’d be willing to test a new product or service and write about it.

In most cases, we decline, because the inquiries often just don’t fit us or our blog. But when the product or service is a good match, and we’re genuinely convinced of its quality or usefulness, we’re happy to feature it in a sponsored post.

We’re transparent about this, of course. You can recognize posts we’ve been paid for by the “Advertisement” label at the top. Over the past two years, we’ve only done a handful of these collaborations, since we turn down most inquiries of this kind.

We’re really glad that we now have multiple income streams and aren’t dependent on just one thing. It gives us a little more peace of mind.

Making Money as a Blogger: Our Take

You have no idea how much we genuinely want to hear your thoughts on this article. We went back and forth for a long time about whether to write it at all — but the questions kept piling up, so we just went ahead and did it.

We simply felt like this article was long overdue. We hope you now have a rough sense of what we do all day and how much work goes into a blog like this.

That goes not just for us, but for all the blogs out there that are run with real love and dedication.

So much heart and passion go into them that we wanted to acknowledge that for everyone doing it.

And yes — we actually make our living from that passion, and we can’t imagine anything better than continuing to pour all our energy into our baby, 22places.

Thank you…

…to everyone who follows along with us, believes in us, and puts their trust in us.

We also want to take this opportunity to thank you! For being here, for trusting us, for letting us make mistakes, and for letting us put our foot in our mouth every now and then.

Really, just for everything. Because without you — without our readers — we’d be a blog that no one reads, and that simply wouldn’t be the same.