Facts
Who: Daniel and Ilona
What: Travel blogging
Format: Content & media · English-language, international audience
Started: August 2018
Audience: 31,000 monthly website visitors (peak, measured through sessions)
Payers: No direct payers – income comes from advertising and affiliate links
Promotion budget: Next to nothing to spend on ads
Income: Side income (around €400/month; both have full-time jobs)
Status: Active and growing
Channels: Search & AI traffic
The short version
What worked: Google Search – over 80% of their audience comes from search
The result: Sessions climbed back from a low of 7,000 a month toward the pre-update peak of 31,000
The catch: Google's 2023 Helpful Content Update wiped their top-ranking posts out of search overnight, and neither Instagram nor Pinterest ever became a real source of readers for them
Background
Daniel and Ilona started the blog on the same trip where they met – an overland journey along the Silk Road and through Southeast Asia. When they reached Laos, they decided it would be fun to set up a blog about their trip.
At first it was Ilona's blog, since Daniel already had a separate blog of his own. It wasn't professional in the beginning, and most of the early posts weren't very good.
After months of traveling together, they moved to Germany and merged their two blogs. Top Travel Sights had more posts and was already getting traffic from Google, so that's the one they focused on. It was still a hobby at that point, but they started taking it more seriously.
At the end of 2020, they registered the blog as an official business – not the best moment to launch a professional travel blog, with travel down, but they wanted to be ready for when it came back.
Starting point
Their earliest traffic came from a single post about traveling from Copán Ruinas to Santa Ana by public transport – a niche route with little information available online. Because so few sites covered it, Google ranked the post highly even though the blog was brand new, and that page brought in their earliest readers.
What worked
For a while, Daniel and Ilona tried to do everything at once – SEO, Instagram, and Pinterest. It quickly became clear that SEO worked best for them.
A paid course on SEO and keyword research gave them a real boost, and they still consider it the best investment they've made in the blog. Search now accounts for more than 80% of their audience.
They've since stopped spreading themselves thin. Pinterest brings in a little traffic, but it's minor, and they're barely active on Instagram anymore – Instagram users open the app to stay in the app, not to click through to a blog, so it never worked well as a referral channel.
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What didn't work
In 2023, Google rolled out its Helpful Content Update, and it hit hard. Their best-performing posts dropped out of the rankings entirely and stopped showing up in search at all.
No matter what they tried, traffic kept falling – from around 40,000 to 7,000 monthly page views. Eventually they found themselves working on the blog less and less.
The turning point
A setback ended up pulling them back in. In 2025, Booking cut Top Travel Sights from its affiliate program – no real surprise, since they'd watched the same thing happen to other travel bloggers, but it meant a lot of unplanned work. Almost all their income had come from that program.
Switching the affiliate links could have been done with a script, but instead they went back through old posts and updated them properly. That work brought in a wave of new traffic. Sessions had already started recovering in 2024, reaching 12,000 a month, and 2025 is when it really turned around.
Around the same time, they got accepted into a Mediavine program for smaller blogs, which let them run ads on the site – a solid new source of income. Between the rebuilt posts and the ad program, the blog started growing again. Income still hasn't caught up to where it was in 2023, but they're optimistic.
Audience
Their audience is spread across the world, which tracks with content covering countries on nearly every continent – from budget travelers looking for public-transport details they can't find elsewhere, to readers booking mid-range trips or even luxury stays through affiliate links. A lot of readers come in through food posts, which suits Daniel and Ilona fine – they love trying new dishes wherever they go.
Looking ahead
Growth has stalled recently, and they expect it to stay hard as more searches get answered by AI overviews instead of clicks. Their next focus is growing their email list – algorithms change, but a list is something they own.
Practical takeaways
Build your email list from day one, and plan how to segment it – a reader who signs up from a post about one country may have zero interest in another.
Think about monetization early and build a sales funnel into the site from the start, rather than bolting one on later.
Don't split effort evenly across every channel – focusing on the one that actually worked (search) beat spreading across SEO, Instagram, and Pinterest at once.
Top Travel Sights
Top Travel Sights focuses on discovering hidden gems without missing out on the main sights. We also help you discover the most delicious dishes around the world.
Links
Project: toptravelsights.com
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