Travel affiliate marketing is perfect for a working nomad lifestyle

Traveling all the time might be rewarding and a lot of fun, but it certainly isn’t simple or easy! 

There are borders to cross, bumpy journeys to get through, financial restrictions to handle… in short, there’s a lot that a successful traveler needs to deal with on a daily basis to keep the dream alive.

To make it viable, you’ll invariably be relying on products and services of all kinds; everything from the robust clothing you wear to the software you use to plan your trips without blowing through your budget.

That means you’ll already have a wealth of knowledge about prospective affiliate products and partnerships, making it as simple as recommending the things you genuinely prefer to use. 

That sounds like a win-win to me.

The social element of the nomadic lifestyle is incredibly important in today’s world. 

Whether it’s crowdfunding to offset the costs, distributing promotional material to build up an audience, or networking to find places to stay for little money, there’s always some way of using social media to make traveling easier— and affiliate marketing is the perfect accompaniment.

That means you don’t need to host any seminars, or dole out any sales pitches. You don’t really need to do anything forced or unnatural at all. 

You just need to talk about the products and services you’re using, explain why they’re worth trying, and let people know how to find them.

As long as you stay honest, you’ll find that your followers will appreciate the insight into how you live and the products you use, and will want to support you along the way.

If you really want to get the most out of affiliate partnerships, you’ll want to find creative ways to use, review, or generally discuss the things you’re recommending. 

When you’re on the road most of the time, you have opportunities that the traditional marketer could only dream of. Scenic views, events of all kinds, new people to meet and learn about— travel blogging is ideal.

You can even let your ideas steer your travel for some added fun. If you were partnered with a particular tent brand, you could set out to test their new model on every continent, and you might well get a decent sponsorship from them in the process.

The traveler community isn’t as cynical about arrangements like that as most. It respects the hustle of finding ways to live extraordinary lives, so you needn’t be overly concerned about people thinking you’ve ‘sold out’!

The most basic form of affiliate marketing is the affiliate link. You provide a URL that forwards the user to a product or service page and gets a commission from the resulting sale. 

Now, filling up your website or blog with affiliate links won’t do all that much if you don’t have any traffic, but as you attract more followers on social media, you’ll find that your visits will go up too.

If you manage to become established as an authority when it comes to the products and/or services you’re recommending, there’s a very decent chance your content about them will bring in a fair number of visitors, whether through search engines or social media links. 

That means that a link you put live two years ago could still be making you money today.

Basic links might not bring in huge sums, but they slot neatly alongside other revenue sources like teaching English online, setting up an online store to sell relevant products (Shopify users can sell custom merchandise with zero inventory using Merchify), offering exclusive updates through a Patreon account, or releasing an ad-supported podcast. It all adds up.

If you’re making the traveler life work, meeting people along the way and telling your story, you’re going to get asked about it by people curious to see if they could do something similar. 

They’ll ask you how you decided to get started, how you managed to begin with, and what advice you’d give them to help them give it a try.

Since you’re going to get those requests no matter what you do, why not add affiliate marketing to the equation?

 You can even be completely honest about the nature of your arrangements and coach prospective travelers on how they can diversify their revenue streams too, which is good for them and good for the brands they end up backing.