Valerie & Valise 11-Year Report
[Case Study]

Time flies when you’re… struggling with your mental health? That’s definitely NOT the expression, but that seems to be the way of things for me this year. After watching many of my other sites get hammered by Google in late 2023, Valerie & Valise joined the club in 2024. Now, I’ve made it to my 11-year blogiversary, but I’m honestly wondering if there will be a 12th…

Blogging is getting harder, and I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that our old business model (write great content, optimize it for search engines (SEO), rank well in Google and get traffic, and monetize that traffic with ads, affiliates, and your own products – basically the whole premise of Site School) might be broken forever. It’s a brave new world, but I’m not feeling very brave after more than a decade in the industry.

After switching to my standard ‘case study’ format for this recap last year, I’m back again to give you a structured look at what I’ve learned, what I’ve concluded, and what I’ll be trying next when it comes to V&V in its 12th year. I hope I’ll be back in 12 months to report how it has all gone – I’ll at least be back to report if I’ve decided to finally call it in.

Until then, here’s the latest installment in my first and most beloved blog now that it’s been going for 11 years.

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 either continue semi-annual or switch to annual reports. Given the ages of all of my sites, I publish annual reports about each of them currently:

• Valerie & Valise – 11 years  (this post!)
• Space Tourism Guide – 6 years
• Discover Sausalito – 4 years
• Follow the Butterflies – 4 years
• London on My Mind – 3 years  
• Great Plains Travel Guide – 3 years
• Jordan Traveler – 3 years
• Eat Like Bourdain – 3 years

(Links will take you to the full list of reports about that site!)

Fast Facts

Here’s a glance at the stats for Valerie & Valise at the 11-year mark.

Date First Published	October 21, 2013
Articles Live (as of 10/01/24)	436
Publishing Cadence	3-5x per week
Monthly Pageviews	66,142 (Sep. 2024)
Max Pageviews	365,602 (Aug. 2023)
Organic Traffic % (last six months)	63.9%
Email Subscribers	15,071

Before going further, I want to make a few quick observations:

• Traffic is in the toilet right now. More on that below.
• My percentage of organic traffic has dropped a ton (it was in the 80%s last year); this is because of how much I’ve been working on non-Google traffic sources simultaneous to Google has been sending me less traffic. More on that below too.
• My email list has not really grown in the past year; it’s actually a little bit smaller. I’ve been working hard to keep my list clean and healthy, and at a size where I can afford the cost of the software I use to run it!

History & Status of Valerie & Valise

In years past, I’ve shared the following chart to explain how my traffic performs each month, year over year:

While I don’t have a traffic chart dating back to 2013, I thought the table above was the most helpful: it shows V&V over the years, and gives you a sense of how seasonal my site is throughout the year. Most years, the trend line was higher than the year before – 2022 (teal) was higher than 2021 (purple), and 2023 (orange) was higher than 2022 (teal), etc. That all changed this year, in 2024 (the black line).

As a result of the black line, I want to share a second chart:

This chart stacks the months into yearly buckets, showing the seasonality (the bump in the middle of each column) and the growth (or lack thereof) in certain years (the height of each column relative to one another).

To help make sense of these charts, here’s how I’d break down the history of V&V:

• Before 2017, I was fumbling in the dark; I had limited knowledge of SEO and didn’t get much traffic – it wouldn’t even be visible on that chart above even if I did add it!
• From 2017-2018, I began mastering SEO; you couldn’t see it right away, but I started to make real strides in growing my traffic.
• From 2018-2020, I had gone full-time and was flying on my blog; along with freelance work, I was able to be fully independent from a traditional job.
• In 2020, I felt the impact of the pandemic as a strong headwind.
• From 2021-2022, my site didn’t grow, but it certainly recovered as people began traveling again.
• 2023 was the the best year ever on my site, as the final impacts of the pandemic on travel behavior clearly ended and people were enthusiastic to explore the world again.
• From late in 2023 through this year, 2024 (so far), V&V has struggled due to Google updates, and a changing landscape of opportunities for traffic, for small publishers like me.

Honestly, looking at that second chart is heartbreaking for me, as I know I did nothing “wrong” to deserve a worse year – less traffic – this year compared with last year. I’ve been caught in the maelstrom of the AI-pocalypse, and it’s left me questioning my entire business (and certainly my business model).

I also made one other major change to my site – in September 2024 – that helps explain why that traffic was so low: I finally changed my domain to match my brand! Gone are the “valisemag” days; my domain is now valerievalise.com. This was primarily motivated by the fact I’m hearing that new domains can do well in Google – at least for a short time. Unfortunately, as of writing this, it’s too early to tell whether it helped or not.

Strategic Takeaways

Each year that I sit down to write this post, I duplicate it from the previous year/report and update or add new sections accordingly. For several years now, I’ve been referring back to the takeaways from previous years – and that still rings true this year.

Here are the takeaways from past years that are still relevant if you’re a blogger today – whether you’ve felt the impacts of Google updates in the last year or not:

• Diversify your income beyond “traffic-based” revenue streams like advertising and affiliates (Year 7)
• Build your audience off-algorithm too (Year 7)
• Too many places are still focused on vanity metrics (Year 8)
• The only constant is change (Year 10) – this is true for life in general!

