How This Young Travel Blogger Grew From 0-$10k Per Month in Just 1 Year With SEO

Would you like to take a blog from 0 to $10,000 per month in 1 year?

Me too 🤝.

And today’s guest on the Niche Pursuits podcast is here to show us how it’s possible!

Nina Clapperton started a travel blog as a hobby and tried to grow it with social media and Pinterest.

She did everything except SEO, but after 4 years, she had no traffic or income to show for it.

In 2021 she shifted her strategic focus to SEO, and everything changed.

She gave herself an ultimatum, did a content audit, and got to work.

Within 1 year, her site reached 100,000 monthly pageviews, earning an average monthly income of $10,000 – and mostly from affiliate income.

In her interview, she dives into exactly how she did it and shares tons of actionable tips and tactics you too can use to grow your sites.

Including great stuff like:

• The outreach and guest posting approach she uses to build high-quality links for free
• How she completed an internal linking strategy expected to take 1 month in only 3 days (Hint: using Link Whisper)
• Her competitor analysis approach to finding new topics
• And a whole lot more…

So definitely take notes and enjoy!

Topics Nina Clapperton Covers

• Her goal to get on MediaVine within 6 months
• What ultimatum she set for herself to stay motivated
• What helped her learn about SEO
• The problems with relying on ‘short-term’ social media traffic for niche sites
• Why she’s diversifying out into other niches
• Updating old non-optimized/monetized content
• How she found her niche within the broader travel niche
• Her content audit process and how deleting and de-indexing content helped
• The importance of staying inside the site’s niche and covering a topic completely
• Determining what people want from the site based on the top posts
• Her competitive analysis approach
• How she goes beyond tools to find new opportunities
• Her publishing calendar
• How builds links without ever paying
• How she doubled her traffic in 2 months
• The importance of internal linking to her success
• How Link Whisper ‘saved’ her life
• Why anchor text is so important and how to use it effectively
• Using Reddit, Quora, Trip Advisor, etc., to find topics with little to no competition
• Her effective outreach and guest-posting approach
• A great Google search ‘hack’ for finding Mediavine sites in your niche
• Her revenue breakdown
• The huge difference between Canadian vs USA ad RPMs
• How she monetizes her email list
• Her affiliate auditing process
• Why she likes to test a few different affiliate offers on a post

Links & Resources

Sponsored by: Link Whisper

Watch the Interview

Read the Transcription

Jared: Welcome back to the Niche Pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman, and today we are joined by Nina Clapperton. Nina, welcome

Nina: Thanks, Jared. I’m really excited to be here. 

Jared: Yes, good to have you. Good to have. You we’re talking about one of your success stories here today, a website of yours, and it’s a specific website.

I, I think I’ve said this before, I just, I love when we get to deep dive into kind of a single sites journey, which is what we’re doing today. And, uh, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a site, the travel in the travel space, which we, we haven’t talked travel blog in a little while, but I know a lot of the things we’re touching on will cross over into, into so many different niches.

Why don’t, um, before we get into the details, how about you give us some backstory on, on your journey and, and a little bit more about 

Nina: who you are. For sure. Um, hi, I’m Nina. I’m Canadian, so I will drop some, uh, boots in here. I’m sure . Um, my friends always make fun of me for my accent. Haven’t lost it, even though I’ve lived abroad a lot.

Um, I started blogging when I was living abroad, actually. And it was, I did everything wrong. So, um, I started a travel blog and it was very like, hi mom. I’m alive around the world. And so it got no traffic. And I was, I wasn’t really convinced this was something I could make money at, but I figured some people were doing it, so why not me?

I think that’s kind of a mindset that I’ve had my whole life. It’s just like, why couldn’t I do it? Why not? And along the way, I spent about four years, which is a long time doing everything wrong, . I used all the Facebook groups to like drive fake traffic. Mm. Um, I wrote on fun stuff. I kept trying to get like Instagram and like Pinterest famous, but I can’t take a photo to save my life.

