London On My Mind 5-Year Report
[CASE STUDY]

I can hardly believe it, but my London site, London On My Mind, is ready for kindergarten! I often joke that my websites are like my children, and it feels like a lifetime since I started this site in the middle of the pandemic and hoped it would help take me back to my favorite city on earth a little more often.

While the site has ridden one of the most dramatic rollercoasters of any site – just check out the chart below! – I’ve stuck to it, and that alone makes me proud of what I’ve done with it. LOMM is never going to reach the heights I hoped it would, but it’s a part of my site portfolio that brings me joy and yes, does occasionally give me a good excuse to go to London.

As this site has crossed the five-year mark, it’s time to share another case study update. I have to admit it’s not super interesting this year; I actually barely check my stats anymore, for any of my sites, because it’s just not helpful to be stagnant and unable to change strategy to grow… But I like writing these case studies anyway to look back and reflect, hold myself accountable, and plan for the future.

Ready to dive into my latest one? Cheerio – let’s go!

What are these Case Studies?

As a reminder, I do case studies for almost every site I’ve created, at the 6-month, 9-month, and 12-month marks. Then I switch to every six months for the next year; you can expect reports at 18 months and 24 months. If a site reaches its two-year mark and I plan to continue writing, I’ll switch to annual reports. 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 (this post!)
• Great Plains Travel Guide*
• Jordan Traveler – 4 years
• Eat Like Bourdain – 4 years
• Alaskan Cruisers – 1 year
• *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 London On My Mind

Here’s a quick glance at the stats for London On My Mind at its fourth anniversary:

Date First Published	January 1, 2021
Articles Live (as of 1/1/24)	272
Publishing Cadence	Occasionally
Monthly Views (last calendar month)	24,623
Maximum Views (lifetime)	82,335 (August 2023)
Google Traffic (last 12 months)	79%
Email Subscribers	1,133

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’m assuming if you’re reading this, it’s because you’re vaguely (or strongly!) curious about any site that shows recovery from the HCU; London On My Mind is the only site I have that got hit and has ever grown in a meaningful way after.

The short version of the story is:

• the first 12 months (2021) of the site were a slog
• the next 18 months (Jan 2022 until HCU/August 2023) were incredible
• the next 12 months after that were completely demoralizing
• in August 2024, the site started to recover after the August Core Update

The site is nowhere near its peak – still less than half –, but is at least making enough to justify its existence and my focus.

If you told me four years ago that I’d be really happy with a site getting around 30,000-40,000 pageviews per month, I probably wouldn’t have started this site; part of the plan was always to build a large-volume business that made money from ads and affiliates from that traffic. In fact, in August 2023, I decided to push my foot down hard on the gas pedal after seeing a fellow London blogger trying to sell her site for almost $1M.

(Sidebar: I actually inquired about buying her blog, but she turned me down (she just doesn’t like me, and I’m not sure why!). She never sold and got hit by HCU and the March 2024 Core Update, and has since stopped work on it entirely. I thank my lucky stars I didn’t buy that business because everything that’s happened since would have bankrupted us!)

When you put today’s traffic against the recovery that so many sites have seen, I guess I’m glad. It’s all relative – but it’s still depressing when you look at where the site once was, and what it could have been if not for Google.

Strategic Takeaways: You Do You, Boo

In the year since my four-year recap, I have followed of strategy called “writing whatever the [bleep] I want.” If you haven’t heard of it, I highly recommend!

In short, I just worked on making sure annual posts were updated in a timely fashion, wrote a few new articles that filled in gaps in my content (like seasonal packing lists and trip recaps from my two London trip last year), and published more attraction reviews – focusing on increasingly popular ones. I also deleted some articles as it became apparent they weren’t serving my audience – either because they weren’t ranking/getting any traffic, or were low-quality (usually written by one specific writer I hired for a time and who was just not great at writing).

In general, my philosophy has just been to write what I want people to find on my site, and what I enjoy writing. I have no delusions now of building a $1M blog about London (and I so deeply sympathize with that blogger who tried to sell her site before it was decimated), but I like writing about London, so I continue to do it.

What’s Next?

Even when I’m not being particularly strategic about a site, I like to set goals; it helps me stay focused and moving forward through the storms of being an online publisher.

Weekly Articles & Emails

Because I like writing on LOMM, I am happy to dedicate time to it each week, and that includes publishing new articles (or updating old ones) and sending weekly emails. My strategy right now focuses on attraction reviews, because they’re all part of a big affiliate funnel pointing to the London Pass, which is my top affiliate for the site.

I could definitely be better at selling via email, but for now, I’m trying to keep the site/list active while doing as little effort as possible (like pre-scheduling a bunch of timely emails for the year so I’m not spending as much time each week coming up with ideas).

Right now, this effort feels sustainable and worthwhile, given how much the site earns.

Instagram… Maybe?

I recently used Claude to generate a social media strategy for one of my other sites, and I think this could be a good idea for London too… London is a wildly popular destination (about 10x Alaska, according to Pinterest Trends, which is why I also get decent Pinterest traffic for this site with relatively low authority), and that’s especially true on Instagram.

I have tons of assets (photos and videos), so maybe I’ll try a quarterly experiment to see if I can get some traction there… Stay tuned!

Want to Try & “Recover” too?

Before wrapping up, I wanted to be explicit about the “strategy” I used in 2024 that seems to have helped LOMM recover a little. If you want to try what I did, here are the exact steps you could take, exactly what I did:

• Go through and delete 20-50% of your lowest-performing content.
  • Alternatively, you could save that content and turn it into ebooks to use as freebies or to sell.
• Block Google from crawling your site using Robots.txt. Give it a few months until the next core update is officially announced, then remove the block and see what happens.
• Just keep doing what you’re doing. You did nothing wrong to deserve being hit; your readers still need you, and you just may need to get creative about finding other ways to reach them.

That seems like plenty to be getting on with – for both of us –, what with my other sites and trying to figure out my next moves… Have any questions about how my London site has grown in the past three years or what I’m focusing on next? Let me know in the comments!