The Blogging Tools I Actually Use (After Nine Years and One “Google Armageddon”)
Every few months somebody announces that blogging is dead. AI writes the answers now, Reddit owns half the search results, and traffic that used to land on independent sites gets swallowed before anyone clicks. I have heard it, I have felt it in my own analytics, and yet I am still here.
I lost most of my traffic in the Helpful Content Update. Boundless Roads went from around 160,000 monthly views to 20,000. That is not a dip; that is the floor falling out of a business I had spent six years building, and I will not pretend it did not knock me down for a while. I clawed it back to 40,000 and 50,000 a month, which is where it sits now while I keep rebuilding. My Mexico sites took the same hit.
Here is what I learned from that year. AI is very good at producing the average of everything ever written about a destination. It cannot tell you how it feels to watch the giant waves in Nazaré and what my favorite spot is to catch it on your camera, or how it feels to stare at the sun setting beyond the iconic lighthouse of sao Miguel Arcanjo. Reddit wins because it sounds like a real person answering a real question. That is not a threat to what I do; it is a description of what I should have been doing all along.
So the answer to AI is not to write faster. It is to be more specific, more personal, and more useful than a machine can be, and then to run the business side efficiently enough that you still have energy left for the writing. That’s where tools come in. These are the ones I actually use day-to-day, from a laptop that allows me to work from any home in the world while housesitting, to the software I use to work more efficiently and smarter.
In this post, I’ll share a list of my blogging tools, including my software, photography gear and affiliate sites.
And if you are wondering whether it’s wise to start the blogging business right now, my answer is that it may be harder than it was once, but it’s still a plausible way of making money, and I know because I am doing it. I don’t have a plan B, and I don’t intend to look for one. So follow my journey if you want to learn how I grow my business back up.
This post may contain affiliate links. If you purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting my small business.
Monetization
Travelpayouts
I’ve been using Travelpayouts to monetize my travel content and wanted to share it with you. It sits behind most of the booking links on my sites, and after years of joining travel affiliate programs one at a time, it is the setup that finally made this side of my income manageable.
Going direct to each brand means a separate login, a separate reporting screen, a separate payment threshold and a separate payday for every single program. Once you are promoting flights, hotels, tours, car rentals and insurance, you are chasing small payments across six dashboards with no idea which posts are actually earning. Travelpayouts puts over 60 travel brands into one account, so your clicks, bookings and commissions report in the same place and your earnings arrive as a single monthly payment.
What moved my numbers was the tools, not the links. Plain text links convert far below what most new bloggers expect. Travelpayouts gives you live search forms and widgets you can place inside an article, so a reader can check real prices for their own dates without leaving your page.
They also have an AI layer called Drive that scans existing posts and adds relevant links, which is worth a look if you have hundreds of older articles earning nothing.
Last but not least, their advanced AI technology creates cute boxes that share your best travel resources, personalized to the destination in each article.
How does it work?
It’s very easy. Once you sign up, you will get a code to insert on your website. Then some brands connect automatically; for others, such as Booking.com and Expedia (the most important), you need to apply to participate in their program, always from the Travelpayout platform, of course. Then you can activate their tools, including Drive (the AI tool), and then the magic happens. If you sign up with my link and email me, and I will connect you with a dedicated Travelpayout associate who will guide you through the process and help you optimize your site performance.
Signing up is free. Sign up here.
Stay22 for accommodation
I use Stay22 for accommodation links and nothing else. But the platform lets you use maps with live prices across booking platforms, so you can see what is available in the area and pick for yourself.
That matters more than it sounds. Most accommodation clicks fail because the one property you recommended is booked, priced badly for those dates, or in the wrong part of town for that particular traveler. A map fixes all three at once. I keep it in the Where to Stay section of a guide, and I do not scatter it anywhere else.
They also have a pop-up that increases your chances of scoring bookings. The tool is called Spark and works wonders. One last tool that I decided not to use, and I don’t recall the name, but in case you are interested, it uses AI to search for relevant keywords in your article and adds affiliate links. I decided not to use it because I found it overwhelming, but the option is there.
Signing up is free. Sign up here.
Discover Cars
Discover Cars is the one I promote most comfortably because I book my own rentals through it. It compares local and international suppliers in one search, which matters in places like Mexico and Portugal, where international brands aren’t always the best option.
