I’ve read my share of blogs and free ebooks about how to make money online, so I was hesitant to spend $27 on Nomadic Matt’s first travel ebook, How to Make Money with Your Travel Blog, released earlier this year.  After the ebook launched, and I read the early reviews, I assumed there would be little for me to gain by purchasing it.

Almost 6 months after it was released, curiosity finally got the best of me and I bought it.  Spoiler alert:  I learned a thing or two and was satisfied that I got my money’s worth.

Before I continue, I should also acknowledge that I signed up as an affiliate before deciding to write this review.

My first impression was “wow, that is a concise Table of Contents” when seeing it featured just 7 chapters (the entire book is 37 full pages, single spaced, with illustrations).  Matt begins with an introduction citing the reason he wrote the ebook was to help answer common questions he receives about search engine optimization (SEO) and how to make money travel blogging.

Following the introduction are six parts, covering everything from the questions to ask yourself before starting your first blog to critical WordPress plugins, SEO and link building tips, and of course, how to make money when you put all the pieces together.

…building social traffic and a network takes time. Don’t expect to have a huge amount of traffic or readers right away. But if you are committed to it and stick with it, traffic will appear.

More than the advice on proper use of Stumble Upon, or the diagrams attempting to demystify SEO, I appreciated his straightforwardness with new bloggers as to the amount of time it takes to build a successful site.  If you’re starting from scratch, we’re talking a minimum of months, if not years.  Building a blog is more like running a marathon than a sprint.

In the monetization chapter, Matt reviews Google AdSense, selling text links, affiliate sales, and how to price advertising when you cut out the middle men.  Along the way, he offers his perspective on the pro’s and con’s of these methods.

I also enjoyed his Putting It Together chapter which wraps up the ebook, however there is one point Matt highlights, which I have to disagree with, or at least present the opposing view:

Don’t feel the need to blog every day. When I first started I put up content every day. It was stressful always trying to fill the blog. It creates more work than you need. You can build traffic just as easily with two or three posts per week.

If you happen to be a persuasive, funny, or naturally talented writer to begin with, then posting a few times a week and building traffic from bookmarking sites and link building can perhaps get you the results you seek.  I, on the other hand, believe strongly in attempting to post at least five times a week, regardless of your experience level. This shouldn’t be stressful, but rather fun, because you are hopefully writing about your passion.

For the novice blogger, it will allow you more opportunities to experiment with writing the all important post titles (headlines).  You’ll narrow down the direction of your blog and find your voice as a writer more quickly (if, like me, you have no previous writing experience).  And of most importance, you’ll be building your blog’s overall content faster, every post being a new opportunity to have pages indexed in the search engines and bookmarked and passed along by readers.

[Editor's Note:  To feel a little more confident when you're just starting out, poke around the early, archived posts of any well-established blogger.  If it is their original blog, and it has been a few years, the difference in writing/blogging quality should be immediately evident.]

For the advanced blogger, you can continue to hone your writing skills, experiment with new writing techniques, and again, build new content.

I realize Matt is simply trying to reassure new bloggers that they need not stress themselves out in order to gain traffic, however I believe there is a lot of value in writing as frequently as possible, whether it’s to build traffic or improve one’s writing skills.

In conclusion, there are a lot of internet marketers who are all too happy to make outlandish claims in order to sell their products.  Some people may doubt Matt’s claim of making $3,000 per month, however once you’ve made some money from a blog or website, you know first hand that it is a reasonable and achievable figure.

Nomadic Matt shows you the tried and true strategies he used in How to Make Money with Your Travel Blog.

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