How to Make $96K as a Travel Blogger

Matt Kepnes is a 28-year-old Bostonian who's turned his passion for travel into a blogging gig that earns him up to $8,000 a month. He explains how in a New York Times interview. (Good publicity helps: His site, NomadicMatt.com, is down temporarily because of a traffic surge from the interview.) Some highlights:

• Who pays him: "It’s a combination of Google AdSense, affiliate sales (insurance, backpacks, guidebooks), private advertising people coming to me. ('Hey, we want to put ads up on this site.')" The site itself earns about $3,000 a month, and he also now has a book for beginners.

• Traffic: "Probably close to 800 to 1,000 visitors a day would get you enough traffic to generate a good-size income."
• Getting started: He paid $250 for his domain name and a computer at a hosting company. Friends showed him how to use HTML to create his site. He began about a year and a half ago, with traffic increasing gradually.
• Epiphany: "About a year ago, when I had gotten big enough that some advertisers started asking to put ads on my site, and I thought, 'Hey, this isn’t too bad—I just made $1,000!' And then another advertiser came and I made a little bit more money." This has been his full-time job since April.

(More Travel stories.)