Until recently, the words “traveling” and “making money” did not go well together, because usually traveling means spending money. This has indeed changed.
Everyday devices that we carry with ourselves empowers us for a high level of content creation while we might not notice our true potential and the means of making a profit.
A modern smartphone can take images and videos with much higher quality than the professional photo and video cameras from the previous decade. A tablet or lightweight laptop can be used to write engaging content and together with these images and videos combined into a travel blog, you can share your experience with millions of internet users, and make a profit, through a website.
Before discussing some other aspects of this venture, I would like to remind you that Google is your friend, but you already know that as I would imagine this is how you got to this blog article in the first place.
Top travel destinations in the US are plenty
Especially when talking about how to make money while traveling the US provides a plethora of macro and micro destinations.
Sight-seeing and nature destinations include Alaska, Everglades National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, Niagara Falls, Maui, Island of Hawai’i, Sedona, Yosemite National Park … etc.
Urban, entertainment and historical destinations are spread all over the country and include Washington D.C, New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Walt Disney World Resort, Miami, San Diego, Boston, Seattle, Orlando, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia … etc.
Investing a little effort into a few popular travel and guide applications on your smartphone, you will be able to flush-out some exciting and gorgeous micro-destinations on your journey, and add different and spicy flavor to your travel site.
How to start your travel blog website?
Starting your own travel blog website is much easier than you might think in the first place, and it involves:
- Registering a domain name for your website.
- Purchasing a WordPress website hosting.
- Choosing a blog theme for your website.
- Changing the template content with your own.
- Publishing articles.
A few smart choices can make this process much easier so I would like to provide some advanced tips which will help you.
The domain name you choose should be relatively short, easy to remember, type and pronounce so your website visitors will not have any trouble coming back to your website or communicating it to their friends.
The hosting service I would recommend would be a Managed WordPress hosting so you do not have to worry about website maintenance, updates, and backups. Instead, it will be the job of hosting company staff to make sure your website is up and running.
Additionally, it would be better if you get a Managed WordPress hosting service that is able to provide modern, high-quality. premade WordPress themes (with an integrated visual website builder) that can be used as a template for your website. This will save you significant time and effort, and make sure your website is running optimally.
While changing template content I would strongly suggest that you use your own, original images, videos and written texts as search engines can quickly recognize content that is duplicated from other websites and it will lead to SEO penalties as well as possible copyright charges.
After you have prepared a few articles, do not publish them all at once, but instead present them to your audience over a period of time, as this will provide a number of benefits.
Search engines favor websites that get regular content updates, for example once per week, and they tend to visit them more frequently so they can crawl freshly published articles.
Changing or updating older articles can provide a benefit because, as mentioned, it will give a signal to search engine crawler bots to come often and check your website.
Can it be that simple?
Yes, building a website with by means of a WordPress theme with an integrated visual builder does not require any coding knowledge. Almost every part of your new website can be changed through a traditional “drag ’n’ drop” interface.
You may have heard that a number of recent Holywood movie productions were done with an iPhone smartphone doubling as the “main video camera”, including “Tangerine”, “Romance in NYC” which received numerous awards … and others.
If a smartphone is good enough for making professional movies, then it will also be more than adequate for your travel blog content.
Make additional money as a travel photographer
Now, the US is a great country with numerous breathtaking places. Some of these truly deserve to be photographed using a professional-grade camera, and there is one more reason why you may consider such a choice.
While you are traveling you will be making hundreds of photos and videos, and it is very likely that 10% of them are used for your website content, while the rest of them are kept on your local or cloud storage.
The thing is, some of those unpublished images and videos may be worth a significant amount of money to a third party, and you can create an additional revenue stream from a stock photo and video image sale.
Now, as a photographer, you can take the easier road, create your account with a number of stock image marketplace websites, upload your material, and let them sell while you split the profit with the sales platform.
However, a less traveled road would take, again, to launching your own photography website, where you are offering the images you created, but are not sharing any profit with a third party.
The fact is stock photographers may have tens of thousands of images but are making most of their profit from a smaller number of popular images, while professional photographers can charge a pretty penny for every single one of the images they made.
Arguably, the best course of action would be to get both – a number of accounts with image sales platforms, and your own photography website. This way you will get better exposure for your photos, and still, have the option of higher profit with your own website.
Conclusion
how to make money while traveling the us:
People are more engaged with the Internet than ever before as we all have some kind of mobile device, and browse it almost constantly. In turn, this creates more need for online content and websites which will provide this content.
Travel and photography blogs are among the most popular content websites because people love to explore new and remote places, especially from the comfort of their home or while sipping a cup of coffee at a local cafe.
All of this creates opportunities for high-quality content creators to present their work, and consequently make a profit.
If you are one such person that loves traveling the US and sharing your experience online with like-minded people then this is the way you should be making money.
Photo by Taryn Elliott from Pexels 
Photo by Artem Beliaikin from Pexels
