How Our Travel Blog Side Project Makes $40K/Year
Who are you and what business did you start?
We're Emily and Ian, a couple based in Boulder, Colorado and we run TMBTENT, an adventure travel website. We provide digital hiking guides, custom itineraries, and help with GPS mapping for customers who are hiking long distance trails, primarily in Europe.
Our business is unique in that we go beyond a traditional guidebook and provide a trip planning resource that empowers hikers to plan their own trips. This includes providing custom GPS maps, video walkthroughs of the hike, one-on-one planning support, and more.
Today we are bringing in about $40,000 per year, all on the side!
Hiking the TMB
How do you come up with the idea for TMBTENT?
We came up with the idea for TMBTENT after hiking the Tour du Mont Blanc in 2017. Most hikers on this famous trail stay in mountain huts, but we opted to camp to save money. Once we were back, we realized there was a huge gap in information for hikers who wanted to camp on this trail and that we could provide a resource with all the information others needed to camp on the trail.
We started our website shortly after that and six months later we were selling a digital guide to the trail. We started with a super simple PDF ebook to prove out the idea, and when that started selling well we added more and more resource to the guide.
From there, we've added other trails and continued to refine our product!
How did you build the initial version of TMBTENT?
Here are the exact steps we followed to build the first version of our product:
- Started a WordPress site (www.tmbtent.com)
- Wrote a series of blog posts related to camping on the Tour du Mont Blanc.
- Once those started gaining some traction on Google, we created a PDF ebook that outlined camping locations on the trail.
- We used a super simple WordPress plugin (now defunct) that let us sell ebooks directly from our site and collect payment via PayPal.
We spent only about $100 that first year, mainly on website set-up and some software costs to be able to create some simple map graphics for our guide.
Overall, it took us about six months to get to the point of selling our guide, and it quickly became apparent that people were willing to pay for the information. We sold the first version for $2.99 - a ridiculous price looking back on it, but something that quickly let us prove the concept.
Since then, we've moved our guides over to Podia, so every customer gets a login and can access not only a PDF guide but also GPS files, video overviews of the hike, tutorials on how to use GPS files on their phone and more. We also charge a much higher price point, typically between $36-$44 depending on the trail.
It was definitely a labor of love to pull the guides together, but we love planning trips and helping other with complex logistics of hiking some of these trails. And as a bonus this side project helped fund more hiking trips for us!
The table of contents from our very first PDF guide.
How did you launch TMBTENT and get initial traction?
In hindsight, we did a terrible job of launching our business. We started our website and made some posts in forums that were ranking for the main queries related to our guides. But this was 2017 and it was a lot easier to rank on Google!
It wasn't long before we were ranking highly for our target keywords - which were and still are quite niche!
In hindsight, we would have had a much bigger social media presence and probably should have started Facebook groups related to our guides.
Our first dollar actually trickled in from an Amazon affiliate link for some camping gear we had posted about 2 months after starting the site, but our first guide sales followed about four months later.
It was a super exciting time and we learned how much fun we had helping other hikers make their trips possible and empower them to camp in places that not a lot of other people were!
What was the growth strategy for TMBTENT and how did you scale?
Growing the business really focused on SEO and adding more trails to our guide offerings. We also added content on our site related to camping, hiking, and other outdoor pursuits that we didn't sell a guide for, but that attracted some good traffic to our site.
That worked for a long time and got us on Mediavine, which was a great revenue source, but times have changed with the HCU and Google updates proving difficult to navigate.
Now we are focused on getting more in depth on specific trails with some new websites and hoping to develop some online tools to help hikers plan their trips.
Social media will be a big focal point for us going forward as well, as we have had almost no presence to date - a big mistake!
What were the biggest lessons learned from building TMBTENT?
We've really learned to lean into the things we are good at. We are trip planning nerds through and through and often get as much enjoyment from planning a trip as actually taking it.
Turns out other were willing to pay for that expertise!
Throwing a really basic PDF guide up on our site in the early days was hugely important to prove that demand for the product existed. Once we saw the sales start coming in it gave us what we needed to refine the guide and sell it at a more premium price point.
It has been an amazing ride for us and a side business that has allowed us to travel and hike some of Europe's most incredible trails has been a dream come true!
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More about TMBTENT:
Who is the owner of TMBTENT?
Ian Swallow is the founder of TMBTENT.
When did Ian Swallow start TMBTENT?
2017
How much money has Ian Swallow made from TMBTENT?
Ian Swallow started the business in 2017, and currently makes an average of $43.2K/year.
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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