Q1 2025 Check-In: Accountability on All My Sites

If you’ve ever met me, you know that I’m a bit of a type-A personality. I’m certainly creative and scatterbrained, too, but I love a structured, organized plan – and in fact, it’s the only way I get anytihng done while juggling everything I have going on in life – my sites, my family, my hobbies… I like to have a lot of plates spinning, too!

I’ve now been writing these quarterly accountability check-ins for more than two years (you can see Q1, Q2, Q3 & Q4 of 2023 and Q1, Q2, Q3 & Q4 of 2024 if you want to look back), and I find it extremely helpful to do so. While I don’t know that anyone reads them, I hope these inspire you to set some goals for your site, and to check in on them regularly.

I’ve historically used a 🟢 green – 🟡 yellow – 🔴 red stoplight system, but as of this year, I’m adding two more dots: 🟠 orange to signify goals that are still active but not going well, and ⚫️ black for goals I’ve chosen not to focus on anymore.

In total, I have 16 areas of focus across 3 high-priority and 5 low-priority sites, and here’s how they’re doing:

• 🟢 (success/achieved) = 8/16 = 50%
• 🟡 (in progress) = 2/16 = 13%
• 🟠 (ongoing but not going well) = 4/16 = 25%
• 🔴 (failure/so far) = 1/16 = 6%
• ⚫️ (abandoned) = 1/16 = 6%

Having five options feels a little bit too nuanced, but I like being able to share that I’m working on things that aren’t going well – I think it’s important to acknowledge that too, as part of these accountability reports. In any case, let’s dive into each site so you can understand more.

High Priority Sites

This section focuses on the four sites I’m currently focusing on the most; they’re the ones I have as ‘favorites’ in Asana and have at least a few articles (new or updates) scheduled in the coming months.

Valerie & Valise (October 2013)

V&V passed the 11-year mark in Q4 of 2024; I’ve now been working on these goals for almost six months:

• 🟢 All-In on Facebook – I’ve put more and less energy into Facebook over the past few months, but I’m still committed to it; it’s definitely my strongest social media channel and drives me a healthy amount of traffic to offset Googl losses.
  
• 🟢 Stay Committed on Email – Still going strong on email, and I even added a new national parks segment that I’ve started emailing weekly; that means I’m sending three emails per week! It’s not a big traffic driver, but I know that email is hands down my most effective channel for “getting things done” (like trying to sell the group trip I’m planning), so I’m happy to stay committed to it. I’m also hosting the Bucket List Bundle in a few days, which should hopefully help boost my list some more!
  
• 🟠 Finally Figure Out Pinterest – I paid a Pinterest “consultant” back in Q4, and it did exactly nothing to help my strategy. I’ve continued to chip away, creating 1-3 pins per day, cycling through content, doing keyword research, etc… and nothing has moved the needle. I chatted privately with a friend of mine who works at Pinterest and pointed out that travel as a category was much more competitive and lower volume than he would have thought… so maybe my lack of success over the years isn’t just my fault! That said, I’ll keep going with this when I have the time to focus on batch-creating pins.
  
• 🟢 “Paywall” My Blog Content – I did this back in October 2024; it was effective for a while but really seems to have dropped off: fewer people than ever are signing up and fewer still are willing to pay for ad-free access. I can’t tell if this is a result of traffic continuing to death spiral, or a change in the market, or just the experiment failing… That said, I don’t plan to turn off the paywall any time soon, as it’s helping me collect emails and occasionally earn some income.

London On My Mind (January 2021)

I still can’t explain why London On My Mind has recovered (at all) when so many of my other sites have continued to take hits from Google and lose traffic. I’m not complaining, though – every site that isn’t completely dead is part of the portfolio that allows me to keep going!

LOMM turned four in January, and I set some new goals for the year:

• 🟢 Keep Calm & Carry On – I’m plugging away at the content strategy I set for the year, and happy to continue doing so. I won’t say I’m seeing any big wins from a traffic perspective, but I am starting to see some affiliate strategies that I started in 2024 begin to pay off – literally!
• 🟢 Keep Readers at the Forefront – As part of my “fuck Google” mentality, I’m focused more than ever on making my sites great for the readers who do find them – including all of my London resources.
• 🟠 Finish my Neighborhood Guides Project – I’ve actually kind of scrapped this project; it was originally a two-phase idea of consolidating a bunch of low-quality existing articles into (new) neighborhood guide articles and then taking all those existing articles and turning them into ebooks that I could sell. It’s sort of a work in progress, but not one I’m focusing on at all right now.

