Q3 2024 Check-In: Accountability on All My Sites

Autumn is my favorite time of year; I love the changing seasons and colors, the cool mornings and warm days, and the sense of reflection that creeps up as I crank up my favorite folk-pop fall bands (anyone feel me on The Shins this time of year?!).

As such, I find my Q3 accountability check-in as one of the easiest to write, because my brain is already priming itself for the end of the year and all the thoughtfulness I put into various recaps – including the anniversaries of my two oldest and biggest sites (Valerie & Valise and Space Tourism Guide).

Below you’ll find an attempted-earnest look at each of my main sites, and how I’m doing on various goals I’ve set for them, as well as brief check-ins on other sites that have shifted to the backburner, or entirely off the stovetop (keeping the cooking-holiday-meals metaphor going). I’ll be back in early 2025 to reflect on how the year ended, but for now, this is what I’m still focusing on and thinking about.

As a reminder, I’m using the stoplight system Rand Fishkin uses as part of his SEO predictions posts each year; it’s a clear way to measure how you’re doing (or did) when evaluating things.

In total, I have 11 areas of focus across 4 active sites, and here’s how they’re doing:

• 🟢 (success/achieved) = 7/11 = 64%
• 🟡 (in progress) = 0/11 = 0%
• 🔴 (failure/so far) = 4/11 = 36%

I think it’s funny that I didn’t mark any goals as ‘in progress’ as of writing this; I’m feeling very binary today and not deluding myself that some of these will ever happen – though I could of course improve my focus on them by next quarter (unless it’s a site where I’m setting new goals between now and then, which is V&V and STG). In any case, let’s dive into each site so you can understand more.

Sites I’m Focused On

This section focuses on the four sites I’m currently working on; 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)

Last October – almost a year ago –, I set two areas of focus for Valerie & Valise. I called them “predictions we would all need to focus on” in my Q4 update – which has turned out to be alarmingly prescient in light of Google’s continued assault on small site owners. Google finally came for V&V this year, first in the March Core update, and again in an unconfirmed update in early July.

Since then, I’ve been struggling to hold on and imagine a future as a blogger at all – V&V was my biggest breadwinner by far, and it’s been decimated now. I actually just migrated domains (from valisemag.com to valerievalise.com) in an attempt to recover somewhat, though we’ll see if it has any long-term impact… At this point, even just stabilizing traffic (rather than continuing to drop) would be good.

Here’s one last check-in on last year’s goals, set in a very different business landscape and mindset, and some final scores for my performance:

• 🟢 Be Inimitable – I’ve actively worked to infuse more of ME into my brand and online presence, since it’s really the only moat I have against Google and AI. This has primarily taken place on Facebook – and a little bit on Instagram and my blog – but I feel like people actually know and care about me now; they also say they’re recommending me and my site when people ask, which is the most powerful endorsement I can ask for.
• 🔴 Diversify Content Forms – I absolutely did not do this, unless you count Facebook posts as a diversification of content forms. Which, to be fair, sort of is diversification, but on platform/traffic rather than form. Anyway, in the spirit of what I originally meant in setting this goal, I did not accomplish it this year.

It’s interesting to think about what my new goals/areas of focus will be when I sit down to write them in a few weeks at the 11th anniversary of my site… I find it hard to predict what mindset I will be in by then, but hopefully, it’s a positive, optimistic one and I have some areas to focus on because right now I feel pretty lost!

Space Tourism Guide (November 2017)

As I mentioned in my last few accountability reports, I have lost almost all interest in Space Tourism Guide. While the site has stabilized at this low traffic level, it’s hard to find any motivation to put out effort beyond the basics – right now that means keeping content updated for this year, which is thankfully one of my goals for the site!

• 🟢 2024 Content Updates – In addition to updates earlier in the year, I’ve kept up on the annual events and monthly night sky guides so that the site isn’t completely out of date.
• 🔴 Continue Filling Rainmaker Gaps – I am still not producing any new content, so this is definitely not something I’m focused on.
• 🟢 Take a Well-Earned Break – I think we can safely say I’m not taking a break from STG anymore, nor am I increasing my current time commitment to it.
• 🟢 Integrate SATW into my Site – I accomplished this early in the year, so this was definitely a win.

Last quarter, I mentioned possibly moving this site to the ‘On Hold’ section, but I don’t think that makes sense at this point. I plan to still set areas of focus next month when I write the 7-year site recap, and to keep the site operating at this bare-bones level for the time being. It’s a very small focus in my average week or month, but it’s still one I do dedicate time and energy to (little as it may be).

London On My Mind (January 2021)

If there’s been one surprise in this quarter, it’s London On My Mind. After getting destroyed in the Helpful Content Update and subsequent core updates, I decided to deindex the site/block Google from accessing it in May 2024. When the August Core update began rolling out, and people started reporting recoveries, I decided to let Google have access again… and the site popped!