You can read the corresponding past report for more context, but they’re pretty self-explanatory.

And here are a few new ones from the past year, which are specific to my experience with V&V…

We – You, Me, Each Small Publisher – are NOT Alone

During my talk about Facebook for bloggers at TBEX Anchorage (here are my slides, if you want them!), I asked everyone to put their heads down and vote if they felt an existential threat to their blog. 50% of people said they did – and I am one of those people.

This has been one of the hardest years of my life, and part of the reason is that my business has struggled and stumbled so much – and basically none of it is because of anything I did or didn’t do. Google just decided to change their business model, and it has destroyed my (our) business model in the process.

I don’t have a solution yet – though I do have ideas, and more on that below – but I want you reading this to know you are not alone if you feel uncertain or scared or sad about your blog and what to do next.

I’ve been processing the grief of losing my business with my therapist for a few months now, because that’s really what we’re going through. We have lost something we once had, maybe something that we even defined ourselves by, and it’s one of the hardest things that may ever happen in your life. It takes time to process and move through this kind of loss, especially as entrepreneurs for whom our businesses are like our children, but it’s important to know you’re not alone in it. I’m here if you need an ear or hug or whatever. The comments and my DMs are open.

EEAT is Out / Don’t Drink Google’s Koolaid

It was funny in a not-funny kind of way, but I attended an SEO roast at TBEX this year, and the person who roasted me told me I needed to focus on my EEAT. That’s funny-not-funny because I’ve been preaching the gospel of EEAT for years (like through this post), and I even spoke about EEAT in SEO at both TBEX Tri-Cities and Travelcon in Memphis in 2022. I know about EEAT and why Google said it was important – and I now know it’s a load of horse shit. (Excuse my language, but I’m done playing nice when it comes to Google.)

Starting in September 2023 with the “Helpful” Content Update, and with every subsequent update, Google has been revealed to either have lied to publishers – bloggers – about what actually matters, or has been gaslighting us about our sites and how we can improve.

(This is not to say that the core tenants of EEAT – expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness – are not important to readers, but that you should have been demonstrating that in your content anyway. If you don’t have those core pillars in all you write, why are you writing it?)

I’m done buying Google’s lines – their lies – about what matters when it comes to ranking, and I hope you can start to see their true colors too. Even if you haven’t been hit by an update yet as V&V has, I assure you, Google’s coming for you and your business. They don’t care if small publishers exist anymore, because what we’ve built has already been vacuumed into the LLMs and AI chatbots. It’s time to move into a post-Google world as bloggers, where any organic traffic we receive is just a bonus.

(Rand Fishkin, who I have long respected and has been generally right about the state and future of the internet for decades, has a great video that finally helped me realize that my golden Google days are over.)

Building a Brand Off-Blog is Essential

As part of the 2023-2024 Google updates, they told us we need to build ourselves as brands. While I generally believe that Google is full of shit and we shouldn’t use their guidance for strategic decisions going forward, I do think that brand awareness is absolutely crucial going forward.

In a world where only the big brands get rankings, traffic, and compensation for licensing their content for LLMs, you must carve out your own space by being active on other platforms and literally building a name for yourself – a brand – that people know and trust and search for directly when they do search.

Last year, I talked about “being inimitable” and how social media might be part of that future of blogging in a new way; that has definitely proven true for V&V, where I’ve been working to build a Facebook presence for a few years now. Keyword presence.

I am actively on Facebook every day, engaging with my audience, sharing content, and fostering a sense of community. Facebook might be one of the few social media platforms where that is possible; Instagram and TikTok are also possible, but a bit harder from the community-building standpoint.

Pick a platform, any platform*, and start to dedicate time to it. On my end – at least for V&V – that will continue to be on Facebook, where the demographics match my blog demographics, and where I feel like I can share my story in an authentic way, almost like the early days of blogging.

(*For comparison, Eat Like Bourdain has a better opportunity to do this on Reddit and Instagram, so it’s really about finding the right platform where the audience is active and becoming an active presence there.)

What’s Next for Valerie & Valise

I’m writing this post about two weeks before my 11th blogiversary, when I’m feeling motivated to share my thoughts and ideas… in another two weeks, who knows how I’ll be feeling!

In any case, I’ve been stewing on some ideas for what I might do next with V&V, under the assumption that it will never be as good or easy for bloggers to earn lots of money via mostly-organic traffic. If Google wants to reward my sites at some point in the indeterminate future, I won’t say no – but it would be nice to try and build something that can survive either way.

As I mentioned above, I’ve started to come up with a plan, though I’m sure it will change 25 times between now and next year’s report – assuming there is one, and that I don’t choose to hang up my hat and try something new. I’ve tried to be open and transparent with my blog’s community and this one that it’s a real possibility that I’ll retire and move on; you’re also not alone if you decide to do that, too.

