Published by Jeremy. Last Updated on March 31, 2025.
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Welcome to the 121st 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.
March 2025 Travel Blog Traffic Report
Our traffic on Living the Dream for the month of March was roughly 7,100 page views. This was a decrease of 15% on a per day basis from February and a decrease of 83% from March 2024.
March’s Core Algorithm Update was neither kind nor unkind to our travel blog. While we had a big of a drop in traffic, it was not too much overall to suggest that we were impacted by an update either way.
Still, we crawl on.
On the Discover the Burgh front, our traffic in March was approximately 92,100 page views. This was a decrease of 4% on a per day basis from February and a decrease of 26% from March 2024.
Our Pittsburgh blog has come through most updates rather unscathed, and that seems to be the case again this month. We’re down a fair bit year-over-year, but given the state of the industry right now we’ll take that traffic all the same.
That said, we’re still pushing our ways to diversify our income and traffic streams to reduce our reliance on Google, and these numbers don’t quite show that full effect yet. Thankfully, our income absolutely does.
March 2025 Travel Blog Income Report
Our booked income for March was approximately $6,134 up approximately 6.5% on a per-day basis from February and a decrease of 7% from March 2024. This income was approximately 85% from our local blog and 15% from our travel blog.
The breakdown includes the approximate following:
*CPM Ads: $2,204
*Sponsored Content: $1,800
*Affiliates: $1,855
*Social Bonus: $275
We’ve had another great month where we are getting closer to our 33/33/33 goal between ads, sponsored content, and affiliates. We saw a massive increase in sponsored post inquiries on our local blog, and many of our campaigns that started out as a quick quote for a calendar listing (~$25) ended up jumping significantly to multi-post campaigns.
We also started posting more frequently on Facebook to tap into the social bonus on our local blog’s page more. by simply posting more frequently, we doubled our weekly social bonus earnings and ended the month at ~$100/week. So if that were to hold, we hope to have a better number to report next month!
Ideally, we want to keep growing that end to push our earnings to 25/25/25/25 and grow them all equally from there. But, as we all know, a perfect world never exists, so we’ll see where things head from there!
March 2025 Expenses
Our dedicated blog expenses* for the month of March were roughly $531 with the following breakdown:
*Programs: $200
*Advertising: $175
*Domains: $20
*Hosting: $120
*Instagram Certification: $16
Our spending for the month of March was up slightly, primarily on the advertising front, as we had a few sponsored campaigns that had an advertising spend requirement attached.
Still, we’re getting pretty good at reducing our monthly spending down to the baseline as I continue to find premium services and other areas to cut our spending down.
*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.
April 2025 Goals
Our goals for the month of April are going to be the same for March- keep pressing on our guidebook and business directory.
I admit that I got a bit stalled on this front in March due to other issues popping up (like my car’s transmission deciding to leak out all of its fluid all over our street) and ended up not having as much time to work as I would like.
So we push another month, and hopefully will have a draft copy of the book ready to go by the end of the month for a summer release!
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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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.