Almost given up, just hanging on

You don't really need affiliate links, if you get enough traffic, charge to have ads placed on your site

Nice clean site by the way, love it

This is a beautiful site and with a following of more than 8.000 people on Facebook and a couple of thousand on Twitter, you should be able to drive traffic to your blog and to new posts, right?

I think you are monetizing with AdSense. Does that work for you? I'd think that your overall traffic is probably too small to really put some cash in your pockets.

Why don't you consider to offer local hotels, pubs and businesses to sponsor posts on your website?

1) First you'll create an article
2) Then you send that to a couple of local businesses. Explain that your Website has X amount of viewers, each post is seen by X people, etc.
3) Give it to them cheap. At least until you can verify how many people click through to the business and how happy they are with the sponsorship.
4) Post the story to your website, put the sponsoring business' details up in that post, add some kind of special offer to the post, and then ride it on Facebook, Twitter and your email list for what it's worth.

You might post a story (walking guide) about a 2-day walk through Glen Fishy and have the sponsor be one of the hotels in Braemer. If the hotel could offer a special deal (discount for the night) for your viewers, that'd be good, too.

You get my drift. It might work or it might not – no other way to find out than to try. I guess it also depends on your readership. If most of them can't easily come to Scotland for a two day weekend, this kind of sponsored post wouldn't work that well.

I think this could work, though. Local businesses are not that good in marketing, they like getting more business and will gladly pay if it brings them more customers.

Travel and tourism sites can work great with adsense as hotels are paying top dollars in adwords.

Not every site makes 10k monthly. If I were you I'd be happy with 500/month from this site and start expanding my portfolio of sites. Some make more, some make less. If you aren't at 500 per month yet, I'd get ranked for a few good keywords.

Something's wrong. With that kind of follower base. You need to SEO some more and post frequently.

That part is what you need to monetize.

I would recommend...

• Create a comprehensive tourism guide. Make it unique. Secret locations for this and that....best unadvertised spots...Maybe create an entire package of materials.
• Invite those people who contact you and all of your followers to scheduled webinars to discuss their interests and questions and create a good hook to get them to want to show up.
• Sell them your guide/package of materials at the end of it.

And keep doing that.

Hi Greg,

Don't completely give on something you love and have an interest on working on. If you are looking to expand your number of visitors you may have to spend some money or network with other bloggers and have them do a referral link to your page. Or have some bloggers write an article about why people like your page. This could get you some more exposure. Just make sure you are connecting with the right bloggers to do the post. Have you heard of www.payperpost.com? This is a great way to connect with other bloggers who could help you gain exposure.

Also consider creating an email newsletter that you mail out on a weekly basis. As a rule of thumb you want to retain a current website visitor as much as you want to get new visitors to your site. You could also post some advertisements inside of your email newsletter and try to get some extra income off of that.

Best of luck with your site!