Okay, onto what I’m planning for the coming year…

All-In on Facebook

It is very clear to me that my community is on Facebook. I was fortunate to semi-accidentally stumble into the place I now find myself: 100k+ group and 35k+ page followers. This is a powerful position to be in as I try to plan my next steps with my blog; it’s also something I can fall back on with a number of monetization options.

In any case, I’m planning to stay wholly dedicated to my Facebook presence in the next year; here are the concrete ways:

• Continue to post daily on my page and in my group, to grow the community and drive traffic*
• Test different content types and formats to try and get the best engagement possible
• Scale up my post frequency to try and maximize the Facebook Performance Bonus Program earnings
• Offer (paid) sponsorship posts on my page
• Run ads when the costs work, to grow my page and increase blog traffic*
• Use my group to continue funneling people to my email list and Instagram

*More on this in a sec…

Facebook is really an incredible platform for brands if your audience is there and you know how to use it; I’m going to try and maximize my good position on the platform this coming year.

Stay Committed on Email

In addition to EEAT, I’ve been preaching about email for years, and let me tell you a short story about why email is still SO powerful:

I recently participated in the Ultimate Explorer contest; it was a stupid public voting competition where you had to get the most votes each week to stay in the running. I made it all the way to the semi-finals by promoting almost exclusively to my email list. Also, that same group of people donated over $3,000 as part of casting votes for me to win. I’m still stunned at that number, because it shows that the people on my email list really care – about me and about the causes I care about. As the e-commerce marketers say, “the money’s in the list,” and that’s really true: you can sell to your list, you can ask them to donate money, etc. – real, actual dollars, pounds, whatever currency, that’s where you can find it.

I can’t ask for $3,000 in donations on Facebook, I assure you.

Anyway, all this is to say that email is still essential, or perhaps is even more essential now that Google’s turning off the hose of free traffic. Please, please start building your list if you’re not. And if you have a list, why the heck aren’t you emailing them every week???

(I have written monthly guides for ideas of what to send your list – November and December are already scheduled – so you can’t use the excuse of “I don’t know what to send!”)

For V&V, I’m going to continue focusing on email:

• Send weekly general newsletters which are broadly focused on travel and life
• Send weekly Alaska newsletters (as that’s my biggest segment) to help keep that funnel of future travelers engaged
• Continue promoting my email list in my Facebook group (already mentioned)
• Rework my welcome series to ensure I’ve got it dialed in to try and maximize sales from those folks who are joining my list
• Run a good Black Friday offer (again) this year – this is coming up fast so I gotta get on it!

I’m sure I’ll have some more email ideas too; it’s one of my favorite areas of my blog to work on, even if I’m terrible at actually answering emails/replies. Speaking of…

(Also, if you’re a travel blogger stuck on getting your email system going, I am still selling the Travel Blogger’s Email Academy!)

Finally Figure Out Pinterest

For years, I’ve been frustrated by Pinterest; it represents a steady percentage of my traffic, but never seems to go up or down. As of publishing, I’ve recently formed a mastermind with a few other site owners, one of whom is a genius at Pinterest. I’m going to kneel at the altar of her wisdom to try and learn about Pinterest and see if I can actually drive traffic to my site. This is one of two experimental ideas I have for my site in the coming year.

“Paywall” My Blog Content

This is controversial, and may totally flop, but I’m going to start moving toward some sort of paywall system for my blog content. The open web is slowly closing as major publishers (think NYT, The Atlantic, CNN, etc.) are all putting up paywalls; small publishers can try and do the same, especially as a way to offset income losses from decreased traffic (and thus decreased ad revenue).

Google isn’t showing us anyway, so why not find other platforms and ways of serving up content to readers – many of whom understand that the content they want to access has value and needs to be paid for.

I’ve been brainstorming about the idea of adding on/moving toward a platform like Substack for the majority of my Alaska content specifically. I’d still leave some of my best top-of-funnel content available for free on my blog (and all my non-Alaska content), but I’d start to have the majority be hidden behind a paywall that people can pay to access ad-free – and which they’d also receive via email so as to not necessitate visiting a website to get info they want or need to plan their trip.

I am in the very early stages of thinking about this idea, but it’s something I might move toward throughout the next 12 months, such that people planning to visit Alaska in 2026 might need to become paid subscribers to access all 200+ Alaska articles I have. I think this will also help insulate me from having content scraped by LLMs (any more than it already has been!).

We’ll see – this is a big, stretchy idea that I’m still playing with. Maybe it’ll be my next TBEX talk 😂

Bringing it all together, I mentioned in the Facebook section that I’d still be driving traffic to my site. I’m planning to think of these three areas of focus as a new funnel: create a brand on Facebook, collect emails there, send people to my blog, collect emails there too, then email people paywalled content. Everything feeds into itself with most of my content behind the paywall but some of it is still available for social media/organic traffic. I hope that makes sense, because it only makes 75% sense in my mind at this point!

Okay, I’ll wrap it up here. Hopefully, I’ll see you next year for the big ☝️✌️ (one-two aka 12).

Do you have any other questions about this recap for Valerie & Valise? Let me know in the comments; I’m happy to share anything that I forgot to include!