Laura Peters is the better half of Mike and Laura Travel, which is just what it sounds like: a travel blog she runs with her husband, Mike.
They also have a course called Scale Your Travel Blog, which I’ll review now.
Okay, cost is $2,497. (Or you can do six monthly installments of $427.)
Laura admits: they make about 10 times more selling this program (along with their Travel Blogging Summit Live Event) than they do from their actual travel blog.
The real money’s always in selling the dream, isn’t it?
But what about travel blogging? Can you still make money with it? Or is it saturated? And what about these new tools like Jasper and ChatGPT that can churn out thousands of words in mere seconds? How’s that gonna affect things going forward? Won’t every travel blogger just be spamming their blogs with the same AI-generated content now?
Let’s hear what Laura has to say.
She claims Mike & Laura Travel is still a six-figure business, so that’s a good sign. The money it brings in is entirely from Mediavine display ads and affiliate links.
Mediavine seems to be the pound-for-pound champ of ad networks. They pay the most, and their ads don’t slow down your site (which is important for rankings). The downside is you have to have 50,000 “sessions” in a month to qualify. Meaning 50,000 real-ass people would need to read your blog in a 30-day period.
Sound like a lot? That’s because it is. Most bloggers never qualify. Those who do often spend years chipping away at it. More food for thought.
The good news, Laura says, is you you don’t have to waste your time on Facebook and Instagram and Pinterest like so many people think. In the beginning, you need to blog, get good at SEO, and do affiliate marketing. That’s it. (And then if you’re lucky you can add in Mediavine one day.)
Spreading yourself thin and trying to “be everywhere” to promote your blog? That’s only gonna hold you back.
Doesn’t it take forever to get traffic though? It can. But it doesn’t have to. Inside SYTB, Laura will show you how to find low competition keywords that still get a decent amount of searches each month.
When you go after the low-hanging fruit, you’d be surprised, some of your blog posts will pop to page one in Google in a matter of days or weeks. (Not months or years like you might assume.)
You want these keywords to be “transactional.” To have “commercial intent.” It’s the same amount of work to write a blog post about “What’s the weather like in Cabo in June?” as it is to write one about “The best hotels to stay at in Cabo if you have kids.” Right? But the latter can make you money if you include affiliate links to like Expedia or something like that.
Are you tracking the breadcrumbs Laura’s dropping? Good, so am I.
Now to write these blog posts, Laura recommends checking out what’s already ranking on page one, and then simply modeling them. Don’t copy. But use it as a guide.
Time for backlinks. These are like votes for your website, pushing you to page one. Laura likes guest posts, HARO links, swapping links with SYTB members, and letting other people use her travel photos in exchange for a link.
Once you have momentum, start building that email list. This allows you to make money on demand (just send out a promo) and hedges against algorithm updates that cause you to lose traffic.
Laura does address AI in her pitch. She loves ChatGPT. It helps with brain farts. When you can’t think of what to say or you wrote something but need it smoothed out. Right? But it can’t go scuba diving in Maui and tell you what it was like. It’s a writing assistant, not a replacement. And since it pulls from blogs, well, that means job security, doesn’t it?
Okay so, in the end, she did sell me on there still being (some) potential for new travel bloggers.
My main critique?
All of her students are now clones of her. Their blogs all look the same, and many of them, I noticed, are promoting her course.
So it’s like, why even bother with the travel blog? Why not just be an affiliate for courses?