How to Make Money While Traveling as a Family

Making money WHILE traveling is different from making money FROM traveling. Cruise ship workers, flight attendants, and transport truck drivers make money FROM traveling. We often get asked how we make money WHILE traveling (which obviously means we don’t come across as independently wealthy).

Some people ask to make conversation (usually other working travelers), others ask out of curiosity (often non-travelers or retirees we meet along the way), and a third group asks because they are trying to figure out how to make money so they can travel themselves.

Whether someone is building an online business, working a job remotely, building multiple smaller income streams with real estate, or working seasonal jobs and traveling in the off-season, there are so many ways to make a travel lifestyle work. You don’t have to do anything like what we do, but we thought we’d outline how it works for us since we get asked quite often.

We also subscribe to the philosophy that a penny saved is a penny earned. We’re not living off ramen and scrounging every penny, but we intentionally keep our costs low so we aren’t constantly chasing income and can have the time to enjoy the places we’re visiting.

(note: this blog contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase based on our suggestion, we may make a commission at no cost to you.)

Here’s how we make money while traveling:

1) Web Design & Marketing

This is our primary income source. I started FreshIdeaWebsites.com in 2011 building websites. Since then, I’ve expanded into helping businesses with their marketing – both in a consulting and hands-on role.

All of our web design clients have their services wrapped into a monthly service package (TMI: Hosting, domain registration, tech support, content updates, etc), so they pay us every month to maintain their website. I also coach other web designers who want to build more stable monthly recurring revenue with their web design agency with a mastermind group called BuildThatAgency.

Tips we’ve learned from running a website design agency (and what I teach in the mastermind)

• Most business owners don’t want to focus on their website – they want to focus on running and growing their business.
• They don’t want or need to understand the technical aspects and are happy to pay someone else to look after them.
• Multiple moving pieces have to be managed on a website. It’s not static once created.
• Selling an all-inclusive monthly service package provides recurring revenue for your business and a hands-off approach for your clients – they know everything is being taken care of, and they only have to call you if they have questions (not an 800 number for their hosting company or the domain company).

While both web design and digital marketing have served us well, we’re moving more towards focusing on web design for our projects (like our travel blog or niche websites like WorldsLargestEverything.com) and the full marketing spectrum for clients.

2) Our Own Travel Blog: AdamAndCeline.com

We’ve been writing our blog (inconsistently) since we got on the road. We’ve spent more time in the past year (2024) intentionally writing content that is both helpful for families wanting to travel on a budget and also intended to show up in Google search results. While this may seem like we’re just writing to get Google’s attention, there’s no point in trying to be helpful if our blog isn’t found by people looking for that information.

We also started sending a weekly email newsletter in the last few months. This keeps friends and family updated on our travels, and we can let subscribers know what’s new on our blog so that we can send more traffic there. Sign up here if you’re curious about our newsletter!

We haven’t figured it all out, and it isn’t yet our primary source of income, but it’s enough money to be noticeable. A small amount of our monetization is from product recommendations (like suggesting a product we use from Amazon) to and a larger portion of our revenue is from affiliate links (like recommending you save 25% on your membership to Trusted Housesitters – the pet-sitting app that we use or recommending a hotel or activity in a city we’ve visited, like this blog post about things to do with kids in Las Vegas).

In the last year, we’ve had some opportunities for brand partnerships with Clifton Hill in Niagara Falls, Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, and City Museum in St. Louis. Brands, service industries, tourist destinations, and tourism boards are often looking for new content that they can promote to their audience, and you can promote it to your audience.

We’ll often reach out to a particular destination and offer to create some social media content and write a blog post in exchange for admission tickets. It’s not extra money in our pockets, but it is a savings that we’re happy to put in some effort for.

We do know travel bloggers whose primary income is from their travel blog, but it takes time and a LOT of content writing and promoting on social media accounts. We’re happy to see it grow, but not going to miss what we’re traveling to see in order to publish one more travel blog post.

What’s the difference between a blog and a vlog?

A blog is short for “weblog” like a journal or a log of posts. Vlog is short for “video blog” – a video version of a journal.

Tips for starting a blog:

• If writing a journal of what you’re up to for your friends to read is your goal, that’s great! Enjoy that hobby. Don’t expect that to generate revenue.
• Pick an angle – ours is budget family travel – yours might be a specific geographical area (like New England or Florida), a certain type of activity (like reviewing restaurants, rollercoasters, or tent camping), or a certain demographic (like RVing for retirees, hostels for single people, seasonal jobs for couples)
• If you want to generate revenue, you’ll need to figure out what people are searching for and write content that gets Google’s attention (called Search Engine Optimization or SEO) using tools like SurferSEO, MOZ, SemRush, or Trends.Google.com
• Always be learning – Google is always changing and there are always things to learn about how to get more traffic to your blog to result in more revenue.
• Start blogging WAY before you hope to make money while traveling. Blogging takes time for Google to recognize your credibility and start sending consistent traffic.
• Use an email list and social media channels to share your blog content and get more people to visit your blog.
• AI can be a great tool to help generate ideas for your blog but don’t allow AI to write your blog posts – we have a 60% rule – AI can generate 60% but we give 40% of our own context and ideas. The AI tool we use is Magai.co (and as a side note, we didn’t use AI for this post at all.)
• BONUS: Doesn’t have to be a travel blog – could be about your current line of work – common problems with diesel engines if you’re a mechanic, ways to choose paint colors if you’re an interior decorator, how to find public speaking gigs, or learning another language if you speak a foreign language and love teaching.