Like they’re all like, Grandpa blurry like nonsense photos, which I think is pretty common of many people that we try everything, not really knowing what works. And I think s e O isn’t like the sexy thing, so it’s not like, oh, people are posting about it on Instagram and stuff. So I didn’t see examples of its success for a long time.

And it really wasn’t until I started using SEO that I saw things kind of have a breakthrough. I finally decided to get serious about blogging. Stop, like listening to my dad telling me that online stuff isn’t a career. And from there, once I got really serious and put my dog in daycare, so I had time to finally do the work, things got a lot better.

And from there I kind of set a goal. Six months from that date I wanted to be in Mediavine, which was a bit ridiculous cuz my site at the time had about 5,000 page views. Um, and I think most people when they’re at 5,000 page views, don’t think they can get to 50,000 sessions in six months. But I figured why not?

Let’s give it a go. I also told myself, within a year I needed to get into Mediavine or at least be seeing more success with my blog, or I would need to go back to law school, which I had abandoned a few years before. 

Jared: Oh that. No, that’s the ultimatum right there. Yeah. And I, I, 

Nina: I literally, like, I got a full scholarship and instead, um, I started my blog and moved to New Zealand cause I found a $200 flight.

So thi things went in a very different direction. My grandmother still wonders why I did what I did, but it’s been the best decision for me. And once I got serious about it and started treating it like a business and not just this hobby that my dad could laugh at, or my sister could just like randomly share with her friends to be like, my sister’s crazy.

Why does she do these things? ? And it got a lot better. And SEO is, 100% the way that it worked. Cuz I don’t really understand social media and I’ve only gotten minorly better at taking photos cause my dog is extremely photogenic and I do nothing. I just point and shoot and he’s very 

Jared: cute. . Well, you follow a similar trajectory that a lot of people who end up doing SEO on their site follow, which is stumbling through some of the other growth channels and then ending up on seo.

What was it for you that made SEO o, like why did you turn to seo? Uh, was it just the last ditch, all this left to try to grow this? Or was there something that you had seen that, uh, you thought maybe lended itself well to what, what, what your skillsets were? 

Nina: I’m not sure exactly why I did it. I have an MA in publishing media and so I’ve done a lot of marketing stuff and in that MA we really focused on social media.

So I think to me, for so long I thought social media had to be the answer. And when the pandemic hit my, I was doing my MA in Oxford and I’m Canadian, so I got sent back here. Um, cause my visa just kinda got canceled and I thought, okay, well I have to do social media for the blog. And it just kept not working and I couldn’t understand why.

So I did a couple like bundle, like you kind of just download a bit of everything and see what happens. And I did, I think I started throwing spaghetti at the wall for a little bit and being like, what makes sense to me? Hashtags don’t. I j I, even now when I post on social media, I don’t use hashtags and it’s like the sin of social media.

I’m sure , even on my Instagram stories and like my, uh, reels and stuff, I don’t bother, but I found, I never know how to say his last name. FIA Fuchsia. 

Jared: I don’t know, but don’t, don’t take my word for it. I kind of live in a bit of a, of a hole over here. So , 

Nina: some of those things were like, I’ve read it for so long and I just, you don’t, I haven’t, I’ve only heard it a couple times.

Mm-hmm. and I’ve decided in my head how I would say it and I just stick with it. But I found, um, his stupid simple SEO course, which I think as well a lot of people, it seems to be the entrance to SEO for most people. Um, and I took the course and it, it’s an amazing course for sure. And I found it gave me kind of my start in seo.

I started understanding what a keyword is, but there were a lot of gaps for me that I didn’t like, I didn’t really know to not just target a high volume keyword that was like vaguely travel. I didn’t fully understand the niche idea and I didn’t really get like the travel side of it. I would even ask questions in the Facebook group and they were like, we don’t know.

It’s travel. Like it’s something completely different. And I think it’s. It is something that people struggle with cuz travel is a very kind of, I don’t know, an interesting niche that people want to write about. Cause it’s a passion. Like most of us have a passion for exploring and going to cool places and we’d love to get paid to like drink my ties in Spain and like take a couple photos.

