Passive income: the holy grail of travel writing?

Steph chats about earning money while you sleep

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What were you doing on Boxing Day? As I recovered from a day of gluttony, I earned £2,500, all without lifting a finger. It wasn’t some diligent member of accounts at a travel publication looking to spread some festive cheer; instead, it was income earned through affiliate partnerships on my travel blog, Worldly Adventurer. Cold, hard cash as I stuffed my face with mince pies.

I stumbled upon the world of passive income nine years ago when I was first starting out on my website and long before I found my feet in the travel media. If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s more or less what it sounds like. Unlike journalism where you’re part of an active, pitch-write-repeat cycle, passive income means you can be much less proactive after the initial flurry of work. For example, it took three years of work before I started earning a full-time wage from my website, but since then, I’ve received monthly payments that have hit £14,000, all despite spending weeks without touching it. This passive income stream means I earn while I sleep, travel or even sit on the sofa bingeing Wallace and Gromit.

How my blog became a £100k business & made me a successful journalist

It has also given me a remarkable degree of freedom. I can join 10-day-long press trips without worrying about how many commissions I’ll need to land to pay for the time I’m away from my desk and can predict more accurately how much I’ll earn each month. Better still, I’ve been able to focus on writing stories that matter to me. I see it as no coincidence that I was nominated for a slew of awards last year because I had the head space and the time to pitch features that got me excited to sit down at my keyboard.

I wrote back in November 2022 about how my blog became a £100,000 business. Unfortunately, pride comes before a fall, and Google spent the last year attempting to obliterate my website, and thousands of other bloggers’, through earthshaking algorithm updates. I’ve lost around half of my monthly blogging income, however, I have fingers in enough passive income pies to weather this storm — including this very newsletter.

If you didn’t learn during the pandemic how crucial it is to avoid having all of your financial eggs in one basket, then do so now. The shifting parameters of Google mean that, unlike in this newsletter from 2022, I no longer view a travel website as the golden goose of passive income, however, passive income is something to seriously consider. Using your existing professional skills to establish a side business within the travel media that earns you steady cash each month is surely a no-brainer.

So what constitutes a viable business that will pay you passive income? This month we’ll be discussing just that: whether Medium could be the route to ongoing riches, if it’s financially viable to self-publish your own travel books and hearing from a photographer who makes four figures per month selling ebooks.

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Post of the week

Have you ever run your copy through ChatGPT? AI won’t be turning your writing into Pico Iyer’s prose anytime soon.

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Who to follow

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Industry must-reads

Check out this income breakdown from Anna Codrea-Rado (paywalled); it’s a fascinating reminder that your earnings aren’t always on an upward trajectory.

This beautiful piece by Captain Corelli’s Mandolin author Louis de Bernières is the perfect salve to the cold weather and an example of travel writing as its most lyrical.

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This is the first in our series on setting up passive income streams. Upgrade your subscription to become a paid subscriber to gain access to all four practical, insights-packed emails. Don’t forget we have an extensive archive of useful content from four and a half years of publishing this newsletter. Plus, Meera Dattani’s webinars are all available to purchase and watch here.