4 Blogging Lessons I Learned in 2024 & How I’m Preparing for 2025

Over on my main site, Valerie & Valise, I like to set a yearly manta at the start of each year. I don’t usually look back and set a new word to describe the year that actually happened, but if I had to pick one for 2024 with regards to my blogging business, it would be gut-punch. Or maybe demoralizing. I’m also drawn to the words stubborn and persistent, because despite how bad this year was for my blogs on the whole, I’m still here – and if you’re reading this, you are too.

2024 was, hands down, the worst year of blogging yet for almost every blogger I know. Traffic has almost completely evaporated for most of us, and with that our income and livelihoods. Simultaneously, we’ve been gaslit and told it was our fault this happened. That’s a lie. We didn’t do anything to deserve this, similar to someone who’s driving lawfully down the road and gets t-boned by someone running a red light.

Despite how hard the year was, I still think it’s worth carrying on my tradition of sharing lessons I’ve learned, how I’ll be carrying those lessons into the new year, and how you can too. I’ve tried to set aside my bitterness and frustration to look fairly at what has worked (and what hasn’t) to forge a path forward in 2025. Let’s step into the new year together!

Lesson 1. Google Can Go Suck Eggs

To write this one, I had to go look up a really good insult that wasn’t profane in any way, because I don’t want to offend too many people, or piss off Google any more than I already have. Oh, wait… who cares!!!

Google has jumped the shark, building something they can’t control or even explain, and there’s no going back to the pre-“Helpful” Content Update days. Wherever we are now is pretty much where we’ll be, and any growth we want to have will be through the brute force of other channels rather than the easy street of organic traffic.

You should absolutely continue to grieve the changes that have happened to your blog, but I hope you’ll continue to look forward and try new things to grow in 2025. At this point, I’m trying to stick it out through the year, and I hope we’ll all be back next year for another post like this.

How I’m applying this lesson in 2025: I have completely stopped writing for keywords, and do virtually no SEO on my posts. I don’t really look at rankings or consider anything that Google shows people in my decisions for what to write or how to write it. I also started using Duck Duck Go for my own personal searches, and encouraging my community to switch away from Google too.

How you can apply this lesson too: Cut the cord and start doing whatever you want with your blog. Write the silly stories and the things you’ve always wanted to share; find other places to share them with the people who need what you have to tell them.

Lesson 2. Facebook is My Place

Last year, I shared thoughts on the idea that people were “sleeping on Facebook.” While there’s been a lot of attention paid to Facebook by some blogging communities, I still think the majority of people are uncertain where to start or what to do.

To help, I’ll be releasing a free webinar in early 2025, sharing my strategy for Facebook right now, and how you can get started (or restarted) to start getting traffic and income, plus build your community and brand.

As for me, I’m going to keep on keepin’ on: my Facebook group is now over 100k strong, and my page has more than 35k followers. My little corner of social media is a generally positive, affirming, helpful place – and anyone who tries to behave otherwise usually gets their butt banned quickly!

How I’m applying this lesson in 2025: I’m going to keep doing what I’ve been doing, posting 4 times a day on my page, and keeping my group active with daily posts and engagement.

How you can apply this lesson too: Start a public group if you haven’t yet, and (re)start posting to your Facebook Page. Watch my webinar once it’s live; make sure you’re on my email list, as I’ll share the link there!

Lesson 3. Email is Still Essential

I had to go dig around in the archive of this site to find the first time I recommended email as an essential lesson I had learned; turns out, that was in 2022, so not that long ago… but really, I’ve been focusing on email since at least 2021 when I first invested in Kate Doster’s Love Your List course.

In any case, I’ll keep banging the drum: email is an essential part of your business strategy. As part of writing this post, I just took a quick detour to look at which channels drove the most sales of my own products on Valerie & Valise in 2024… 31% of sales came through my email list, the same percentage as came through organic search channels (Google, Bing, etc.).

Basically, I would have left 30% of sales on the table – just not even earned them – if I didn’t work on my email list every single week.

There are LOTS of great resources to help you grow your list and use it to drive traffic and sales, including some on my site:

• I share monthly posts with weekly ideas for what to send your newsletter
• I have the Travel Blogger’s Email Academy specifically designed for my fellow travel blogger friends
• I’m putting together a webinar in Q2 all about my free/paywall and how you can set one up to collect emails too

How I’m applying this lesson in 2025: I’ll be carrying on with my weekly general newsletter and weekly Alaska emails for the V&V community; monthly + special events emails for STG; weekly emails for LOMM & ELB; and biweekly emails for JT and this Site School list. I’m a busy email bee!

How you can apply this lesson too: Please, please, please: just start emailing weekly. Commit to it for one quarter! Use my newsletter ideas (linked above) to start cultivating a community through email. I promise it’s worth it if you want to earn more in 2025 – through traffic/ad revenue or affiliate/product sales.

Lesson 4. Future-Proof Your Sites

As many of my sites have been hit really hard by Google (STG’s down over 90% since September 2023), I’ve had to shift my priorities away from focusing on them as much. To help with that, I’ve started what I call “future-proofing” my sites, which means trying to make the content/site as evergreen as possible.

For example, that includes taking all dates out of titles (as mentioned in my suggestions for preparing for the December Traffic Bump) and updating content to remove as much time-sensitive content (prices, dates, etc) as makes sense while still helping readers answer the questions they have.

This is going to look different for every site: you might just be tidying up content, or you might be deleting some outright. In some blog posts, you might want to add or remove affiliates and other links to make things less likely to break. Maybe you want to add a banner to the top of your blog posts older than a certain age so people know that you’re not as active maintaining them…

Whatever you decide to do, it’s worth considering future-proofing since you probably aren’t spending as much time on content as you used to be – especially if you’re busy working to get traffic from other channels!

How I’m applying this lesson in 2025: Removing dates from any posts that have them (where it makes sense), and reducing the number of product links for companies with lots of turnover (lookin’ at you, Amazon!).

How you can apply this lesson too: Audit your content (maybe using the BOSS spreadsheet!) and decide what your strategy will be to ensure you don’t need to do regular/annual updates going forward.

Okay, that’s it from me… What lessons did you learn this year? Have any advice for the rest of us? Let me know in the comments below!