But with S D O, you have to approach the bit differently than you do with other sites. I found. So that was my intro and from there I started realizing that like I really love data and I’ve always loved like data entry and stuff. And so getting to kind of connect with the keywords and the data of it made sense to me.

And finally my blog wasn’t just this like, yes, it’s a creative outlet in some ways I can write and have fun, but it wasn’t just like having fun and no one sees it. There were metrics I could track. There were things that I could follow along with that weren’t just. Yeah, post and hope it works or post and then spend 120 hours, which I was doing for a while in those Facebook groups to be like, look, I have 30,000 page views.

I got into she media that way, and then I got like no money because anytime I took a day off, I lost all that traffic cuz it was all synthetic and no one told me that was a bad thing for so long that I was like, Why not do it? And then when I learned that you could get it, get like good traffic and not be doing that for hours every day, that really appealed to me.

Jared: Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think that’s, that’s, that’s the upside right of SEO is if you do it right, sure. It’s a short term, you know, there’s not much gain from it in the short term, but the long term means you can take more than a, more than a day off. You can kind of walk away from it in many ways, and it will continue to grow and, and at least continue to, to be stable.

So, yeah. And I think, I know the, the, my, the course you’re talking about is Mike’s course. I don’t ever really referenced his last name, but, but, um, I’ve heard good things about that course. So when did you, like, let’s, let’s, let’s kind of get into the details here. When did you transition and start focusing on seo?

You mentioned the pandemic. Was it just a little while? . 

Nina: Yeah. So actually January, 2021 is when I took the course. Okay. Um, and I did not get through it quickly. Um, , I was sort of doing it step by step and then I would like spend a week on keywords and see what that was, and then spend a week on everything else.

And when there’s like 11 hours of lessons and you’re doing an hour a week, it takes a while. Yeah. Um, and so along the way I definitely bounced back to TikTok ba back to Pinterest and stuff. And it wasn’t actually until about October, 2021 that I sat down and I was like, okay, I need to do something. I was in my apartment in downtown Ottawa with a disaster puppy, cuz teenage puppies suck.

They’re just the worst. . I was working four jobs at the time trying to. Get an income from my blog and at that point I was really going after any money was good money regardless of how much effort it took me. So doing things like freelance writing where it takes a lot of time to write like 15,000 words for other people.

I was doing work at a, uh, as a law clerk at a law firm cuz like I needed to make ends meet even though I hate it . And then on top of all of that, I’m trying to get this blog going. So I was like crying in my apartment and I was like, I need to get serious about this. I need to figure it out. And it took me another month of wallowing before I finally like, it was really November, 2021.

I set this plan in place where I was like, okay, we’re going to do a month by month plan of getting into Mediavine and turning this into a full-time gig and turning this into something that I’m proud of and like, not that. I kind of embarrassingly tell people at my family functions like, yeah, I’m a blogger.

Like maybe kind of instead it was like, I’m a travel blogger and I am great at it and it’s going so well. And it’s more fun to say that . 

Jared: Well, so I mean, we’re recording around, what is it, November, 2022. So I mean, really you’ve been head down on SEO for, call it a year, you know, and yeah, you started, you know, reading, educating yourself about it.

Uh, so I, I don’t wanna, uh, get too far ahead of ourselves, but maybe fast forward to today, tell us some of, uh, the metrics about where the site is at. You’ve dropped a lot of hints about Mediavine and, and SEO has been the reason for so much of your success. Um, and then we’ll start to unwind, cause I’ve got a lot of questions about how you got there.

You’ve been doing some very interesting things along the way that I want to ask you. For 

Nina: sure. Yeah, so my main site, I now have a whole host of niche sites. Cause I got a bit addicted in April. April of this year I got into, or I hit just about Mediavine level traffic. In May, I got into Mediavine. Now today it’s at about a hundred thousand page views a month.

I make over $10,000 a month. Typically from that site. It drops down a bit in winter. I’m realizing because of the affiliate income, because I write a lot about globally, but I do have a lot of Canada tours and don’t come here in winter. It’s cold. And I’ve heard, I’ve heard, yeah. So a lot of the tours I have don’t run in winter, which just, it happens, it’s totally fine.