I also bought their full coverage on a rental, and it worked exactly as it should have, which is not something I can say about most travel insurance products I have tested. That’s why I recommend it in writing. I don’t send readers to a product I haven’t put my own credit card behind. When someone rents a car in Mexico and gets ambushed at the counter over mandatory insurance, that coverage can save the trip.
Discover Cars is also listed among TravelPayout partners, but I prefer to work directly with them since we have history.
SafetyWing
SafetyWing is on a recurring monthly payment on my card and I hope I never need it. That is the whole point of insurance and it is also why it belongs in this list, because a subscription product that people keep for years is a very different affiliate proposition from a one time booking.
I will be honest about my starting position. I have always thought insurance companies were sneaky and part of me still does. What changed my mind about this one is that they actually paid. They refunded medical expenses for me on a couple of occasions without turning it into a fight, which is the only test that matters. I recommend it because it passed that test with my own money, besides the commission.
For the business side, their affiliate program is one of the better run ones I have joined. They put real work into marketing support, there is an active community behind it, and they run bonus campaigns every six months with rewards worth competing for. If you are writing for long term travelers, nomads or anyone leaving home for more than a few weeks, this is close to the most natural recommendation you can make.
Display ads
Ads are the other half of the income and the half you control least. Once your traffic qualifies you for a premium network, the difference in earnings per thousand views compared to the beginner networks is large enough that it should be a milestone in your plan, not an afterthought. When I started making money blogging, getting on Mediavine was the ultimate goal.
Then, while I was growing, Raptive (formerly AdThrive) was the goal for the pro bloggers, those with millions of views, since their entry requirements were very strict, with a minimum of 100 page views (whereas Mediavine was 50K sessions). Raptive was renowned for its supposedly higher RPM, which is still uncertain.
I decided to stay faithful to Mediavine because I was grateful for their business and how we grew together. Until RPM started to decrease and Raptive lowered their entry-level page views. So I decided to jump on the Raptive train.
Now, I can confirm that the RPM is approximately the same, but I love their dashboard more, and I find the Raptive SEO tool much more proactive and helpful. All in all, I’m happy with my choice.
If you have 25K pageviews per month and your audience is predominantly from the US, Canada and/or UK, you can apply here.
SEO and data
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is my most expensive tool and the one I would keep if I had to cut everything else. I use it for keyword research, checking what competitors rank for that I don’t, and site audits. After the Helpful Content Update I ran full technical audits and spent weeks fixing redirect loops, mixed content warnings and orphaned pages that had been quietly sitting there for years.
None of that fixing was glamorous, and some of it was tedious enough that I put it off for months. It still needed doing. A site with hundreds of posts accumulates technical debt the same way an old house accumulates bad wiring.
I don’t pay a monthly fee; I just use it for a month when I want to get serious with updating and cleaning up my site.
Google Search Console
It’s free and more honest than any paid tool because it shows what Google actually did, not what a third party estimates. I check it for pages losing impressions, queries where I rank between positions 5 and 15 (those are the fastest wins, since the page already ranks and just needs to be better), and indexing problems.
If you only ever open one tool, open this one.
Google Analytics
I use Google Analytics to see where my traffic is coming from. It’s a bit confusing at the beginning, but once you poke around, you get familiar with the main functionalities. I use Pages and Screens to see the total page views per day, and then I filter the traffic sources to see where the traffic is coming from. In GSC, you can only see traffic from Google Search (hence the name), while in Google Analytics you can see all traffic sources and demographics.
The AI tools, and what I actually use them for
I opened this article about AI eating search results, so it would be dishonest to pretend I don’t use it. I do, every working day. The difference is in what I hand over and what I keep.
What I keep is what makes the site worth reading. Where I went, what I saw, what went wrong, what I photographed, what I would tell a friend. No model can produce that because it was not there. What I hand over is everything around it.
Full disclaimer: Claude wrote this article, but I told it what to write. It just put it in a pretty package. 😉
ChatGPT
I use ChatGPT mostly for titles, and specifically for Flipboard. Flipboard is a headline economy. The same article can sit there doing nothing for weeks and then take off because the title framed it differently, and I am not good at generating fifteen variations of anything at eleven at night. So I feed it the article, ask for twenty title options in different angles, throw out the eighteen that sound like a machine wrote them, and use the two that do not.
