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Welcome to another travel blog income report where I document the wins and losses on the way to seeing if travel blogging is still viable.
If you want to start with last month’s income report and get the backstory on when I started and everything else, click here.
Why do income reports?
This is a valid question and the short answer is, I find them really enjoyable to read from other people.
I also know that they give me hope and push me to work harder when I see people achieve things I consider hard.
We also can’t avoid the chat around travel blogging being dead. Which is what everyone is discussing with AI.
With all that said, this month was tough. And I didn’t do as much as I hoped I would do.
Let’s start with traffic.
Traffic for October 2025
A few quick facts on this. I started reviving this blog back in June with under 1k views. It had just been hit with all the algorithm changes, hence little traffic.
But the blog has been active since 2018.
This month we crossed 8k sessions. But I also had my first little bot attack, that brought a lot of random traffic to the homepage.
Thankfully this stopped after 2 days, but you can see it as a spike during the start.
I’m going to remove the 500 extra sessions from my total here, and say that we had 8.3 as the total traffic of the month.
Ads
This site won’t have ads until I hit 50,000 sessions and can apply to a premium network so there is no change on this front.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate income is my main source of monetizing this blog so far and I foresee that to stay the same.
One interesting thing that I noticed this month, is that I’ve been counting income as what is generated not what hits my bank and clears.
Maybe I should change that in the future but will keep it as is for the next 6 months.
Stay 22: $168.89
The majority of my income this month came from running the Stay22 LMA Script. I was shook to see that number jump to 3 figures. Most of the bookings were for last minute stays, so they have cleared already but some are for later in the year, meaning there is a good chance they might get cancelled. Hence why I might have to start calculating things different in the future. Either way, I’m happy to see this.
Amazon Associates: $0.00
Not surprising. But I should probably focus on it a bit more if I want to qualify for keeping my account active.
Get Your Guide + Travel Payouts $4.52
Discover Cars: $0
I’m going to disappoint you all by saying I didn’t work on Pinterest as much this month as I had hoped to.
It was a work focus month primarily, so I left this as is.
| Source | Amount |
|---|---|
| Ads | $0 |
| Affiliate sales | $173.41 |
| Brand deals / FAM tours | $0 |
| Total | $173.41 |
A much better number to work from, but it won’t keep growing without a push.
Expenses
The only recurring monthly cost tied directly to the blog is Lightroom ($12/month) — which I use for photo editing across both blog content and client work.
My hosting is under a shared hosting plan bought. for client work, and the domain is a once a year cost so far.
I foresee these expenses rising when I switch to different hosting, once my numbers go up.
For now, I recommend Hostinger as an affordable hosting plan for those starting out. I’ve also had to reach out to them for support multiple times (for client related work) and they reply fast and fix the issue.
More tools if you’re wanting to start a travel blog.
Other tools like AI, Canva, formatting software, and stock photo libraries fall under general business expenses for now, so I’m not counting them specifically toward the blog expenses yet.
Content Published
This month I failed spectacularly at publishing lots of content.
I gave a lot of focus on other work. So the total number is 139, with only 3 new guides posted here.
The good news is that I had a collaboration request with another travel company, to write content for them, which I’m really happy about and will discuss more about when they are ready.
October Goals: Completed ❌
- 📌 Publish 20 new blog posts
- 📌 Reach 50k monthly views on Pinterest
- 📌 Reach 15k traffic
November 2025 Goals
My output this month was really low, so I’m keeping the same goals from last month to get back to baseline. I’ll also be traveling quite a bit this month within Greece and to a new country, so that might give me a little push on new destinations.
- 📌 Publish 20 new blog posts
- 📌 Reach 50k monthly views on Pinterest
- 📌 Reach 15k traffic
Final Thoughts
If you’re following along month to month — thank you for being here. I really appreciate it. If you have any specific questions you’d like me to cover (about blogging, travel, passive income, or anything in between), feel free to reach out or leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.
Here’s to steady progress, even when it starts at zero.