But I had my first $10,000 completely passive month in June of this year of 2022. And then since then, um, I kind of took some time off of that site. I definitely. Could have kept growing it a ton more, but I decided to start a couple other niche sites. I wanted to get into the niche site game a bit more and diversify from travel a bit.

But that site has continued even. I took three months of not posting a single thing and I did not lose any traffic. In fact, it continued to grow. Um, I wasn’t like, I wasn’t really doing anything with it. I think I emailed my list a couple times, but I, I was really bad about including links, to be honest.

During that time. Um, it was completely seo. I still don’t use Pinterest. I still, on my Instagram, it’s all just about seo. I don’t do travel on it. And then from there I, yeah, I’ve seen it really continue to grow and stay really present even through, I know 2022 has been like the year of hellish updates on Google.

It feels like, um, in BET it has. They don’t take time off over there. Like they don’t give us a break. It’ll be like someone posted on Twitter recently that was like, oh, finally a day without an update. And then that afternoon they did another, they did the 

Jared: spam update. There must be a bonus tier or something everyone’s trying to hit, you know,

It does 

Nina: feel a bit like the law firm where it’s like just however many like updates you can throw at them, you’ll just 

Jared: bonus you’ll make partner or whatever. Oh, it’s funny cuz it’s true though. . 

Nina: And the great thing is that it has, it’s really weathered the course. Now I’m setting up systems to have, uh, writers run it a bit more and let it be a bit more passive.

But it’s, it’s an amazing thing for like my passion project of something that was really personal. I moved to about 14 countries in the last 10 years. So it was really focused on my journey doing that, become this thing that’s sustaining me, continuing to 

Jared: do that. Wow. Congratulations. $10,000 month less than a year after you put your head down and started focusing on growing your site with seo.

That’s a really big accomplishment. And I mean, kudos. That’s amazing. 

Nina: Thank you. I mean, I think it also shows how much was there that just needed to be looked at differently. Like I definitely didn’t include affiliate links for a long time. Mm-hmm. , um, and did, cause I just thought I couldn’t do it. Same with seo.

I think for a while there I thought it’s just like, There’s some reason it’s not for me. And I was like, no, you’re just not doing it Right, . And so once you do it right, um, things go great. Yeah. And that’s I think kind of the moral is also letting it take time cuz Sure. Six months was six months, but I did like probably two years worth of work.

Jared: Six months and six months. Well, fair enough. Yeah. I think that’s good to point out. I think a lot of people might hear this and say, oh, it’s that easy. You know, and you’re making out like it, it was right in front of you, but it sounds like there was a lot of work along the way. And, and, and let’s talk about that workload.

I’m looking at my notes here. I mean, we’re, let’s, let’s rewind back to October, 2021. November, 2021 when you really started putting your head down, by the way, quick question. What age is a teenage puppy? I didn’t know puppies could be teenagers. 

Nina: Um, he was about six to eight months old. This kinda, ah, it’s like puberty.

It’s one they puberty. Yeah. Yeah. So it was, 

Jared: it’s when they start growing under their paws. 

Nina: Yeah. And he, he’s a service dog too, so we’re, we, were doing like full-time service, dog training. And it turns out that like, like any teenager at school, um, they rebel a lot and they get really mad that they have to like, go to the grocery store and not eat steak that you put in front of them.

Luckily, he’s gotten through that and he’s a kind boy now. 

Jared: I, I, I always say I, I learned something new on every podcast, but I, I, I didn’t expect to learn that. But anyways, I digress back to kind of October, November last. I, I’m always fascinated by this question. When someone has a website that they’ve had for a period of time, they are going about it a different way.

You, you were going about it, social media and all these things, and then you pivot into seo. You start with a website that has a bunch of fragments out there, a bunch of articles out there, a bunch of stuff out there that’s not really built for seo. What was the process to start with? Did you go back and really tweak a lot of your old content?

