Income Report Q4 2024: We Made $15,325 In 3 Months While TRAVELLING

The Salt and Charcoal Travel business made $15,325 between October and December 2024 – the last quarter of the year.

That’s $5,108 a month made while… TRAVELLING!

To say we are grateful is an understatement. And we will never not pinch ourselves that we get to call this “work”.

But the reason we are sharing this isn’t to brag, it’s simply to show you it IS possible to earn for travel, and while travelling. 

So, let’s break down how we earned this.

This income came from two sources – the travel blog (affiliate sales) and Instagram (brand deals). We’re spilling all the tea further down.

Some key things to know before moving on:

• This blog started mid-2021, but we weren’t consistent with it until late 2022. At the time of writing, we have ~180 blogs published.
• In blogging, how much you earn is directly related to the work you’ve done in the past. Your first blog posts won’t make much money, but it’s a snowball effect – the more helpful posts you publish, the better.
• REMEMBER: The more people you help, the more money you make.
• We have experience monetising websites, we’re trained and have been working on websites since 2016, so this is far from our first rodeo. We learnt how to do it here. 
• We’re not doing this to gloat, but to show you other lifestyle options than a regular 9 to 5. It actually keeps us accountable as well. Honestly, anyone can do this – if an ex-FIFO (Chris) and a social worker (Bec) can do this, so can you!
• This report might get a bit technical. We’ve done our best to explain the concepts but feel free to leave any questions in the comments! 
• This is our second income report. The first one is here, where we explain how we made $17,730 between July and September 2024. 

With that in mind, let’s talk NUMBERS!

Travel blog (affilate income): $4,216.41

This was all earned via affiliate marketing, we’re not running ads on the blog yet. 

“Affiliate marketing” is an income form where someone promotes a product/service on behalf of a company.

If people buy it through their link, the promoter earns a commission at no extra cost to the customer. 

We use affiliate marketing to earn money with the following:

• Tours and experiences we recommend in our blog posts, with providers like Viator or Get Your Guide.
• General products we use and recommend, like Caravan RV for purchasing bus parts and equipment, or eSims from Airalo.
• Things we think might help people in their travels – travel insurance, caravan rentals, etc.

So, the $4,216.41 we earned this Q4 was via promoting tours, products, travel insurance, etc.

The cool thing about this is we genuinely recommend them, and use them ourselves too!

So it’s a win-win, we are not ripping anyone off at the end of the day. We are just leading customers to make a sale they were possibly looking for anyway.

We achieved this with a blog traffic of 44,000 (an average of ~14,600 per month). 

“Traffic” is essentially the number of people visiting your blog. Usually, the more traffic you have, the more income. 

Here’s our traffic from that period:

There are a few things worth noting regarding this traffic chart that we want to share with you.

First, see how the traffic drops inside the red circle? That’s 2 weeks BEFORE Christmas.

It makes sense for the traffic to drop during that time, people are at the peak of holiday shopping. Zero interest in planning a trip, it’s time to get that last-minute gift! 😂

Second, see how the traffic suddenly spikes inside the green circle? That’s the week AFTER Christmas. 

Most people are in vacation mode and thinking about the trips they might do in the upcoming year! Lots of interest in trip planning. 

Lastly, it ends with a sudden traffic drop – that’s New Year’s Eve. 

The big takeaway from this is:

• Blog traffic naturally ebbs and flows with the seasons, especially around major holidays.
• Traffic drops don’t always mean your content isn’t working! Factor in the behaviour patterns of your readers before making conclusions.

Now, let’s continue with the affiliate income breakdown.

Affiliate income breakdown

Much like our last quarter, most of our affiliate income came from two main sources – Viator and Commission Factory.

Viator

If you don’t know, Viator is a marketplace for tours. Tour operators all over the world list their tours here to reach a wider audience. 

This Q4, we earned $1,947.89 with them:

Commission Factory

This is an affiliate network, i.e. they connect you to dozens of brands with affiliate programs, so you can earn commissions from promoting their products/services. 

We earned $2,590 this quarter with them:

We earned +30% compared to the previous quarter ($2,590 vs $1,950). Yet, we expected a lot more! 

Traditionally, many businesses make most of their yearly income during this quarter because of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holidays.

But it looks like it’s not the case for us, probably because of the kind of products we earn money with (travel insurance and tours).

People with courses or products (physical or digital) will probably make more income during this period though.

We’ve previously discussed a few things that can impact affiliate income, click here to learn more about it.

