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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...
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London On My Mind 9 Month Report [CASE STUDY]
When 2021 began and the pandemic continued to rage, I – like many of you – was really freakin' tired of sitting at home. One can only do so much work, especially as a travel blogger, without actually traveling! I like to think I got pretty creative in 2020, starting Discover Sausalito and spinning Follow the Butterflies out from my main travel site. So as the new year began, I tried to think of a new project to focus my efforts on – and settled on the cluster of content I had written about London in the past...
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September 2021 Valerie & Valise Income Report
After a roaring summer, the autumn slump has begun. This is a pretty common thing for travel bloggers to experience at this time of year, but it's still hard to see your business contract and have no control over it. The reality is that people just travel less during this time of year – myself included – so the volume of people searching drops for almost every business in the travel industry...
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Great Plains Travel Guide 6 Month Report [CASE STUDY]
Welcome to my first ever case study post! I’m starting these posts to document my successes (and failures) in running 12 websites. As this is my first post of its type, I’m not totally sure that I’ve included everything I want to share – or will share – in every case study post going forward. But, I wanted to get this first one out to get feedback about what else I should include, so be sure to comment with any additional questions or info you’d like to know! As a primer, I’ll be doing case studies for every site I’ve created, at the 6-month, 9-month, and 12-month marks. Then I’ll…
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August 2021 Valerie & Valise Income Report
Well, here we are: the 18-month mark of the pandemic. It's hard to believe that it's been a year and a half, and I'm still here, reporting on my little travel site which has undergone the most dramatic rollercoaster of its 8-year career – and there's no end in sight...
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July 2021 Valerie & Valise Income Report
After a few months of limited travel as we adjust to life here in Ohio, July finally saw my return to the open skies and open roads – just in the nick of time! Not being able to travel has been hard for my mental health and my business, and sneaking in a few trips before the Delta Variant began sweeping across the country helped soothe that discomfort some...
