How to Publish your First PAID Travel Blog (Travelicious Walkthrough)

 

How can you actually make money out of your travel writing?

If you have been keeping an amateur personal blog where you post your travel experiences and tips plainly for the love of travel writing and documenting your awesome adventures, OR if you have just started travel writing, OR you’re just about to start writing, then you could earn at least AU$40 per article.

Writing for Travelicious

I have been (inconsistently) writing for my  personal blog for 4 years now where I publish my random reflections and travel experiences. I also now have a baby travel blog.  But just last month, travelicious.world published my first ever paid travel writing article in their own website which got me paid AU$40. Check it here to see what kind of articles they publish. It was a fulfilling achievement for me. In the following paragraphs, I will try my best to walk you through the process… from the application to writing your draft, to getting paid, to getting published.

Steps Before You Can Write for Travelicious

Last August 2016 I clicked an advertisement in Facebook from a certain Travelicious.world about travel writing which can make you earn at least $40 per a 1000-word (minimum) article. Being a traveler who loves to write, it got me really interested. The link of the advertisement directed me to a web page that shows this:

Although it was a marketing trick that they just put $40 in the ad which made me think it was in USD, when the reality is that payment is in AUD, it still sounded so promising to earn money compared to no money at all.

1. Send an application

Using this link http://travelicious.world/write-for-us/ sign up through Facebook.  Once you’ve allowed their API to access your FB profile to sign in, you will be redirected to a page with the following fields you have to fill up:

Email

Please confirm your email address for notifications.

Write About Yourself

Please write a description of yourself, your education, professional and life experience.

Occupation

What is your regular occupation?

Skills

List your skills or areas of interest.

Education

List your education or qualifications.

2. Wait for the approval of your application within 24 hours.

Check your email for the approval of your application. If you don’t find it in your main mailbox, it’s probably in your spam folder. I found my approval notification email in my spam folder. The email looks like this.

I didn’t put many words to answer the application questions but they still approved my application so I’m concluding that they’re not very strict. However, approval doesn’t mean you can start right away. You have to set up your own blog first.

3. Setting up your own blog

Travelicious doesn’t allow you to use an existing blog. So if you’ve been keeping a WordPress blog for a long time, you would have to create a new one with your own domain name (yourblogname.com instead of yourblogname.wordpress.com). That entails paying for a GoDaddy domain which you will own anyway. This is the reason why I now have 2 blogs, the free WordPress subdomain (purposefulwanderlust.wordpress.com) and the paid personal domain (thewanderwalkers.com). At first, I thought that it’s a hassle to keep 2 blogs but then I realize I could use the old one for random personal musings and the new one for purely travel stuff. Another option is to transfer the contents of your old blog to the new one by importing the contents. The process will retain properties such as likes, dates and other information about your imported blogs.

This also means that you have to invest around $12 for a year of subscription of your chosen domain. It would still be good because you will receive around $30. You gained $18 plus your own domain 😉

So anyway, you can read the full details of this pre-requisite here. It would require patience and skills in following instructions to complete this part, that is, you have submitted your new blog site to travelicious. The approval took 2 days for me, notification of which is sent via email and your travelicious portal.

4. Travel Writing using the Travelicious portal.

Writing in the portal is very much similar to writing in WordPress. The portal has embedded the entire WordPress editing tool, plus some tips and training guides. Once you start writing, you may either finish right away or continue some other time but be sure to save the draft. You would also need to fill up some fields such as your PayPal account and your short bio. After submitting your article, you will have to wait around 2 days before receiving a notification of approval. I strongly believe that travelicious approves any kind of travel article after I have read some of their articles.

Payment

You will receive your 40 AUD on the Friday following approval date of your article.

Publishing

Travelicious will provide you a tentative date when they will publish your article. Travellicious will require you to share your article and gain traffic to the best of your ability. The thing is you cannot publish the same article in your own new personal blog. What is the new blog for, then?

What’s the catch?

Your new blog is for travelicious to link to when they publish your article, something you will see at the bottom of my article that they published. Here’s the catch: Travelicious’ website is a travel guide that serves as a pool of writer talents where their travel magazine clients can choose from for their outsourced writing jobs. That means that until you get picked by one of their clients, you will not be able to write again for your second 40 AUD. That’s the purpose of your own blog site as well… so that the clients can look through your portfolio (your blog site). It better look nice and be filled with interesting contents.

I have talked to another published writer and she shares the same sentiment. We both haven’t received any writing jobs after our first article, as most of the writers who have written their own experience of travelicious online.

 

Would I recommend Travel Writing for Travelicious?

Personally, it was an achievement to have my travel writing output be published by another website. It was like “guest blogging.” However, as I learned, guest blogging should direct more traffic to your blog site. From my experience, even when travelicious published mine on theirs, my blog site did not get much traffic. So I conclude that their website probably doesn’t receive much traffic from travelers, rather from writers and clients. There’s also probably too much competition to be looked into and chosen by one of their clients.

So if you are patient enough to follow through the entire process, go ahead and give it a try. 🙂