How to monetize a Squarespace blog
Here are four ways I make money from my travel blog on Squarespace.
I never believe people when they say they start a blog out of passion, or to ‘keep friends and family updated on a trip.’ That seems pretty outlandish to me, considering how much work goes into getting a blog up and running.
Not to mention the costs of running your own website.
So, if you do plan on starting a blog, or scaling your existing blog to generate a respectable income, you’re probably casting around for ways to monetize your content.
The most popular ways to monetize a Squarespace website are ads and affiliate marketing.
However, the Google search shakeups of late 2023 and early 2024 mean that these methods are no longer as effective as they once were.
I’ll talk through both of these — because I make money with both methods — but I will also look at other ways you can make money from your site, which are much more sustainable, although take longer to get off the ground.
These tactics are all ones I use to make money from my blog. There’s a lot of aspirational advice out there about how to monetize a blog, but I have tried to keep this as concrete as possible, numbers and all.
What you’ll learn in this article:
How much money I make running ads on my site
Affiliate marketing
Itinerary consultations
Selling digital products
Running ads on your Squarespace site
Putting ads on a Squarespace site is one of the easiest ways to make monetize your content. However, to see a worthwhile profit, you need to get a lot of traffic — at least 50,000 page views a month.
I have seen some people say online that you can’t monetize a Squarespace site with ads and that Wordpress is the only option for this tactic, which is completely incorrect. Just ignore this.
I work with Mediavine, a premium ad network, to place display ads across my site. Mediavine has more stringent requirements than other ad networks like Adsense, or Shemedia. You need 50,000 sessions a month to qualify, with most of that traffic coming from the US.
I make around $1500USD a month from my Squarespace travel blog.
Here’s a peek at my Mediavine dashboard:
Ads went live on my site mid way through March 2024 (that’s why the income for that month is lower).
Since then, I have regularly made around $40-50 a day from ads.
You will need to master SEO to see the benefit of income from ads though, as RPMs typically hover around $30 per 1000 visitors, so more traffic means more money.
If getting into Mediavine is a goal for you, make sure your keyword strategy focuses on netting US traffic.
Here are a few key things to know about running ads on a Squarespace site:
Integrating Mediavine ads into my site was seamless. They had no issue with my website being on Squarespace, so if anyone tells you that you need to be on Wordpress to make money from ads, they are wrong.
You have a lot of control over how ads appear on your Squarespace site — on some pages, I switch them off completely and on others I use code blocks to control how frequently they appear.
If your goal for blogging is to make around $1000 a month, then that is completely feasible within a year. I make well over than with around 60,000 sessions a month.
But, keep your expectations for how much you can earn from ads in check. There are bloggers who make a lot of money this way, but it means publishing a lot of content to make a profit. I thought I would make more than I did at first, if I am completely honest. The amount of money you make depends on where your traffic is from (US traffic has the highest value).
I personally don’t love having ads all across my site, so I keep them dialled back to a minimum to no not interrupt the user experience. This impacts how much I earn — as with all things involved in running a travel blog, you need to weigh up your values against how much money you want to make.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is the other main way to make money from a Squarespace site. You can start earning from affiliates with much less traffic than you need for ads, but you need to be much more dialled in to user intent.
That means looking for buying keywords. If someone is looking for the best hiking pants for women, and this is an area of expertise for you, you might craft a blog post about your favourite hiking pants and why you enjoy them — including an affiliate link throughout the post.
Where your audience is located is also important for affiliate marketing. Some affiliate programs are specific to countries; Lululemon has separate affiliate programs for the US, Canada, and Australia, for example. If you wanted to link out to Lululemon hiking pants, it’s going to be tricky to navigate which program to apply for — and which ones will accept you.
Because I’m based in New Zealand, a lot of my blog traffic comes from New Zealand. So, in this scenario, I can only add an affiliate link to Lululemon NZ, even if a lot of my site visitors are based in the US.
This is all just to say that you need to be pretty tactical to make a lot of money from affiliate marketing.
It can make you money without needing to be super salesy in your content, though.