It’s now up 100% from the traffic levels without Google – though it’s still down about 66% from pre-HCU levels. All this to say, it’s back in the Google index and getting traffic, but I don’t expect it to ever fully recover.

Here are the goals I’ve been focusing on this year, until I set new ones in January:

• 🟢 Manage Expenses vs Growth – I accomplished this early by letting go of the two writers I had hired to help me with this site, and not investing in… well… anything else!
• 🟢 Keep Trying New Content Types – I’m still sticking to the strategy I set earlier in the year, but I get so little traffic it’s hard to draw any conclusions. Speaking of…
• 🟢 Triage Low-Performing Articles Quarterly – I am still looking at low traffic articles and doing some reorganizations/deletions to try and reduce the “low quality” content on my site, though I don’t expect it will move the needle much. Some SEOs said that my early deletions are likely why the site recovered at all, though it’s impossible to know for sure.

Like V&V, I have no idea what my new goals might be, or if this site will downshift to more of a maintenance mode as we move into 2025.

Eat Like Bourdain (June 2021)

Eat Like Bourdain continues to be the golden child, the only one that has survived Google’s many bullshit moves in the past 12+ months. It is definitely consistent for traffic and income; it’s not growing anymore as all the guides have been published and thus probably won’t grow ever again, and will just shrink over time as interest in Bourdain wanes naturally. That’s okay – that was part of the plan all along.

Here are the goals I set at the end of Q2:

• 🔴 Enthusiast, v3 – I set this as my #1 main goal in Q3, and spent a lot of time thinking about, researching, and scoping out my new vision for this project. In the end, I figured out that to do it the way I wanted would probably A) cost more than I could afford given how my other sites (and thus income) are suffering, and B) never have a return on investment because podcasting doesn’t pay enough unless you’re a top 1% podcaster. As such, I’ve finally retired the idea, unless you want to give me money you never want to get back to do this as a passion project.
• 🔴 Instagram/Social Community – I am literally the worst at Instagram, so I completely failed at this so far. I also tried posting to Facebook but it also flopped, so I stepped back from spending any time on this for now. Maybe someday I’ll get better at Instagram, but I think we’re all aware I’m mostly deluding myself by even saying that…

I obviously have room to improve, though I think that the most realistic outcome of these goals is two red dots in the end. That’s something I need to come to terms with… or maybe set new goals?

Sites On Hold

I started this section in Q1 of this year, to cover the sites that I am stepping back from. I’m not one to easily let things go, so these quarterly updates are letting me still feel connected to each project and wrap up any loose ends before I move on entirely.

• Discover Sausalito (January 2020) – Since last quarter, I have done exactly nothing on Discover Sausalito and have seen exactly zero impact of my doing nothing. I have a grand plan of migrating a few more articles to V&V and creating an ebook before year’s end, but we’ll see if I ever get around to it!
• Follow the Butterflies (April 2020) – It’s the time of year when Follow the Butterflies gets its best traffic and affiliate income of the year, which technically means that I should keep this site alive and just let it earn whatever it does. I’m still on the fence though; I might still let it expire just to get it off my mind.
• Great Plains Travel Guide (March 2021) – I continue to migrate content from Great Plains Travel Guide to my main site, even though it too showed some signs of life during the August Core update. Nothing is doing as well on V&V as it was on GPTG, but removing this domain from my mind will be a weight lifted even if I end up deleting the content from V&V someday too.
• Jordan Traveler (May 2021) – As mentioned in my last accountability update, I wasn’t sure what (if any) attention I would give Jordan Traveler going forward. It has not shown any signs of recovery; between Google and Israel’s bullshit, that’s not a surprise. I’m vaguely keeping my eye on it, but not publishing any new content and only marginally updating a few posts each year as needed.

Other Sites Not Mentioned

You might notice a few other sites I didn’t mention, and I wanted to address those here.

• Soup Whoop (April 2021) – Inexplicably, this site continues to get some traffic, and I just can’t let it go. I am thinking I might actually list it for sale – I could probably sell the recipes to a food blogger to at least get something out of it!
• D&D Community (April 2023) – I launched and almost immediately fell off the wagon with this site, but I plan to keep the domain as it does get a tiny bit of traffic and I own the branded Instagram account which has about 24k followers and thus a bit of value if I ever want to come back to it.
• Global Tiki Tour (February 2024) – I still have this domain and exactly one article on the site – which got its first-ever comment, so at least one person has been to the site! Who knows; maybe I’ll come back to this someday too.

I have two other sites for which the domains have expired (True Crime Podcasts & Visit Niihau), so I don’t even remember exactly when I started those. Needless to say, there are no updates there either!

And with that, I’ll leave this for now. These updates continue to become easier to write as I put sites on hold and focus on fewer of them, but I still find this helpful for myself to write and be accountable. Hopefully you too find them helpful as they offer a bit more of a peek behind the scenes! Have any questions about my various quarterly goals? I’m happy to answer in the comments.