In this TL;DW episode, we’re going to extract the gists of Niche Pursuits podcast – This Travel Blogger Went From 0-$10k Per Month in 1 Year By Switching Her Blog’s Strategy to SEO.
Nina Clapperton is a solo female expat travel blogger. The podcast entails how she took her travel blog https://ninaoutandabout.ca/ from literally zero pageview per month to 100K pageviews within 1-year and how she is making over $10K+ per month currently!
TL;DW Key Takeaways
Initially targeting social media ie. Pinterest and Instagram but no success.
Decided to use SEO as the primary growth channel.
Set a goal to join Mediavine for ad revenue.
Went through a thorough content auditing process for her existing (180) blog posts. Does not hesitate to (mass) delete (30-50) posts and rewrite (reindex) old posts to ensure content quality.
Siloing or focusing on certain niches and really going in depth on those niche topics.
Building backlinks with guest posts.
Fixed internal linking (with Link Whisper) which helps in providing relevancy and SEO benefits. (Google actually encourages one to build internal links)
Fixed orphaned posts and optimizing anchor texts.
Internal linking for “in-built road map itinerary” rather than “abandoning” the visitors after reading your great article.
Shared her “People were doing it (making money online) so why not me” kind of mindset.
Also shared her seriousness and started treating it like a business and not just a hobby.
Took Mike Fuchsia’s SEO course – https://stupidsimpleseo.co/
Focus on keywords and data ie. low competition keywords, competitors analysis, metric tracking.
Possess an advantage being a freelance writer herself; hence, writing and content generation is generally easier and faster.
Diversified from Mediavine ad revenue with affiliate income.
Good thing about SEO is that even with (3) months of not posting anything, there is no significant traffic reduction.
Deployed email marketing; she got a dedicated (responsive) email list.
Setting up systems to have writers to scale up content generation.
Analysed existing top posts to refine site/content structure; recommended to look at top 10 posts and add in appropriate affiliate products.
Posting frequency : Publish a minimum of 2 posts every week; typically 10-20 posts a month.
Mining Quora, Reddit, Trip Advisor forum etc. for keyword research & competitor analysis.
Even write posts on “dumb” questions; as long they are low competition keywords.
Digged “golden” keywords by searching “mediavine privacy policy” related blogs for competitor analysis.
Created her own signature courses (SEO; travel niche) for further list building and monetization.