For example, in one blog post I list recommendations for what people can buy in New Zealand. My number one recommendation is a book I bought myself on my travels, and I loved. I didn’t expect to make money from that recommendation, but almost as soon as I put a Bookshop.org link in, I started see ing sales trickle through.
If you’re making genuine recommendations, people will trust you — and you deserve to be remunerated for directing people to good things.
Affiliate programs for travel blogs
Some of the biggest and best affiliate programs for travel blogs are with the websites you would probably use yourself, if you were planning a trip:
Booking.com
Viator
Discover Cars
VRBO
And many more. I use Travel Payouts for affiliate marketing, which lets me easily share links from popular platforms like Booking.com, Viator, and Rental Cars. The good thing about Travel Payouts is it keeps all these different programs in one easy dashboard.
If you’re trying to juggle a multitude of affiliates, it quickly becomes a nightmare, so streamlining the process is brilliant.
There are dozens of affiliate programs out there —
AvantLink
CJ Affiliate
The problems with affiliate marketing
Ads make websites harder to read and use, because of pop ups and distracting videos, but usually the content around them is still good. Affiliate marketing has definitely impacted the internet for the worse, encouraging people to put out poor quality content with the sole purpose of getting affiliate link clicks.
There are some people who make the majority of their income off affiliate marketing on their websites, but I have never felt that comfortable pushing tours and experiences I’m not familiar with.
I struggle with the idea that a lot of travel bloggers push tours or activities they would never pay for themselves, just because they know they can see money from doing so.
On some level, I get it. It’s tempting to splash affiliate links everywhere once you start to see the dollars flow in. It feels a bit like free money.
But honestly, affiliate content is what has caused things like large scale site abuse, which is where big domains (like Forbes, or news websites) publish ‘best of’ lists or other affiliate content, acting as authorities on the best hiking pants for women even when the writer is a man.
If you care about building a long-term brand, serving your audience well, and generally not contributing to the steady decline of the internet, I encourage you to use affiliate marketing judiciously. Only recommend things you would recommend anyway (without a monetary kickback), don’t lie to your audience to make more sales, and always, always, disclose your affiliate links.
For me, affiliate marketing is a happy bonus on top of my other monetization strategies.
How much I make from affiliate marketing
I average around $500 a month from affiliate marketing.
Sell your services — like itinerary consultations
One of the unexpected ways I started making money as a travel blogger was through itinerary consultations.
This happened organically, when readers started emailing me asking if they could book time with me to get my help planning their trips.
I am an expert in New Zealand travel. My whole blog was about New Zealand travel. I’m a New Zealander.
So, this was an obvious value proposition that my readers literally pointed out to me.
I found it hard at first to price these services, and started off charging an hourly rate of $80 for a call. On the very first call though, my client paid me double what I had asked for. She could easily tell that the gigantic follow up document I sent her, with all of my personalized travel tips and recommendations, had taken me a lot more than an hour, on top of the hour we spent on the call. (She was right — it took me all day).
I eventually raised my prices and honed my processes a little bit. It became less time intensive, and started to be a regular stream of income.
I genuinely love offering this service. It’s a great fit for me, as I love talking about visiting New Zealand, and it helps me understand what people are looking for or struggling with.
You don’t have to only sell consultations, though.
This funnel looks like: People find your blog in search >> they read some of your content and decide they like your vibe >> they subscribe/follow and read more of your content >> they decide to purchase your services.
In this way, your blog is acting as part of your marketing funnel, increasing your brand awareness among your ideal consumer.
This is getting very marketing speak, but basically — your Squarespace blog is essentially an online billboard for any services you offer. Use your site to put those services in front of people.
Sell digital products
Along Dusty Roads is one of my favourite travel blogs, and a stunning example of a blog built on Squarespace.
They monetize their site by selling gorgeous prints to their audience.
My main pieces of advice for starting and monetising a Squarespace website:
Know that you’re in this for the long run. You might not see money for a year or more, so think of this as a long-term brand building exercise, rather than a way to replace your full time income quickly.
Stay the course. Consistent action is the only thing that will get you to where you want to go.
Be creative with how you make money. You might feel more aligned with tactic than another, so adopt a test and learn mindset to see what works for you.
If you’re curious about what it takes to run a website on Squarespace, check out these articles as well:
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