Eat Like Bourdain (June 2021)

Almost every day, I am grateful to past-Valerie who decided to launch this site and worked so hard to get it done before Google came in to wreck everything. Eat Like Bourdain remains the only site of mine that hasn’t been hit by Google updates; it also doesn’t seem to be degrading much each year, showing the staying power of Bourdain’s legacy.

It really is my great honor to work on this site, and I hope that I can continue to focus on it more in coming years. For now, here are the goals I’m focused on through June when the site turns four:

• 🔴 Enthusiast, v3 – I think about this often, and really just need to pull the trigger. Anyone want to come take care of my little one for a few days so I can really dig in and try to script, shoot, and record a pilot?
• 🟡 Instagram/Social Community – I was doing well at this early in the quarter, but fell off the wagon as I usually do. My account continues to grow, and I really need to make this a priority since I know it opens opportunities for me. I just need more time in the day!

Low Priority Sites

In this section, I cover sites I’m not focusing on much; most of them don’t have many goals, so I’ve just assigned the whole project a stoplight score. One exception is Space Tourism Guide, which I shifted to low priority at the start of 2025, but for which I had already set stoplight goals before that point.

Space Tourism Guide (November 2017)

I am focusing on Space Tourism Guide as little as possible while not letting the site become outdated. That said, I do have some stoplight goals for STG, and want to acknowledge those:

• ⚫️ Repurpose content for Forbes – I abandoned this goal in Q1 after realizing I would make even less money from my articles than on my site, so I’m not gonna do that!
• 🟢 Keep updating gear posts, monthly guides, and annual events each year – Still going steady with this one.
• 🟢 Future-proof the site in every other way – At this point, I think I’m pretty close to having all non-evergreen content (aside from those in the bullet point above) scrubbed of non-evergreen details and such.

🟠 Jordan Traveler (May 2021)

Jordan Traveler has shown only minimal signs of recovery from Google’s baloney, but it was never a big enough site to merit a large commitment. I set a goal of writing or updating 2 articles per month this year, and so far I have not done great at that; I published/updated four articles in Q1.

I also decided not to worry much about this goal/site as I don’t have any major plans to grow or expand it. I’m mostly keeping it on maintenance mode to help serve travelers without taking up much of my time or energy.

🟠 D&D Community (April 2023)

At the start of the year, I committed to publishing 12 articles this year on D&D Community. I published a grand total of one in the first three months, and have not prioritized this at all in the coming quarter.

Interestingly, D&DC does actually earn small amounts of money – a few dollars – on occasion, thanks to the affiliate posts on the site; perhaps it would do better if I committed more to it?

Also, I have done a poor job of engaging my social community for this site. All around, I wish I could make this a greater priority, but my heart isn’t really in it right now.

🟢 Global Tiki Tour (February 2024)

Similar to D&DC, my goal for Global Tiki Tour is to publish 12 new articles in 2025; surprisingly, I actually stuck to that, publishing four articles in three months:

• The Designs & Types of Tiki Bars, Explained
• The 13 Best Tiki Bars in London
• The Mai-Kai Restaurant Review: It’s Back, Baby!
• The 10 Most Popular Tiki Drinks (with Pictures!)

(Gotta get that backlink juice, baby!)

This is for sure my fun project right now, and I am always surprised at how easy it is to write for this site. It gets absolutely no traffic and doesn’t have any good monetization strategy, but sometimes, we just need to do things for fun, ya know?

🟡 Alaskan Cruisers (February 2025)

I hinted in my Q4 2024 report that I was working on a new site – but I didn’t know when it was going to launch. Well, Alaskan Cruisers is now live! I started publishing content and migrating cruise content from V&V in early February. Because it’s getting seeded with content from an existing site, it seems to be doing pretty well; it’s already earning a little bit of affiliate income and getting around 1,000 pageviews per month.

I don’t really have any goals for the site at this point, but I was pretty uncommitted in March and I need to get back to at least migrating content over and adding a few new posts on occasion. Seems like goals would help, so for a short-term plan until I hit the six-month mark and start publishing case studies:

• Write one new blog post per month
• Migrate three (or more) posts from V&V per month

Totaling weekly posts for the rest of Q2. I’m excited to share how this one does going forward!

Sites I’ve Shut Down

As of the beginning of Q2, I’ve shut down four of the sites I started in the past few years:

• Discover Sausalito (January 2020)
• Follow the Butterflies (April 2020)
• Soup Whoop (April 2021)
• Great Plains Travel Guide (March 2021)

I don’t have much to add other than including this section for posterity, and to reference all the sites I’ve shut down – including those I don’t really mention anymore, like True Crime Podcasts and Visit Ni’ihau.

Have any questions about my various quarterly goals? I’m happy to answer in the comments.