Published by Jeremy. Last Updated on March 3, 2026.
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Welcome to the 132nd entry into our monthly income and traffic report!
In this monthly update we share our traffic, earning, and spending figures for our blogs from the previous month so you can get a glimpse inside the business of blogging. In addition to sharing these for your use, by publishing our information we are also able to stay on track with our own goals for our business.
Prior to reading, it is worth noting that we feature two blogs in this report (one global travel and one local travel) and our income is based on the combined total of the two. We break down the traffic for each in this report for additional information.
Note: In July 2023, Google switched from Universal Analytics to GA4 reporting. We use custom templates to ensure we are still reporting on page views as our traffic metric; however, it is possible this figure is different slightly from the past.
February 2026 Travel Blog Traffic Report
Our traffic on Living the Dream for the month of February was roughly 16,125 page views. This was an increase of 29% per day basis from January and an increase of 114% from February 2025.
Our work on updating content and adding schema markups to posts is showing some rather positive results, as we’re up almost 250% from our lowest month in 2025 and 29% from January! This has been one of our best traffic months in nearly two years, and the trajectory is still rising.
If our end-of-month peaks hold throughout March, it is entirely possible we could see another 15% increase in traffic (or more) if we are lucky. So we’re going to keep up with the momentum and see if we can get this site back on track!
On the Discover the Burgh front, our traffic in February was approximately 80,120 page views. This was an increase of 6% on a per day basis from January and a decrease of 8% from February 2025.
February is often one of our worst months of the year, both because it is a shorter month and because the weather leads many to just stay inside until March brings better temperatures. Throw on that we were coming out of a major snowstorm at the beginning of the month, and it is no surprise that our traffic was on the lower side- we’ve only had a couple months this low since COVID.
That said, we were up on a per-day basis from January, and our end of month totals will likely be showing some gains overall. We also found that we had dropped in some SEO metrics like Core Web Vitals that may have influenced our performance, which we fixed as well. So, fingers crossed for March!
February 2026 Travel Blog Income Report
Our booked income for February was approximately $4,000 an increase of 6% on a per-day basis from January and a decrease of 15% from February 2025. This income was approximately 85% from our local blog and 15% from our travel blog.
The breakdown includes the approximate following:
*CPM Ads: $1,900
*Affiliates: $1,464
*Media: $200
*Book Sales: $186
*Social Bonus: $250
Much like January, our income for the month of February was… fine. Not bad, not great. I am admittedly thankful that I have other sites from outside this report that brought in income that carried us, but for the two travel sites it was, well, a bit lackluster.
But, that is how Q1 often goes.
We are seeing an increase in affiliate bookings, an increase in ad RPMs, and the like, but the lower traffic on our local blog really shows what a difference 20,000 views makes. In either case, we’re going to make more of a push to sell our book in March, and also hope to see an increase in traffic-based earnings across the board.
Note: We run more websites in addition to these two travel blogs. This income and expense report only includes income from these two sites. These additional sites were started well after we started this income tracking series, and we have decided not to add those income streams in to keep this one focused on our travel blogs only.
February 2026 Expenses
Our dedicated blog expenses* for the month of February were roughly $713 with the following breakdown:
*Programs: $550
*Advertising: $125
*Instagram Certification: $16
*Domains: $22
We cut a lot of annual renewals that were about to hit this month to try and baseline our spending, and we hit that this month with just one domain renewal outside of our normal bills.
*We do not share our travel/local expenses in this report. This can be anywhere from $100-$3,000+ per month extra, but your mileage may vary as the costs to generate content can vary wildly from blog to blog. We strive to only share true blog operating expenses here.
March 2026 Goals
February was a bit of a holding pattern month as we put in a lot of effort to try and increase traffic on this site. We’re going to continue that work in March with more schema markups added not only to our travel blog but to our other sites as well.
From there, we’re going to make a bigger push doing outreach for our book and business directory, as we know our incomes there could be improved. Even with just being fairly passive, we’re on track for record years on both. But we know it could be improved, so that’s where we will be focusing our efforts in March!
Looking For Past Reports?
Unlike other websites that host an article series on this topic, we only have one article for our travel blog income and traffic reports.
We do this for a number of reasons, but it is mostly because we do not want dozens upon dozens of posts on our site on this one specific topic. Over time, the monthly details become irrelevant and trends are the only thing that matters.
To compensate for this, we update this article every month based on our current data and publish a graphical summary of previous months as well. If you have any questions about data from a specific month we are happy to share more details via email if you contact us.
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On the bright side, you had an increase of 25 percent income from last year. I read your updates with the stats and different information. I have been keeping up with your reports over the last year.
Very true. It’s sometimes hard to see the positives through everything, but you’re absolutely right. Thank you so much for following along too!
Do you think sponsorships or content creation packages for local businesses could be a primary source of income? Either companies paying you to promote their events / service / products on your socials/blog, or creating photo and video content for them to use in their own marketing? I’ve been thinking about how I could do something similar in my city without depending on ad revenue.
It definitely is an option and one I’m exploring more of now that ad income is down. I know many content creators who make way more money than me on sponsored social media posts with brands. But they’re also (mostly) shilling trash and I can’t bring myself to do that. The real struggle is dealing with the fact that local businesses tend to not have a high marketing budget (if any), so the vast majority of inquiries are for coverage for food or a gift card. I’m rolling out some new options that could work, but I haven’t really found something that checks all the boxes just yet.