Instagram: $11,108.71

These are the paid gigs we’ve done for brands thanks to our Instagram presence. 

Sadly, for privacy reasons, we can’t disclose the exact projects or brands. But we can share our earnings: $11,108.71.

In our last income report, we also added an estimate of free things the brands gave us – gear or flights for example -, in addition to paying for our services. 

We didn’t add that this time because it’s really hard to estimate the value of those things! So we kept it at the payments received. 

The paid gigs focus mostly on creating content for brands usage on our Instagram (or UGC content they can use for their accounts), usually short videos or photography. 

Here’s an example, you’ll notice it says stuff like “ad”, “paid partnership”, etc. early in the caption:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Chris & Bec | Adventure Travel (@salt.and.charcoal)

This brings up a very important point. 

We’ve been using DJI drones since WAY before we knew there would ever be a partnership. We love the product, which is why it was a no-brainer for us to promote! 

This is absolutely key. Work with the brands you know and love and then selling them is natural.

See, if you want to build or grow your business with Instagram, know that brands will eventually reach out to you… Even if you only have a few thousand followers.

Know your worth, early on we did a lot of exchange deals (where we receive a product or service but don’t get paid). This is a great way to grow a portfolio early on but as you start to get better at content creation CHARGE for your services.

Even if you are only reaching a few thousand views, that’s THOUSANDS of potential paying customers for that product/service! Plus, hours of work behind the scenes you have put in.

Carefully choose who you work with too….

Some random obscure brands might offer you payment in exchange for you promoting their products to your audience. Sometimes we get offers from lotto services, alcohol brands or products that just don’t align with our brand. It can be tempting to say yes, but please be careful!

If it’s stuff you haven’t tried and it ends up being dog poop, you risk damaging your reputation and the hard work you’ve put into your Instagram, only for a few bucks.

No amount of money is worth losing what you have worked to create. 

So we recommend focusing on promoting products that you personally use and that you believe in. Your audience trusts you, don’t take that for granted!

Let us know if you’re interested in learning HOW we monetised our Instagram:

Getting paid

The problem with working with different affiliate programs, clients, etc, is that payment comes in different currencies – AUD, USD, EUR, GBP, etc.

As a travel blogger, you need somewhere you can receive all these payments without the hefty conversion fees of most banks.

Paypal is not a great option – their commissions are ridiculously high and seriously eat up your revenue. Plus we have been scammed too many times there.

That’s why we use Wise. You can receive money and make payments from dozens of currencies, plus transfer them to other bank accounts.  You betcha that’s an affiliate link but we actually USE and LOVE Wise so are happy to recommend it to you.

And their conversion rates are unparalleled – they’re some of the lowest in the market. And the whole thing is so easy to use that even my grandma could do it!

You can also have a debit card with them free of charge to pay internationally while you travel. Talk about a win-win!

Check out Wise here to see if it’s right for you.

Want to follow in our footsteps?

We learnt how to make money off websites (like this travel blog) from the eBusiness Institute back in 2016, with their course called “Digital Investors”. 

Since then, we’ve built, renovated, and sold several websites – one for $250,000 and our last website sale was for $76,000. Our current website, we are keeping because it makes monthly revenue, and we’re passionate about it!

The founders of the institute (Matt and Lizz Raad, a couple from Brissy) created this course for beginners to teach how to buy and renovate websites for passive income and profit.

Honestly, we cannot thank these guys enough, our life has changed exponentially since learning from them. We are still good friends with them to this day. Are we their affiliate too? Duh. But once again because we genuinely recommend them to learn how to earn money online.

They’re offering a FREE masterclass exclusively for Salt and Charcoal readers! It includes several bonuses at the end, watch it here:

The webinar goes over how we earn money online for our travels and enough to save for the future too.

They also have other courses. We have done all of them and reviewed them in this blog, check it out to find out if the eBusiness Institute is the right fit for you.

The bottom line

Well, there you have it – that’s the breakdown of how we earned $15,325 in just three months for simply travelling and sharing content. 

Other travel blogs make that in a week! Our website is relatively new and small.

It’s inspiring to know the potential that’s there. We hope this income report has been insightful and gives you some motivation to start or improve your own online brand. 

If you’re looking to learn more about earning through blogging, check out the exclusive (and free) masterclass from the eBusiness Institute. 

It’s how we got started, and it could be the stepping stone you need on your path.

Plus it’s free, what ya got to lose?