From 0 to 1.5M Page Views: How Passport and Stamps Built a Slow-Travel Empire
This is an interview with Toti and Ale of Passport And Stamps.
Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do.
Hi, we are Toti and Ale, a travel couple from London behind several online projects. Our main flagship website is Passportandstamps.com, which is a thriving community of travellers looking for the most authentic experiences, slow-travel, off-beat adventures and deeper knowledge about each place.
We’ve been digital nomads for the past 4 years, leaving the traditional 9-to-5 in London for travel adventures and boots-on-the-ground research. We aim to spend quality time in places we love the most, so you’ll often find us returning to destinations we’ve been to more than once.
How did your blogging journey begin?
We started, like everyone else, from the passion for travel.
With a background in journalism, I found it easy to transition into storytelling and blogging. Our first blog was launched in 2018. The Passport and Stamps project is where everything has matured from passion to professional travel writing and content creation, officially launched in 2022.
We picked the name because of Ale’s obsession with stamps and her constant quest to get stamps from border officers on her passport, even when they have been digitised, like at Singapore Airport.
What were your writing about in the early days of the blog vs now? Has the blog’s direction changed?
Totally different, things evolve, our travel style changes. We now chase more experiences than places, as we did at the beginning.
Early days with the 9-5 job were a huge success, making it happen in 13 countries in 12 months (2018), while now we value time in one place and love to explore local culture more deeply.
With this in mind, even our articles change, more local experiences, coffee places to go, digital nomads tips, unique temples or things to do, take the main stage now.
How long did it take you to make your first money blogging?
I will say about 6 months, and the first income came from affiliate marketing.
We suggested tours we took in a European city during one of our weekend breaks and received a small commission for doing so.
How did your first year as travel bloggers go in terms of traffic, income, and site growth?
To be honest, in the first year of travel blogging, we didn’t know what we were doing. We were trying different things, participating in community events and conferences, and gathering as much knowledge as possible.
At first, even though it was satisfying to see the traffic growing, it was more on the understanding path than concrete results. We grew our blog from 0 to 50K views in about one and a half years.
When did you start your other travel blogs, who do they target, and what inspired you to do it?
For years, we have been running just one travel blog. It was back in 2022 that we started to diversify our portfolio.
So we launched Passport and Stamps to have a concrete talk about our change in travel style, highlighting the Southeast Asia backpacking trip. The target is easy: people who go beyond the ordinary, like us. Who chose a journey over a vacation place.
How much traffic do your blogs get now? What are your top traffic sources?
Our main blog is now stable at over 1.5M views per year.
Traffic is fluctuating constantly, but we create new guides that pick it up quickly.
Our primary traffic source is Google and other search engines. The second source is a pair: newsletter and social media channel (our Instagram account is a powerhouse), and other sources.
What’s your content strategy like?
We have a strict routine when posting content. We work in clusters, meaning we publish guides to specific destinations one by one over a set period.
When in publishing mode, we have been able to publish up to 15 guides per month, or every 2 days.
However, travelling full-time is hard to keep up with, so we don’t push ourselves to a strict schedule.
Also read: 11 Travel Bloggers Share How They Grew Their Blog Traffic and Income
What SEO strategy has worked best for you?
SEO has been part of my journalism background forever; in the early days, I didn’t know I was doing SEO.
Today, SEO has evolved, and if you don’t push storytelling, fact-checking and boots-on-the-ground experience in your text, there is no strategy that works.
All our blog posts are a good mix of optimisation and inspirational flaws.
How have you grown your email list?
Our approach to blogging has changed since our first trip to Asia, and we are evolving by building a community that is already pretty active on our Instagram account.
The email list is pushing hard on specific destinations, which we are specialists in – Thailand, Vietnam, and beyond. So we promote free guides and maps that we have built over the years, based on our own experience, to grow the email list.
What social media has worked best for you?
We love Instagram, it’s our main social media channel, and where our target audience is.
Other social media works for us, and we have a presence and growing reputation there as well.
How much are you earning from your blogs?
The income fluctuates monthly, we are growing toward 6-figures.
Our revenue streams now come from different factors that often depend on Google updates, seasonality, and travel conditions between countries.
At the moment, our major revenue streams are affiliate marketing (accommodation, tours, insurance, e-sim cards). We then work with brands for tailored campaigns. AD revenue is another revenue stream. We also have a shop on our website that sells great maps and guides.
How do you choose which affiliate programs or products to promote?
We are very selective on this. Receive dozens of proposals every week, but just a few make the breakthrough.
There are many considerations:
- Does the product fit our audience?
- Have we tried it ourselves?
- Does it function?
- Product reputation, long-term relationship with the brand, and more.
At the moment, we are cutting off direct programs with our affiliate partners. We use stay22 for everything that is accommodation-related, and Travel Payouts for tours, tickets and others.
Have you noticed any affiliate marketing tactics that work better in the travel niche?
The only affiliate marketing tactic that works for us today is authenticity.
If we try, we write about and promote. Sometimes we encourage similar products, often cheaper than the one we’ve tried, but always aligned with our audience’s expectations.
What tools or plugins do you use to manage affiliate links and track performance?
We don’t use plugins; we mostly rely on Google Tag Manager for outbound links and where.
If you have ads, what ad network are you using and why?
We use the Mediavine ad network. However, we are temporarily pausing ads on our website because the RPM is relatively low, given the effort we put in.
So we will prioritise good reading of our guides, sacrificing part of the income, hoping for a better affiliate conversion revenue.
Also read: Going Ad-Free: Why I Removed Ads from My Blog (and What I Gained Instead)
Do you accept sponsored posts on your blogs?
We have accepted sponsored posts in the past, but we are more selective now. We haven’t accepted any sponsored content for the past 2 years.
What’s the secret to successfully managing multiple blogs?
Be patient, growth takes time, and sometimes doesn’t come.
The strength is in your ability to manage pressure (financial and mental).
How have the recent Google core updates affected you?
The Google core updates are always a roller coaster; we are still in the “Google dance” face, and working hard to update old content.
At the moment, we are stable, but things change day by day. The secret is to keep working; if something is wrong, adjust it, but not everything is bad if it is still alive.
What do you do if you notice a significant drop in your blog’s traffic and engagement metrics over the past month or a few?
We monitor results daily, so we notice drops and adjust the guides accordingly.
With every new Google update, the algorithm changes the way it reads your post. We monitor user actions, so we can adapt if something isn’t right.
How do you see the future of blogging?
The landscape is changing, and faster than anyone anticipated.
Guides must be more prone to change, and you need to build a brand behind every travel blog project.
In the past, blogs were earning 6 figures per year; today, you must build your online presence to get the same results.
What’s next for you and your blogging business?
We are working more on establishing Passport and Stamps as a leading travel guide.
On the side, there are a few niche side projects. Our Instagram account is doing pretty well, and we have grown more than average in the past year, which is encouraging in the current landscape.
