Success Stories

How Alex Wieteska-Gasior’s Slow Travel Blog Earns $5k/Month From Ads and Affiliate Marketing

Last updated: July 31, 2024

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Alex Wieteska-Gasior has always had a passion for travel, and as soon as she could, she moved abroad to teach English.

This gave her the opportunity to live a nomadic life, which she began to document on a blog called Roam & Thrive.

Once on the road, she fully understood the importance of not only experiencing new places, but also taking care of yourself both mentally and physically.

Her site provides practical travel tips and destination itineraries while also leaning heavily towards wellness and retreat guides, eating healthy, and fitness. Today she's making $5k a month and living the life of travel she's always dreamed about.

Keep reading to find out:

Why she created her blog
How her blog led to other opportunities
Where her income comes from
How much traffic her site gets
How she grew her site
Her main marketing strategies
Her thoughts on AI
Her approach to SEO
Her keyword research process
Her content creation strategy
How she leverages her DMs
Her go-to resources and tools
Her biggest challenge
Her greatest accomplishment
Her main mistake
Her advice for other entrepreneurs

Contents

Meet Alex Wieteska-Gasior
Why She Created Her Site
How Much She’s Earning
Her Top Marketing Strategy
Her Thoughts on SEO
- Keyword Research
- Link Building
Her Content Creation Strategy
Alex’s Email List
Her Favorite Resources
Her Go-To Tools
Her Main Challenge
Her Main Accomplishment
What She Wishes She Knew When She Started
Her Biggest Mistake
Her Advice for Other Entrepreneurs

Meet Alex Wieteska-Gasior

I’m Alex and I’m a content publisher and photographer. I’m originally from London, UK, where I lived for most of my life, or until the age of 25.

I was really lucky to be able to grow up traveling quite a bit, mainly around Europe, and then, when I reached my late teens, further afield.

All I wanted to do was travel. People would always ask me what I wanted to do for a living later in life and the answer was always “I don’t know,” while I was constantly thinking about how I could make a living from travel.

Back then, blogging, influencing and any type of content marketing didn’t exist, so I became an English teacher because it allowed me to travel.

I went to live in China, Nepal, and Chile, and I traveled much of Asia because of those opportunities, but the income wasn’t good.

It wasn’t enough to build any kind of wealth and I wanted to build my own online business, something that would give me the freedom to live life on my terms.

That’s when I started Roam & Thrive, out of a 600-square-foot apartment in Barrio Italia in Santiago, Chile, where I was living at the time.

I did quite a bit of traveling during the development of Roam & Thrive, living nomadically in places like Mexico and Costa Rica and then moving back to Europe and finally to Puglia, Italy where I bought a house last year.

I currently live in Puglia, Italy about 50% of the year and travel the rest of the time.

Why She Created Her Site

I created Roam & Thrive out of my passion for travel and a desire to inspire others to explore the world while maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

The idea came to me during a period when I was traveling extensively and realized the importance of not just experiencing new places, but also thriving physically and mentally while on the road.

Roam & Thrive focuses on providing practical travel tips, exceptional destination guides away from the generic rubbish you sometimes see online, wellness and retreat guides, and photographic inspiration to help travelers make the most of their journeys.

Starting out, I began by sharing my own travel experiences and wellness practices on a simple blog platform. My initial content included detailed itineraries, fitness routines for travelers, and tips on finding healthy food options while abroad.

As I continued to travel and gather more experiences, I expanded the blog to include more comprehensive destination guides, and Roam & Thrive began to move more into the luxury side of travel, but a much more conscious luxe.

Growth came through a combination of consistent, high-quality content, engaging with my audience on social media, and optimizing my site for Google. As I developed my photography career, Roam & Thrive also started to get more and more visual.

I’m someone who is incredibly inspired by visuals when I’m doing travel research online and I wanted Roam & Thrive to do the same.

Overall, Roam & Thrive remains my primary focus and passion and I haven’t started any other businesses apart from being a freelance photographer.

Roam & Thrive has grown into a comprehensive resource in recent years for travelers seeking a wellness-focused, luxury approach to travel. Through continuous learning and adaptation, I aim to keep expanding the blog's reach and impact, helping more people travel mindfully and live better travel experiences overall.

How Much She’s Earning

I earn around $5-6k a month with Roam & Thrive. It fluctuates a little throughout the year due to a few different factors like ad RPMs, which content is trending at different times of the year, etc.

