Guest Blog by Peter Orsel – owner travel and photography blog PeterOrsel.com
One year ago, my blog was barely making any money. I knew it was possible to monetize, but somehow I felt far away from the big bucks the successful travel bloggers made. I’m not gonna lie, I’m still far away from that. But I’m getting somewhere. And a big thank you goes to Stay22!
In this blog I’ll tell you all about the start of my blogging journey, and how Stay22 helped me to make it a constant income stream. But I’m also here to tell you that just installing Stay22 to your website is not automatically going to skyrocket your sales.
Your blog needs to be optimized too, and that’s why I’ll give you my best tips to make the most out of your blog. Even when your blog is still small.
Blogging is not my full time gig. It’s something I do on the side and that makes my time to work on it a bit limited. When I started my blog in 2021, my plan was to share good photos, write how I took them, get found by potential clients, and land them in order to take even more good photos. On repeat.
For a period of two years, I didn’t have more than 5 articles published on my website, surely not optimised to be found, let alone turning into any money. However, the blog I wrote about the best photography spots of Bangkok somehow turned up at the top of Google. Some friends mentioned that they used my blog as their source of inspiration, because it was their first hit when they searched for it.
After that, it received more and more views, until a point that The New York Times reached out to me to see if I took more photos of Bangkok, as they liked my work. Around 250 readers read my article every month, and for a baby blog without traffic, this was great. It motivated me to write more articles, and more and more people found their way to my website.
I obviously didn’t make money yet. When my page views had grown to about 6000 in early 2024, I started implementing affiliate links to my articles. My monthly earnings for my blog were around $50 and I was happy that they could cover the costs to keep my blog running, but not more than that.
In the second half of 2024, I noticed that the tours I promoted started to sell quite well, but the hotel bookings stayed behind. For every article I would recommend the best options in different price ranges, but nothing really seemed to work. I used Travelpayouts for all my affiliate links at this time. I got around 2 affiliate hotel bookings per month, and honestly thought that making affiliate sales through hotels wasn’t really possible anymore. Until I heard about Stay22.
Initially I didn’t want to try, as many bloggers recommend sticking to one affiliate partner in order to get your minimum payouts. I also didn’t want to go through all my posts to edit all of the links, as I did that once before and it took me way too much time. I heard that the installation had to be easy, but it was hard for me to believe it would be that easy.
For installing Stay22, I used LetMeAllez script. It’s the fastest way to get your site ready for affiliate sales within 5 minutes. With installing Stay22 through LetMeAllez, all your links to Stay22 will be automatically directed through the affiliate program of Stay22.
Besides this, your broken affiliate links will be fixed automatically. If you’re linking to a non-existent tour or accommodation, Let Me Allez helps you to fix these broken links so readers are redirected to a relevant page.
The next amazing feature of Stay22 is their NOVA feature. It will perfectly time an opportunity for your readers to open a booking site of your readers’ preference, giving you an unique selling opportunity of an affiliate link.
Lastly, it implements Spark. Spark analyses your article and implements a link where it thinks there’s a missed opportunity for an affiliate link. It blends naturally in your blog. Here’s a screenshot of one of my paragraphs:
Spark recognises the words ‘staying in Calama’ and automatically flags it as an opportunity for people to find accommodation in that town. This didn’t took me any effort, and was fully automated. How amazing that AI tools can do things like this these days!
When I implemented Stay22, I excluded GetYourGuide, as I’m happy with the widgets they provide, and the solutions that they offer as well. For all the other links, I was more than happy to try out Stay22.
In all of 2024 I received about 20 bookings through Booking.com on Travelpayouts.
The following 6 months with Stay22 I received over 315 bookings. An increase of almost 1500%!
Additionally to that, I needed 2.269 clicks to receive 20 bookings, while I only needed 1.233 clicks to reach the 315 bookings. Now that’s something to be excited about! Around 85% of my bookings through Stay22 are from Booking.com. The others are mainly Expedia and Hotels.com.
My current average commission per booking has been about $5,14. This is a number that I'd love to increase. To do this, I’m planning to write more articles about visiting first world countries, as the average nightly stay is more expensive there and will automatically result in a higher commission per booking.
All of this results in an average payout of about $220 USD per month. My tour bookings through GetYourGuide’s platform are, depending on the season, around $300 USD a month, totalling my blogging income at around $500 USD every month.
Even though Stay22 uses a lot of automations, you shouldn’t rely on just that to optimize your sales. In my journey to where I’m at now, I implemented some strategies that will help you generate more bookings.
When I just wrote my first articles, I wanted to give everyone the exact same experience as me. I did all the research myself, as a solo traveler on a budget. I avoided all kinds of private transportation as much as I could, and of course I wouldn’t do a tour if I found a way to organise a trip myself. Lastly, I found the cheapest accommodations, giving up on comfort to save a little bit of money.
I had to learn that my readers are not always like me. A family of 4 is not gonna sleep in a 10-bed hostel, they get a private room. A retiree who’s into photography doesn’t want to walk for hours and discover everything himself, he wants to spend some money on comfort in order to get to his place with the least effort possible.
I optimised my blog so all readers could identify themselves in one of the recommendations that I had. This turned into way more affiliate sales than before, and contributed in turning my $50 USD a month blog into a $500 USD a month blog.
When my blog started to hit 1000 monthly page views, I felt like I could start making some money. I remember signing up for ad platforms like Google Adsense and seeing a revenue of cents after one week of displaying ads. I also saw a lot of creators referring to tours from Viator, bookings on Booking.com or flights through a variety of search engines related to flights.
I tried signing up for Amazon’s affiliate program, the Adobe affiliate program and similar websites. I wrote about the best drone to buy, the best camera for travelers like me and more like that. Even though these things related to my photography blog, I stopped. Why? Other people were way better at in depth comparisons and I asked myself: would I really trust the advice from someone who tested one drone model, instead of the people who tried them all?
The thing I know a thing or two about is travel, and travel photography. How to get from A to B. How to capture exactly that place. How to plan your trip accordingly in order to arrive everywhere on the most optimal times. How to optimize your drone photos. And ultimately, how to turn these skills into an income both online and offline.
Even though I already earned a bit from my blog, I didn’t maximize my earnings. I remember the day I signed up for Stay22 and I thought, wait, is it really this easy? A couple of days later I had my first bookings, and ever since the journey to the increase of 1500% started.
It does matter who you choose as your affiliate partners. For me, Stay22 is one of the best because of all their innovations. Stay22 invests in their tech solutions, using AI wherever possible and combines it with great customer support. I just can’t not be hyped about that!
After being amazed by the program, I decided to refer some of my friends with small or growing blogs. Even though Stay22 has grown a lot over the last years, a lot of bloggers still don’t know about it.
This friend is a fast growing blogger, scaling her blog from about 5k to 50k monthly sessions over the last 6 months. She got her 100 sales within a couple of months, and makes over $1.000 a month now, just by using Stay22 for her affiliate sales. Now that’s a way to make a living!
With not much time at hand, I’m very happy where I’m at now. However, I’m still planning to write photo articles about premium destinations. I recently traveled to Hong Kong, and I visited Singapore 4 times this year, so I should have something to write about.
My goal is to end the year with at least 600 Stay22 bookings! And I might even try to activate tour bookings for a month or so, to see if I can skyrocket even further!