Did you leave it there and just go full tilt forward with an SEO strategy? Did you kind of blend a little bit? Like, I’m just curious what you did with this site that you’d already built that wasn’t optimized to get off the ground with back in, um, back in the end of 2021. 

Nina: Yeah, it was four years old, so it had, uh, I think about 180 posts on it or something like that.

A decent number. I think three got decent organic traffic completely by accident. Um, I had a post about like Canada that during like one of the elections went minor minorly viral because everyone wanted to leave the US but nothing that brought anything significant. So what I kind of did is I sat down and I was like, okay, let’s look at my site.

And at the time I was a solo female travel niche, which I’m not anymore because I realized. Being a very general solo female traveled niche is too general. And I think in travel, that’s really the hard thing to know is like, yes, travel’s not a niche, but a lot of things like budget, travel, not a niche, general family travel, not really a niche either.

There’s still too overarching and so I saw kind of people saying, pick a niche that should just be a little bit narrower than travel. And I went with solo female travel partially cuz I saw people doing it on Instagram as well, which as we know, not the best model for seo. From there, I really sat down and I was like, okay, what are the posts that are already getting traffic?

What are the posts that like when I email about them or people comment on them, it’s. And not the fake comments from the threads, but what’s like the organic stuff that’s happening? Mm-hmm. And it was my living abroad post about like being an expat. And I moved abroad when I was 16 by myself and just said like, bye to my family and move to Italy.

Great decision. Highly recommend, except you will go up three pants sizes from pizza, which is not great, to a 16 year old self-esteem . And so because of that, people were responding to those. I was seeing that I was getting good traction, so I pivoted and I was like, you know what? I’m gonna leave those strategies behind, move towards a different niche, but I’m gonna update what exists already.

So I lived in New Zealand, I live in Canada. I had a lot of posts on those places that were salvageable, I guess is the best way to put it. Yeah. Yeah. So like in uh, November, December, I basically sat down and created like a map of my site. And I looked at every single post and I was like, what is trash?

What is, hi mom, I’m in Singapore. Those need to go . What is, um, actually decent and relevant information that I could update. And I think what I did that a lot of people don’t do is I wasn’t afraid to delete things and I did like a ation of like 30 to 50 posts. I know index another 50. And I think in the world of just blogging, a lot of us use the number of posts as like this kind of like vanity metric to some sense of like, oh, when a blog gets to like a hundred posts, it’ll see whatever success.

And it’s not true cuz the posts have to be relevant and good and have a keyword. Like most of these didn’t have a keyword. So then I looked at them and I was like, okay, these can be salvaged. Now it’s time to do the keyword research for every single one to write a brand new outline. Even for the ones that probably just needed a little bit of a tweak, I would, I prefer to kind of.

Start from scratch and then build those old paragraphs into the new outline as best I can. So I, over the course of December and January, updated every single post on my site for January. Every day I rewrote a post completely. Wow. December was like finding the keywords, going through all the posts. Most of those ones just needed like minor tweaking to fit.

I even updated posts that were ranking number one, which I know is like a big no-no. But they were ranking number one for like two keywords, so I knew I could get like at least 10. Nowadays I go for like 50 , so they needed an update. 

Jared: Well, let me ask you a question about that really quickly. You said there were only a couple posts that were really getting much traffic.

So for all the posts that weren’t getting traffic, did you find that these articles, I guess you had written about a topic that was being searched, but it wasn’t optimized for it and you were optimizing around that? Or had, I mean were these posts that just, you were basically starting over again about the general concept.

I’m just curious cuz it sounds like you had some really good success with it. 

Nina: Yeah, it was both, to be honest. Some of them, um, I updated too because I did this kind of, I didn’t do this as structured as I could have done to be fair. So there were definitely some that I spent time updating that like nowadays knowing what I do, I wouldn’t have wasted that time on something that’s like a 50 monthly search volume keyword and there weren’t any other options.

But if it’s already written, I was like, well, let’s just do a bit of work and see. Um, some of them did surprise me too, which I think is the good part during this is I was willing to be surprised and I was willing to. Have things tank and have things grow and just like see what happened. I didn’t need every single thing I did to work because at that point nothing was working.