Ads, which are run by Mediavine, provide the largest portion of income, about 45%, and after that, affiliate marketing (35%), mainly for hotel, tour, and car rental bookings.

I also sell my own products like photography prints (5%) from various destinations around the world and I also sell a very specialist map-guide about Puglia, Italy (15%), which I think is one of the most comprehensive travel resources to the region that’s online right now.

Roam & Thrive is not my only income stream, as I’m also a professional photographer specializing in travel and lifestyle photography for various travel brands and hotels.

I also make money licensing photography from my travels to clients.

My site currently gets around 60-70,000 page views per month. It was more last year, but we suffered quite a bit from the Google updates.

I work on my business about 6-7 hours a day. That might not all be for Roam & Thrive, as I might need to take a bit of time to edit some photos for a client or write a freelance article for another project, but that’s the average. I enjoy it though, it doesn’t feel like work.

Her Top Marketing Strategy

When it comes to growing Roam & Thrive and reaching a wider audience, my #1 marketing strategy has always been just creating immersive, interactive content that resonates deeply with my audience.

I think if you create great and authentic content, people come back and I’d like to think I’m quite committed to delivering the best recommendations and content I can and updating it when necessary.

I travel to all the destinations I write about, photograph them in my unique style, and occasionally show myself in them so readers can see I’ve been to these places and brought a unique perspective to the table.

It’s super easy today to just sit at home and let AI spit out some low-quality, badly researched travel articles, and unfortunately, we are seeing more and more of this today so people don’t really know who or what to trust.

It’s important to show readers you’ve been there and know what you’re talking about.

I also send destination email blasts to my audience once a quarter from trending destinations I’ve recently been to.

In it, my audience gets recommendations on where to stay, eat, and play in various worldwide destinations and it’s all very local, insider intel. You can’t find that stuff online or with AI; it’s pretty exclusive.

Of course, I also use SEO as the biggest marketing strategy, and social media, especially Pinterest.

I don’t think it’s unique, but as I’m in a very visual niche and a professional photographer, I’ve been able to leverage Pinterest as a platform to generate a vast amount of traffic.

My strategy there has been to pin consistently and manually for years and to use good images. I think the quality of the pin/image on Pinterest matters a lot, so as a photographer I’ve been able to leverage that.

Her Thoughts on SEO

SEO has been essential to Roam & Thrive, particularly at the beginning. I think now with all the updates and Google potentially moving away from supporting independent publishers, it might be getting less important, but it remains a focus for us.

Our strategy has always been about finding low competition, long tail keywords and writing about that, though we’ve also tried to focus on a content theme and write more around that to build more authority. Watching what competitors were writing about at the beginning was useful at times.

Technical SEO is also a key component. I ensure my website is fast, mobile-friendly, and has a clear, logical structure while also being design-friendly.

Regularly updating content, building high-quality backlinks, and engaging with my audience through social media and other platforms further support my SEO efforts.

Keyword Research

My keyword research process begins with understanding my audience's interests and needs, using tools like Google Keyword Planner, KeySearch, and other resources to gather data.

I also see what’s working currently, what people are reading, and whether there are any content gaps to fill around those destinations.

I focus on long-tail keywords that are specific and less competitive, analyzing search intent to categorize keywords into informational, navigational, and transactional types.

Competitor analysis helps me identify gaps and opportunities, and I map keywords to my content strategy by creating comprehensive pillar content and supporting cluster content.

Regular monitoring and updating of posts and keywords ensure my content remains relevant and well-ranked but I’m not as good at updating posts as I am creating new ones.

Link Building

Link building is definitely something I’ve struggled with in the past, never really having a clear-cut strategy for it.

My strategy always went something like “rank at the top of the Google Search and people will naturally link back to you,” and in my cases, this has worked: our top-performing content has the most links.

I’ve used HARO quite a bit in the past to be featured or quoted in other content for a backlink, and I’ve also written freelance content for other sites in exchange for a backlink, but that’s pretty much it.

Her Content Creation Strategy

Our content strategy begins with the reader. I love to write content for people, not for Google, so I start by watching and listening to what people are doing when it comes to travel.

My nose is firmly in the industry, so to speak, so I know which destinations are and might be trending shortly.

I’ll do a bit of keyword research and then I’ll travel to those, or as many of those as I can, I’ll then do more keyword research and begin writing about those destinations.

