Make Money with Your Travel Blog Holiday Sale

NomadicMatt’s excellent ebook is on sale for the Holidays!

We are now traveling the world fulfilling our dream of being full time travelers.  It wasn’t always this way.  We had loved to travel, but had to keep coming home to work and save money between trips.

It wasn’t until we returned from 5 months in Africa that we decided to once and for all look into ways to make money with our travel blog.

Luckily, we found NomadicMatt’s website early on in our research and bought an invaluable book from him.

How to make Money with Your Travel Blog taught us insider secrets into how to earn an income while being on the road.

From SEO techniques, social networking to finding advertisers and optimizing your site, Matt’s book gives a step by step guide on how to achieve success.   This isn’t a get rich quick scheme and it doesn’t guarantee that you will be able to sustain a life of travel. However if you follow his guide and work hard at your blog, you to can be traveling the world like Matt and us!

The great news is that for the holiday season, Make Money with Your Travel Blog is on Sale.  It is only $17 dollars U.S. That is a 30% savings

Want to make a New Years Resolution to change your life?  That is exactly how we started.  It was a New Years Resolution in 2006 that turned into an adventure of a lifetime!

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Nomadic Matts: Make Money With Your Travel Blog

ThePlanetD has grown considerably over the past 6 months. We are starting to see a nice increase in traffic, we are selling adspace and people in the travel community are starting to take notice of us.  For that we are very thankful.  It wasn’t always this way though.

Dave and I started to blog way back in 2007 when we decided to take part in the 2008 Tour d’Afrique, a cycling race through Africa.  Back then, we didn’t know the first thing about Blogging.  All we knew was that some people kept a journal about their time in Africa the previous year and we enjoyed reading them so we decided to follow suit.

We started our own blog to track our training and preparations and then to let friends and family know how life was going while we were Africa.  When we returned home, we stopped Blogging and that was the end of that.

We never dreamed that someone could actually make money off of Blogging.

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It wasn’t until this past April that we actually looked into the business of Blogging. We stumbled upon it really, we were looking into travel writing and how to submit to magazines and newspapers.  As we followed links from one blog to another looking for information, we came across a great travel website called NomadicMatt.com We have learned a great deal in the past 6 months and one of the biggest contributors to our progress has been by following Matthew Kepnes word of wisdom in How to Make Money With Your Travel Blog.

It is a perfect book for people starting out as well as for established Bloggers that haven’t moved their blog beyond a few hundred hits a day and a couple of bucks from Adsense a month.  Matts book will give you the tools that you need to learn how to find readers, what price to charge advertisers and how to raise your profile on the Internet.  I don’t think that we would be near as far along with our Blog if it weren’t for this ebook.

We frequently go back to his book and reference sections and chapters.  When we need something clarified or need to ask a question, Matt always takes the time to help.  He doesn’t have to, but that is just the kind of person that he is.  Helpful.

He covers everything in the book right from the basics of setting up your blog to selling ad space.  He teaches you how to increase traffic, utilize social networking, and he talks about search engine optimization.  It is all very easy to follow and understand.

Matt is living proof that making a living off of travel blogging can be done.  He makes up to $3000 a month on his websites and he is living the dream as a full time traveler and who better to take advice from than a professional sharing his expertise.

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How to Take care of Your Finances for Travel

Since Dave and I are going through this again right now, we thought that it would be a good time to let you know how we prepare all of our banking and financing before a world travel.

It can be a little overwhelming when you leave for a trip putting all of your accounts in order, but if you take it step-by-step, things can go pretty smoothly and you can travel worry free.

The first thing that I do is go through our wallets to see what cards we will be taking and what we will leave behind.  I make a note to contact every account to tell them that we will be overseas.  Some banks and credit cards will freeze accounts when they see them being used in a foreign country unless they are notified.

Next I make sure that we have a variety of cards that will be compatible worldwide.  We have found that cards that use the Cirrus system work well, but we also use Plus and Maestro.

I write down all of the important numbers and contact information that I will need for each account.

I then write down account numbers to store in a safe place. You need to have this on hand in case anything goes missing.

We have several different accounts with different pin numbers. I make sure to write down little hints as to what each pin is.  If anything gets stolen, they won’t be able to figure out what all of these random numbers and words mean, but I know what it all means.  We also email ourselves the same hints just in case.

• I have heard of the online pin storage sites, but I have yet to use them. Maybe we will this trip after some more investigation.  But there is nothing safer in my opinion than not having pins stored anywhere, just some random hints that don’t make sense to anyone but me.

The next thing we do is get our online banking in order and set up pre-authorized and scheduled payments. We basically set up all of our banking for the time that we will be gone.  Bill payments, investments, money transfers…they are all done ahead of time so that we are not worrying about monthly expenses while we are away.

Organizing your Finances Before Leaving the Country is the Key

We also use a separate account for bills at home from the account we will be using on the road.

This is not mandatory, but we make sure to have a monthly payment to our credit card that we use for travel whether we use it or not.  Just in case we can’t get to an internet by the time the due date comes around, we are content in knowing that at least the minimum payment will be taken care of.   We would hate to miss a payment and have our cards declined if we needed them.

We also make sure that we have a savings account that is linked to our account that we are using to travel that we can transfer money to and from.  We don’t keep a lot of money in our travel account at one time as ATM’s can be greatly compromised.  Transfers are set up before leaving home to go into our account monthly to fit our budget.

We pay very close attention to our finances while traveling. We have our credit monitored to make sure nobody has gotten our information and we check our accounts regularly to make sure that things haven’t come out that shouldn’t have.

We also leave a banking account number with a family member at home in case we need them to put money into our account.  It is good to have all avenues covered in case of an emergency.

So that is what we do  to prepare our finances while we are traveling. Knock on wood, all has gone well, but we are always learning new tricks.

Do you have any hints or suggestions to make your banking while traveling easier?

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