That is the honest workflow with any AI tool. It is a volume machine, not a taste machine. You still have to be the one with the taste.
Claude
Claude is the one I work with most. I use it to brainstorm article ideas and content angles, to audit my blog when I am too close to it to see the problems, to catch the grammar and phrasing mistakes that come with writing in my second language, and honestly to organize my life. I run several sites, a photography business and a channel, alone, from a different country every few months. Keeping the priorities straight is half the job.
Email: MailerLite
I run my list on MailerLite for Boundless Roads. The case for email got stronger, not weaker, when search got unstable. Google can take 80 percent of your traffic in one update, and it did take mine. Nobody can take your list.
MailerLite is cheaper than the better-known alternatives and does everything I need, including automations and landing pages, without the interface fighting me. My mistake was waiting too long to take it seriously. Start collecting emails on day one, even when the list grows slowly, because a small list of people who actually read you is worth more than a big number that never opens anything.
Design and visuals: Canva
I shoot my own photography, which is my main visual advantage and why my posts don’t look like everyone else’s. Canva handles everything around the photos: Pinterest pins, blog graphics, social templates, thumbnails.
Canva isn’t about design quality; it’s about repeatability. Build the template once, then produce twenty pins in an hour instead of designing each one from scratch. Anything you do weekly should exist as a template.
Photography
As I mentioned before, I use my own photography most of the time. However, there are situations, like when I write about topics that require lifestyle-kind photos or a packing list, for which I am useless. In this case, I use Depositphotos (where I also sell my own photography, by the way). I love their infinite archives and I always find what i am looking for. They have very convenient packages. If you think you need photography, you should check them out.
The platforms I use to grow traffic
The lesson from the last two years is simple. One traffic source is not a business; it is a bet, and I lost that bet in public. These are the places I now send content, and what each one is actually good for.
SEO, always
Search still comes first, and it always will. Organic search is the only channel that keeps sending readers to a post you published three years ago while you sleep. But now I’ve gotten smarter, and I am working on building other sources of traffic so that when SEO fails me again, I have other “friends” to rely on.
Pinterest is the one I keep fighting with. It sends real traffic when it works, then goes quiet when the algorithm shifts, and I have taken more courses on it than any other platform without cracking it fully. From experience, the outbound clicks are the number that matters.
The impressions and saves don’t say anything. You want people to click the links in your pin (outbound links), because that brings traffic to your blog. Among the courses I took, my favorite was Amy’s Courses. I took Scheduling Shortcuts, which was really helpful, although most of the strategies she shares were very familiar; I was happy I bought it.
I was also on her monthly program, which is mainly structured for Pinterest coaches, but it was helpful too, and it taught me a new scheduling strategy I wasn’t aware of that saved me so much time.
If I had one critique, it’s that her classes can be a bit too nerdy and hard for me to understand, so I had to listen to them multiple times to get it. But that’s just me.
Whether you get Amy’s courses or anyone else’s, I do believe you need guidance because It’s not just about Pinning. You do need a strategy, especially now, and even the Pinterest algorithm is hard to get sometimes.
Flipboard has done more for my traffic recovery than anything else I tried after the update. It is one of the few places where good, genuinely useful travel content still gets distributed on the strength of the content rather than on how many followers you already have. It is also headline-driven, which is why it gets its own workflow with ChatGPT.
If you took an algorithm hit and you need traffic while you rebuild, this is where I would start. Open an account and start sharing your work.
Facebook is the surprise. I ignored it for years, like most bloggers did, and after I got accepted into their monetization program, it became a real income line rather than just a place to post links. The page’s reach is better now than it has been at any point I can remember. I am still learning how far it can go, and I am treating it as a serious channel rather than an afterthought.
Unfortunately (or not), as I write this post, Facebook is rolling out a new rule: you will need to pay to share your links. On the bright side, that means that they will stop hiding posts that include a link, which is something they have always done.
Mastodon and Bluesky
Both are small compared to the rest, and I am there deliberately. The people on Mastodon and Bluesky click through, engage properly, and behave like the early internet did before every feed became a slot machine. The audiences are smaller, but the quality is higher, and being early on a platform has value that is hard to get back later.