I also tend to listen to my social media DMs. Many people ask for travel advice along the lines of “I’m visiting blah destination soon, have you been there?”

Oftentimes, the same destinations come up again and again, which makes me book the trip and create content around it as I know people want to read it.

Sometimes I’ll do random keyword research around a destination I want to visit; sometimes the trip is worth the while and I’ll take it.

We are going on about 350 articles.

Alex’s Email List

Yes, I do have an email list, but it’s relatively small because I never put much effort into growing it or had a solid strategy for developing it. However, this is something I’m actively working on now.

To grow my email list, I’m focusing on creating valuable lead magnets such as travel guides, and exclusive content, such as our Puglia map that visitors can access in exchange for a small fee and their email addresses.

I'm also optimizing sign-up forms on my blog to make them more visible and enticing, and I'm experimenting with pop-ups and inline forms to capture email addresses without being intrusive.

Mediavine’s Grow program has been great for this, without me having to do much extra.

Her Favorite Resources

I think Brandon Gaille and his podcast, The Blogging Millionaire, has been one of the most influential resources for me, not just for blogging advice but also inspiration in general.

I do love Niche Pursuits, too, and listen to the podcast weekly; it’s perfect for industry news and inspiration.

Her Go-To Tools

KeySearch has been and still is one of the most useful tools for keyword research, especially at the beginning of your business when you don’t have the funds to pay for the more advanced ones like Semrush.

I also use and love RankIQ, Brandon Gaille’s own keyword research platform built for bloggers. It has allowed me to write top and better-ranking content and reach page 1 of search for many different keywords.

I also use a Pomodoro timer on my desktop to get serious work done. I tend to get distracted quite a bit when I write, so the timer helps me to focus on getting those words down.

Her Main Challenge

Traffic growth! This has always been the biggest challenge: getting enough traffic to be able to reach my financial goals as a business. It’s really taken me years to get to a level of good traffic and income.

In recent times, all the Google updates haven’t been nice to us. Between the HCU and March’s core update, we lost around 40% of our Google traffic, which is heartbreaking when you’re trying to build an online business.

As most entrepreneurs in the same position will know, these parts of the business are so frustrating as we can’t do anything about them.

Having no control over many parts of the business is a challenge, especially when it comes to growth, and this is the biggest challenge we are facing now.

Her Main Accomplishment

I believe in small wins across each stage of building businesses. Small wins which, over time, lead to larger and larger ones. I’ve certainly had lots of small wins along the way.

One was definitely getting into Mediavine and being able to earn a full-time income from my first site.

Another is, of course, when readers write to you thanking you for your content and how much you helped them out.

My “why” and true reason for starting out was to be able to guide people in their queries and searches and give fantastic travel advice that really helps them.

When readers come back to us and say how much X content helped them, in a sense we are achieving our “why.” I think getting to that stage has to be one of my biggest accomplishments thus far.

What She Wishes She Knew When She Started

I think every online publisher would have loved to know more about SEO or link building strategies, or how to build an email list effectively, but I guess those are just part of the learning process.

I underestimated the importance of SEO from the beginning. Understanding how to optimize my content for search engines earlier on would have significantly accelerated my blog’s growth and online visibility.

Her Biggest Mistake

I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t made quite a few mistakes, especially at the beginning when I first started out.

The major one was not investing enough in myself, my skills, and my business. I was very frugal starting and, looking back now, had I spent more on my own education and learning things like SEO, I would have no doubt progressed a lot faster.

The second fairly large mistake I made was not having that business mindset about my business from the get-go.

For the first couple of years, it was a side hustle, but I didn’t think of it as something that could succeed as a business, so I treated it more like a hobby side hustle.

I think if I applied that entrepreneurial and business mindset to it from the beginning, it would have turned into a profitable business a lot faster.

Her Advice for Other Entrepreneurs

Invest in yourself and your business early on with whatever resources you can. Go niche with your site.

Also, don't underestimate the power of networking. Connect with other entrepreneurs, industry experts, and potential partners.

These relationships can offer support, provide new opportunities, and offer insights that you might not have considered.

And finally, not just because I run a wellness-focused travel blog but, take care of yourself. Entrepreneurship can be demanding, and maintaining a healthy work-life balance is crucial. Prioritize your well-being to sustain your energy and creativity.