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Eat Like Bourdain 6 Month Report
[CASE STUDY]Sometimes, you start a project simply because you're passionate about it. Such was the case with a site I started in June, focused on all of the places that Anthony Bourdain ate in his many journeys around the world. A combination of travel blog and food blog, Eat Like Bourdain has been a fun way to revisit the catalog of Bourdain's television work – and discover new places I want to visit and eat too...
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Great Plains Travel Guide 9 Month Report
[CASE STUDY]Time flies when you're having fun – and when you're busy! And to say it's been a busy three months for my portfolio of sites is an understatement. After returning from Alaska in late September, I entered my most productive time of the year, and also worked on doing a sweeping set of updates for old content on some of my older sites. But you're not here to hear about those sites, right?...
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3 Steps for Choosing Keywords on Niche Sites
Gone are the days when you could start a blog about a topic like "food" or "travel" and expect it to rank well in Google within the first few years – if ever. The internet has been flooded with independent publishers and bloggers, and Google has gotten way better at figuring out who knows their stuff – and who's full of it...
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6 Important Factors in Your On-Page SEO Strategy
The most important and biggest part of SEO is what’s called On-Site or On-Page SEO. On-Site SEO is when you optimize elements on a page (such as a blog article, your homepage, or a landing page) or within your website to try and improve your rankings and earn more organic traffic. It’s a huge term as the vast majority of SEO work is “on-site” work...
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3 Steps for Choosing Keywords on Niche Sites
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Jordan Traveler 6 Month Report
[CASE STUDY]The sun rises above the mountains as I dig my toes into the sand. The scent of camel wafts over me in the hot air. I sip my mint tea and am grateful to be present in this place. Sounds good, right? That's Jordan – the destination I chose to focus on for (yet another) one of my 2021 niche sites: Jordan Traveler...
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Space Tourism Guide 4 Year Report
[CASE STUDY]Time flies when you're having fun, right? That's how it feels with my second site, Space Tourism Guide. I launched this site four years ago this week – and the time has just flown by! From its earliest days on Medium to migrating onto WordPress, to a Lonely Planet book deal to today's healthy, stable site, STG has come a long way... and still has far to go...
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October 2021 Valerie & Valise Income Report
October is one of my favorite months of the year... which is a good thing, as this month was pretty tough for my business! While my site is still growing in the long term, October continued the trend in September (well, really, it was a trend that started in June) and continued to decrease in traffic and income. That's okay though: I was busy working to ensure that next year reaches both higher peak traffic and higher low traffic...
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My “Capsule Site” Visit Ni’ihau
(& How it Failed Spectacularly!)Six months ago, I went a little wild. In the span of eight weeks, we launched five new sites – right as the double Google June/July core updates and Core Web Vitals update were all bearing down on us. To say those young sites got the shaft for just being published at the wrong time is an understatement – almost all of them are still struggling to gain a foothold in Google after 5-6 months...
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Follow the Butterflies 18 Month Report [CASE STUDY]
Back in March 2020, when the world was full of uncertainty, I was busy watching the traffic from my travel blog disappear by 90% within a few short weeks. At the time – and now – I had no idea when (if) life would return to normal, and needed something to both distract myself and diversify my income in the event the pandemic lasted longer than the two months everyone was originally expecting...
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Valerie & Valise – 8 Years On:
Lessons Learned from 8 Years of BloggingIt's hard to believe that my very first post was published on Valerie & Valise eight years ago today. 8 years ago, I was living in Seattle, had just started a brand new job, and thought travel blogging would be a good way to hone my travel writing skills and prove I was worthy of a job at Travel + Leisure or AFAR...
