Published by Jeremy. Last Updated on March 31, 2026.
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Welcome to the 133rd 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 2026 Travel Blog Traffic Report
Our traffic on Living the Dream for the month of March was roughly 17,600 page views. This was more or less flat on a per day basis from February and an increase of 148% from March 2025.
Our momentum was increasing considerably at the start of March, where we thought we would be on pace for about 20,000 pageviews per month. Towards the middle of the month there was a lull, which seemed to not be so much of a change in search rank but rather just overall impressions and clicks (likely stemming from a dumb war started by a very orange pedophile).
Still, we had our best traffic months in two years, and we hit some record traffic days overall (and a slight recovery at the end of the month) that suggests we may keep this momentum going through April. Our goal? Hitting 25k monthly pageviews at some point in 2026 so we can upgrade our ad network to Raptive which would give us a much needed income boost.
Will we hit that in April or beyond? Only time will tell, but we’re hauling it to get there all the same.
On the Discover the Burgh front, our traffic in March was approximately 118,600 page views. This was an increase of 34% on a per day basis from February and a decrease of 29% from March 2025.
Discover the Burgh saw a large month-over-month gain and a nominal year-over-year gain, too. Although this was our best traffic month since December 2024, it still feels good to get over that 100,000 hump as we were quite a ways behind in January and February (likely due to poor weather in the area)- if we can keep that as a floor, we’d be quite happy.
Much like Living the Dream, we’ve added a few schema markups to this site, but we are saving it for last to make sure that this effort doesn’t have any adverse affects. So we are likely to be moving into this phase of updates in the next few months once we confirm that, yes, schema was a good idea (all signs are pointing that way, thankfully)!
March 2026 Travel Blog Income Report
Our booked income for March was approximately $7,200 an increase of 63% on a per-day basis from February and an increase of 30% from March 2025. This income was approximately 85% from our local blog and 15% from our travel blog.
The breakdown includes the approximate following:
*CPM Ads: $3,150
*Sponsored Ads: $2,250
*Calendar Listing: $20
*Affiliates: $1,440
*Book Sales: $210
*Social Bonus: $130
Our income for March gave us another encouraging sign, as we had nice tallies in most every category outside of affiliates. Of course, given what is going on globally, this is not a surprise, but we are pleasantly surprised with where income streams are sitting all the same.
Do we have for improvement? Absolutely. With our book, for example, we spent a good amount of time in March contacting businesses that may want to stock it locally to drum up sales. But at the same time, if we can improve our passive income stream there just a bit more, we’d have some nice recurring revenue all the same (and, to be honest, we’re quite ok with where its at already- we’ve already recouped most of our costs to launch!).
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.
March 2026 Expenses
Our dedicated blog expenses* for the month of March were roughly $491 with the following breakdown:
*Programs: $350
*Advertising: $125
*Instagram Certification: $16
We’re keeping a pretty core baseline as usual. Apart from some nominal ad spending and programs, we didn’t have any annual renewals hit this month so our baseline spending was pretty low.
*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 2026 Goals
We’re spending the first bit of April in Portugal on another trip, so our goals for the month will be pretty nominal. If we can get caught up on back-end work like editing photos, we’ll be pretty tickled.
After that, I am going to do a mad dash pitching our book to local entities to get some bulk sales, plus work on developing a plan to pitch local sponsored content and sales in some of the new channels we made last year but never got time to thoroughly promote- all while publishing new content, of course.
Thankfully, we’re mostly caught up on the Schema Markup test for now, so we’ll probably lay low on that for April and revisit that in May or June once the test has enough time to show some more results.
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.