This is an interview with Becca Siegel of Half Half Travel.
Hey, Becca. Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do.
I’m a writer, blogger and travel content creator. I work on Half Half Travel with my husband and business partner Dan. We love “being real” and sharing our photos and experiences with the world.
What was your life like before becoming a full-time travel blogger?
Before becoming a full-time travel blogging couple, I was a part-time travel blogger (seriously!). We started Half Half Travel first as an Instagram account, and turned it into a blog in early 2018.
How did the Half Half brand start?
It started as an Instagram. Dan was traveling for a year as a digital nomad, and I was living and working in NYC. We started putting together photos of us doing the same thing, like having a coffee in NYC and in London, for example.
It continued, and we stayed true to the half-half visual aesthetic until he came back. I said, let’s continue it forever! And that’s what we did, with travel photos.
When and why did you start the travel blog?
The travel blog started as a way for me to share travel tips and experiences with friends, mostly.
I had traveled a lot: lived abroad in China, studied abroad in Hong Kong, traveled in East Asia and Southeast Asia, backpacked in Central America and South America. I had written all my tips of things to do in simple Google Docs.
Dan, with his background in web engineering and web design, said, “Let’s start a website where more people can see the tips.” I thought it was an OK idea! With both of us as photographers, we definitely had photos with which to fill the pages of a website about travel.
Also read: How to Make Money as a Travel Blogger: 7 Ways to Monetize Your Content
What were you writing about in the early days of the blog?
Early on, we were only writing travel guides and travel tips. Our first popular guide was the best photo spots to go to in Hong Kong, as the “Instagram photo spots” at the time were going viral in 2018.
I was passionate about taking great photos and how to get them, so this guide was a true passion project for me.
We were also writing basic travel advice like how to find out if you need a visa for your travel, and how to decide which platform to use for booking accommodation.
Later on, we started doing in-depth topical guides for cities and countries: cafe guides to Medellin, Bogota and Mexico City, safety guides for our favorite cities, photo spot guides, and the best neighborhoods to stay in.
We wrote a lot about NYC, where we were living, and it felt great to share our local secrets.
After starting our family, we started writing about family travel! This was a new topic for us.
We started out with topics like how to take a road trip with a baby, and we expanded into “flying with a baby,” and guides to places we went as a family like El Retiro, Colombia, and Halifax, Canada.
What did your first blog income come from?
Our first income came from Amazon affiliates. We weren’t writing too many affiliate-heavy guides, but Amazon was an easy “in.”
Later on, we started realizing that travel gear guides would do well. Our first big success was “Best Travel Pants for Men,” and then a few years later, we had a big hit with “Best Travel Backpacks for Women.”
We made connections with affiliate managers at top brands, received products, took lifestyle photos and wrote about our honest opinions on using the products in our travels.
Also read: How Shelley Sold Everything, Moved Away and Started Multiple Mexico Travel Blogs
How did your first year as travel bloggers go in terms of traffic, income, and site growth?
Our first year was just a hobby. Our traffic was not high, and it didn’t matter, because we were experimenting.
We barely had any income from it, and that was also OK, because we had full-time jobs working for companies.
With site growth, we’d grow as we wrote honest genuine content about more places we traveled to. We had somewhat of a strategy.
By year 2, our traffic increased a little, but it wasn’t until 2020 that we really had a boom.
How much traffic does the blog get now? What are your top traffic sources?
In five years, we brought our traffic from zero to more than a million and a half viewers per year. It felt really incredible, because we have put so much work into the site.
Our top traffic sources are organic Google search and Pinterest.
What’s your current content strategy like?
We mostly base content off of which phase of life we are in. Having our first child really brought us into the world of family travel, and that has been the newest for us.
We’ve reviewed baby travel products and made connections with baby travel brands in order to review gear.
We create posts mostly every day, and if we’re traveling, we have a delay, and then a big dump of travel guides developed from a trip.
When did you get into SEO? And do you optimize every blog post?
We got into SEO around 2019 and 2020. We were working with Ahrefs for a while in order to find content that would do well with organic search.
This actually helped us create a few of our best articles ever–our heavy-hitters that did great in Google.
Aside from that, we are pretty relaxed about SEO and our theme is to write honest content from our hearts.
What’s one social media channel that has worked best for you?
I would say Pinterest. We create pins with engaging vertical photos from our blog, and put our article titles on those.
The types of content that tend to do best in Pinterest are those that have to do with “roundups” of travel apparel or travel luggage.
What are your different income streams and what percentage of the total income is coming from each?
Our different income streams are ad revenue with Mediavine as a member of that network, and a range of affiliates on a bunch of affiliate platforms.
While we have affiliate partnerships with around 100 brands, it’s really only 15 that make the significant sales, which is interesting.
Also read: How to Build a Top Travel Blog and Earn $10K/Month with Brand Partnerships
Tell us about your second blog, Half Half Home.
We started Half Half Home in 2024 as a way to share more lifestyle advice from when we’re not traveling, as we don’t travel all the time.
The biggest thing in our life right now is that we bought our first home, and we are raising our daughter. So, with these big changes in our lives, we chose to write more lifestyle and home content, as this is a huge topic right now!
Our plan is to chronicle our different phases of life through new guides, product roundups, apparel reviews and work-from-home tips.
How do you build a brand and stay relevant in such a competitive niche?
That is a hard question! We keep being ourselves. That is important.
We don’t have guest writers, we don’t accept ghostwriting and we do all the work ourselves. We hope that we continue to be noticed for being honest, real and authentic as a travel blogging couple.
What is it like running a blogging business with your partner?
It’s a very interesting experience, and we get asked about this a lot! We find balance with each of our strengths, so I do most of our writing and social media, and Dan does “back-end” things like web design, article publishing, learning about new platforms and software we can use and finances.
I also work in our communications, interfacing with affiliate managers, tourism boards, event invitations and gear testing opportunities.
What was your greatest blogging mistake as a travel blogging couple?
I think our biggest mistake was writing articles that had so much potential, but we made them too short. It hurts me to think about that!
We have some old travel guides of amazing places with great photos, and we just didn’t write enough text, and didn’t make them helpful enough. They’ve lost so much traction, and it is so much work to consider redoing them.
I suppose it is a common blogger frustration.
Any tips for new travel bloggers who feel like giving up?
I think any blogger would say, “Keep going.”
Keeping going is what helped us as a travel blogging couple building a business in 2020, when we found our niche with remote work topics, and it gave us our first big push.
We couldn’t believe our eyes, and it was one of the coolest experiences we’ve had to watch our traffic go up, in line with the extreme hard work we were putting in as a travel blogging couple.
What’s next for you?
Well, we have Half Half Home, where we are putting a lot of focus right now, so we are looking at growing Pinterest, partnering with new brands in the affiliate sphere and taking great trips that we can share with our audiences!