I do not expect either one to replace search traffic. I do expect the platform landscape to keep shifting, and I would rather already be somewhere when it does.
Metricool
Metricool is what keeps all of that from eating my week. I batch content, schedule it across platforms in one sitting, and then close the app and go back to writing. Without something like this, posting across five platforms turns into a full-time job that pays nothing. I’ve checked plans from different platforms, and Metricool is the cheapest. They have a team ready to help if you need it. I have been using it for a year now, and I am about to renew the subscription. It’s a real lifesaver.
YouTube: vidIQ
I run a channel, and I am honest: it’s the hardest part of my week for the least return so far. vidIQ is what keeps me from guessing. I ran a full analysis on my channel, and it told me things I did not want to hear about my titles and my first thirty seconds of retention. It’s not the Bible, but it’s helpful.
I especially love that it helps me craft my titles and description, scrapes the platform and suggests the best topic for my niche. It also helps create thumbnails and scripts.
The tool nobody mentions
Time. I work alone. Every tool on this list earns its place by giving me back hours I can spend writing or photographing, which are the only two things on my site that a competitor cannot copy.
That is also my answer to the AI question. Software can already write a generic guide to anywhere on earth, and it does it in twelve seconds for free. It cannot go to Nazaré for three months, get up at six for the light, notice that the tourist information office gives wrong bus times, or tell you what it is like to travel alone as a woman past fifty. That is the whole job now. Everything on this list exists to protect the time for it.
The courses that got me here
Tools are the easy part. Knowing what to do with them is where the money actually goes, and I would not be running this business today without two courses in particular.
Scale Your Travel Blog, by Laura Peters
If you are starting and don’t know where to begin, investing in a good course will save you years and a lot of crying. Laura Peters is the real deal. She knows what she is doing; she does it herself on her own sites, and she keeps the course constantly updated as Google throws out its next round of madness, which over the last two years has been close to a full-time job on its own.
She recently moved the whole thing to Skool and rebuilt it from scratch, and every student who had already bought it, including me as a coaching student, got the entire new version without paying a cent more. That is professionalism, and it is rarer in this industry than it should be.
On top of the course itself, there are coaching calls, Q&A sessions, and interviews with other experts. She is a serious businesswoman, and I look up to her. I cannot recommend her highly enough. You can take a look at Scale Your Travel Blog here.
Travel Blog Prosperity, by Jessie Festa
Jessie’s membership, Travel Blog Prosperity, works differently from a course you buy once and finish. It runs as an ongoing program, which suits the reality of this business better than a fixed set of modules does, because what worked in blogging eighteen months ago is not what works now, and a static course cannot keep up with that (except Laura’s mentioned above,who keeps updating it) .
What I found most useful were her one-to-one sessions. A course, however good, is written for the average student. A session about your own site, your own numbers and your own bad habits gets to the problem far faster. If you are stuck on something specific rather than missing the fundamentals, that hour is worth more than another module.
The part nobody selling a course will tell you
Buying the best course in the world guarantees you nothing. I am the living proof of that, in both directions.
The course gives you the map. It cannot make you walk. If you don’t do the work, and if your mindset isn’t right, you can own every course on the market and stay exactly where you are. An instructor can teach you everything she knows, but you still have to put your own head and your own heart into applying it to your own blog, in your own voice, for your own readers. That part can’t be transferred.
It is also the only real explanation I have found for why two students take the same course, follow the same modules, and one thrives while the other quietly disappears within a year.
If you are starting out, do not buy all of these. Get hosting that works, set up Search Console, start the email list, and add one monetization tool at a time as your traffic justifies it. If you are rebuilding after an algorithm hit like I was, start with the audit and the email list, in that order.
Final Thought
All in all, you need tools to build a blogging business and these are the one I have been using and I still do. Scale Your Travel Blog course help me scaling for real, but I had to do the work and use my intuition and ability. That’s why some other student thrived even more than I did, and others gave up half whay through. It is really up to you, and how bad you want this to work. Let me know in the comments if you have used some of the above mentioned tools or I missed something that I should include in my work flow. I would love to hear from you.