Another way to make money on your blog is Google Adsense. Google will put ads on your blog and pay you if a visitor clicks that ad. We don’t use this method on our travel articles since we don’t want our readers to be interrupted by ads while reading, but many blogs make extra cash with enough traffic (like WorldsLargestEverything.com).

A step further is to create video content for YouTube and grow an audience that way. Plenty of travel bloggers and travel vloggers have done that successfully, but for us, there’s a lot of work up front in editing videos and a long wait to become profitable.

3) Secret Shopping (Be a Mystery Shopper)

Service industry businesses want to be sure their customers are getting the best possible service, so Celine will often go out for dinner to Five Guys or Raisin Canes, take the boys to a trampoline park, or pretend to shop at a mattress store. While there, a secret shopper needs to evaluate a series of standards like the conditions of the restrooms, if the employees are wearing their name tags, and if the employees follow a particular script by recommending a drink or fries.

While traveling, we’ve completed secret shops for:

• Dine-in and Fast Food Restaurants
• Gas Stations
• Oil Changes
• Convenience and Grocery stores
• Trampoline parks
• Mattress retail
• Movie Theaters
• Zoos
• Arcades
• Telecom retailers
• Pet stores
• Minigolf

Mystery shopping is great because we’re compensated for our purchase (like admission or the cost of food) and we get paid. Because these chains need secret shoppers all over, we’ve completed multiple shops in multiple cities in the same day.

Based on our experience, don’t plan to quit your day job and rely on secret shopping for a steady income. Sometimes, we find secret shop jobs four or five per week, and other times, only a couple per month, depending on the area and timing.

Here are the secret shop platforms that we use:

• Amusement Advantage – Bowling alleys, zoos, minigolf, movie theaters, trampoline parks (often required to take kids with you)
• MarketForce – Restaurants, retail, grocery, gas stations
• Coyle Hospitality – Primarily for the hospitality and service industry
• Field Agent – auditing displays in grocery stores, pet stores, and making a purchase

4) Instacart

Like mystery shopping, this one falls to Celine primarily. Since we’re Canadian, we can only instacart when we’re in Canada, but if we’re within driving distance of a Walmart, Celine is quick to open her instacart app and see if there’s a shop that needs to be completed – especially if we’re about to run to Walmart or the grocery store for something for ourselves anyway.

An extra few minutes in the store and a grocery drop-off helps us offset the cost of our groceries in the process.

This “on-demand” work is great since there are no set shifts, so we can Instacart all day long some days, and other days, just complete a shop in an evening or a morning run to the grocery store.

Sign up for instacart and check our their app for free here.

That’s it for us: We do web design, marketing, our travel blog, instacart and secret shops to cover our travel expenses.

Here are some article that might help you discover ideas on how you might make money while traveling:

• 157 Remote Job Ideas
• 19 Mobile Businesses you can run from your RV
• Tips for working from an RV (with a family)

 

Ways to get paid TO travel

Being paid TO travel is different than making an income WHILE traveling. We haven’t pursued any of these avenues, but we know friends who have. Here are some ways to get paid to travel:

• On-location photographer (destination wedding photographer, resort photographer in exotic destinations, contract work for tourism boards)
• Work on a cruise ship
• Get a work visa for a foreign country – often in the travel or hospitality industry
• Become a counselor at summer camps in another country
• Flight attendant
• Work for a travel agency
• Apply for farm work in a foreign country (with WWOOF, for instance)
• Find a full-time job that requires travel
• Freelance writing for international publications (may or may not be freelance travel writing – you could be writing about current events or breaking news within an industry)

Keeping costs low while traveling

Keeping our costs low means we don’t have to stress about making more money while traveling. After all, what’s the benefit of enjoying a luxury travel destination if you’re just sitting at your laptop the whole time trying to figure out how to pay for it? We’re figured out ways to make our family travel budget stretch as far as possible.

Saving money on accommodations

For free accommodation, we use TrustedHousesitters to pet sit and house sit while homeowners are away. This requires a fair amount of flexibility in dates and locations since you have to work around the times when homeowners are actually traveling. (Save 25% with our trusted housesitters discount code)

If you’re RVing, your biggest expense is likely to be campgrounds, so here are nine ways we’ve found to save money on campgrounds – exactly how we cut our campground expenses in half our second year on the road. Staying longer often comes with a discounted rate, learning to back-in instead of paying for a pull-through site, and camping memberships have all made a difference.

Camping off-grid on public land

If you want to RV away from campgrounds, then you might consider getting your RV wired up with solar. This will require an investment upfront for the equipment and wiring but will allow you to be off-grid on public land without paying for campgrounds. Here’s what we learned about putting solar on an RV.

Saving on entertainment while traveling as a family

We also have found plenty of free things to do on the road with kids, so you won’t have to use up your budget just to keep your kids entertained. Libraries, skate parks, you get the idea.

For entertainment, we’ve chosen to get theme park passes for multiple years. One year was Six Flags, another was Cedar Fair – mostly depending on our route for the year and what parks we may be near. This gives us multiple new places to explore while we’re on the road and we know we can always stop in for a few hours in an evening with the season pass without an expense. We got a couple dining passes (2 dining passes for our family of 5 has been sufficient until now) so we can get snack while we’re at the park, saving on the cost of food while we’re there and having to go to the car for lunch or carry a backpack for the day.

We also found AZA passes for zoos and ASTC passes for science centers, giving us access to free activities in almost any direction.

What is a Digital Nomad?

A digital nomad is someone who works online (whether a job, contract work, or running their own business) and travels in the process.