Alaskan Cruisers 1-Year Report
[CASE STUDY]

One thing you don’t hear so much lately – even from me, running this site – is people starting new websites. Sure, there are lots of content farms in foreign countries, generating AI slop sites, but I mean new sites from established bloggers, niching down or branching out to build a portfolio of income-producing websites that help us weather the storms of algorithms and AI.

I think there are two reasons for that. For starters, many people over-committed during the pandemic, when we had a lot more time on our hands; lots of us started sites, then saw them die on the vine as Google made changes and AI began stealing our content and then our jobs.

Second, and I always forgot this even in the ‘before times,’ it’s really hard to start a new site and have it succeed! There was a time when it was a little easier, but it was never easy. Now, again, it’s almost universally hard, and that can be discouraging before you even start.

But here I am, one year after starting a new site – Alaskan Cruisers – and it’s time to share my first case study update for this site… hopefully the first of many! This site, despite the headwinds against it, has plotted a course toward being sustainable, and I do enjoy having a new area of focus for writing, within my general expertise.

Ready to set sail into uncharted waters with my newest site and its latest update? Bon voyage!

What are these Case Studies?

As a reminder, I do case studies for almost every site I’ve created; when I started them, I used to create reports at the 6-month, 9-month, and 12-month marks, then switch to every six months for the next year; you can expect reports at 18 months and 24 months. Today, I just do annual updates, even for new sites, since it’s so hard to gain traction in that first 6-18 months.

Here are the ages of each site and its current status:

• Valerie & Valise – 12 years
• Space Tourism Guide – 8 years
• Discover Sausalito*
• Follow the Butterflies*
• London on My Mind – 5 years
• Great Plains Travel Guide*
• Jordan Traveler – 4 years
• Eat Like Bourdain – 4 years
• Alaskan Cruisers – 1 year (this post!)

*I shut down these three sites last year; read more about that decision.

(Links will take you to the full list of reports about that site!)

Fast Facts about Alaskan Cruisers

Here’s a quick glance at the stats for Alaskan Cruisers at its first anniversary:

Date First Published	January 15, 2025
Articles Live (as of 2/1/26)	30
Publishing Cadence	Occasionally
Monthly Views (last calendar month)	1,361
Maximum Views (lifetime)	4,457 (May 2025)
Google Traffic (last 12 months)	79.5%
Email Subscribers	0*

*As of publishing, I have not started a mailing list for this site, but it’s on my to-do list for this year!

In the rest of this post, I’ll dive more into the history of the site and where I hope it goes in the year to come.

History of London On My Mind

I started Alaskan Cruisers in January 2025, planning it to be the home for all my existing cruise content (which I would migrate from Valerie & Valise) and new content tailored specifically to ‘my’ kind of Alaskan traveler – but one who wants to cruise.

As you can see, it’s been a quiet year for AKC; I had a big bump in May 2025 (one post started to rank well for a hot second then dropped back down) and thought I might have a good little growth chart going – but alas, Google still sucks.

To be fair, for as much work as I’ve put into this site (15-20 hours total), it hasn’t been terrible: it earns some income each month (about $600 in the first year), and that’s not nothing!

Strategic Takeaways

If there’s one main thing I’ve learned from this new site – the first one I’ve started in a few years, it’s that you miss all of the swings you don’t take.

As I said, when I started Alaskans Cruisers, part of my goal was to migrate most or all of my cruise content, to give myself a starting runway and foundation from which to grow. However, I should have known better than to assume that just moving content to a new domain would help it perform any better, even though it was only performing poorly on V&V because of Google’s stupid algorithms.

But I also didn’t really dedicate time and resources to creating new content, which is – and always has been – the only path to growth. I did write some new articles, but the articles I published weren’t consistent or strategic.

Additionally, it’s been interesting to see how little a complimentary existing site helps a new site grow. I kind of thought people might be more interested in my cruise content, because it was expanding within the same area of expertise I already have (Alaska travel). However, my cruise group on Facebook hasn’t grown as fast as I would have hoped, and cruise content tends to fall flat in my main group and page. I think I could get smarter about this, and that leads me to my goals for this second year of the site…

What’s Next?

For a new site, I’ve got some high hopes for it as a healthy business – even if it’s never a big business.

Posting 2-3x per Month

One goal I set at the start of 2026 was to try and write (or migrate from V&V) 24 articles on the site. This isn’t a huge leap in content – basically just doubling what’s there already – but I think it’s an important signal that the site is legit and maybe Google might start to rank it.

Lean into Social Media

This is the first site I’ve built in the post-HCU/AI-pocalypse era, so I’m thinking about it differently. I’m focused more on click-worthy evergreen content that will do well on social media than in-depth, comprehensive posts to try and rank on page 3 of Google through SEO.

Build out an Email List

As mentioned earlier, I am now working to build out a mailing list from this site, and as of publishing, I have my first 100 subscribers, and I’ve sent my first email. (I was actually collecting emails all along, just wasn’t using them, so I count that the same as having zero subscribers.)

I’m hoping to be strategic in delivering new posts to increase traffic and maybe monetize the site with ads someday, and promoting discounts and partnerships I’ve already built (through V&V, cross-promoted on AKC) to earn affiliate commissions.

Roll out Travel Advisor Services

I haven’t mentioned it since I didn’t really start it when I wrote my annual V&V recap last October, but I’ve now become a travel advisor specializing in Alaska – cruising and non-cruising. I’d like to build out some landing pages, call-out boxes, and other promotion within my existing site and email automations, to help people know that I offer this service and maybe drive some revenue from working with cruise-specific clients.

I feel like this is the first year of having real goals for the site, and that this is a lot to try and accomplish, especially for a site that’s barely breaking 1,500 pageviews per month at this point…

Have any questions about how my Alaskan cruise site has grown in the past yearsor what I’m focusing on next? Let me know in the comments!