So even having like 5% work would’ve been better. But I would say about 80% of the posts I updated saw significant returns. A few of them definitely. I’ve, I’m doing my content audit again. I’ve started doing, like, I do one every few months now, but I, I typically do like a big one every year now. Um, and a few of those are gonna get like ousted now , but for the time they worked, they also, um, supported the site.

Two of them, my grandma really loved and I love my grandma, so I was like, I’ll keep ’em, it’s fine . Um, but mostly it was like I am a very good writer. That’s something that I definitely have as a claim to fame for myself. And so they were well written, but some of them were stories and they weren’t keyword.

Some of them too, needed to be amalgamated. I had like something about visiting Singapore beyond the, hi mom, I’m in Singapore. That was like built into three parters, kind of like, yeah, yeah. Like I, I say that would be an email. Now to me that’s more of a newsletter, not a blog post. So I just built them into one blog post and kind of Frankenstein them.

But definitely, uh, I had like good bones kind of hidden in there. And some of them did need to like be rewritten or that just became what existed before, became a small part of a new post. Um, but because I’ve been a freelance writer for a really long time as well, I can write pretty fast. And so going through and updating a lot of these, it wasn’t.

The end of the world to spend the time on. 

Jared: Yeah. I, I think, well, you must be, um, you must be a good writer. You just used the word amalgamated, which, um, I don’t think has ever been used in podcast history, so, uh, . No, that’s good. That makes a lot of sense though. It does make a lot of sense. Especially, I mean, it really sounds like you almost MacGyver this, this, this, this website into something that made sense.

You pulled from some articles, you analyzed the stories and yanked those, you redid posts that were ranking for certain keywords, some posts you just rewrote. I mean, you took a really, really top down, um, approach to it from what it sounds like. Um, so were the results from that immediate, because I know you then moved on to starting to write new content with a more keyword optimized focus.

When did that transition happen? Was it after these posts started to get some traffic and you had some momentum, or did that take a while for the updates to sync in and you just had to start writing new content? Um, kind of hoping that, that it would work out. 

Nina: I think a couple posts started to do better.

So posts that were like, there were some that just by accident were on like the fourth page of Google for something kind of related. And so I was able to pick those up a bit more and kind of push them forward. And because like the recent posts as well, kind of late 2021, I at that point knew a little bit about keyword stuff.

So I had started going towards it, but some were like a beach essentials packing list and I had no posts on a beach at all on their site, . So I was like, why did I do this? Um, so some of those just got, um, kind of, that one got deleted entirely, but there were some kind of like that, like had a good keyword.

but I’d kind of half-assed it cuz I was still doing Pinterest nonsense for no reason. Um, and some did like, really surprise me and took off immediately. Uh, I think there were a couple that were like, yeah, within the top five pages. Um, I updated them and then I, I resubmitted everything for indexing. So even if I had just added in a sentence, at that point my site was so bad, I was like, that sentence needs to make or break suck

So I’m gonna re-index it and going through as well. And like, I still have some solo female travel, like kind of focused posts that work within the overall framework of my site. But I really sat there and I like even the ones I updated, I only, I only updated posts that would fit into my new niche pillars.

And I had kind of set up two that I was gonna work on. I saw a tiny success and then I was like, well, I’m gonna leave this. Um, I definitely thought I’d failed at it to be honest, and I wasn’t like, Super hopeful that it would work. Um, so I kind of then I was like, okay, well I’ve done a month. I have to move 

Jared: on.

Yeah. It’s just done even. Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean, I think for everyone listening, there’s a really, you keep talking about it and so I want to ask you about it. I don’t know if now’s the right time, maybe I will. But like you keep talking about how focused you became about publishing content and updating content that fit your, um, your niche, right?

And that, that kind of stayed in the lane of the topics you wanted to cover. Whereas before you were very topically diverse, you really honed in on these topics and then were pretty ruthless about cutting content. And then the way that you wrote the new content, making sure that it related to these new, um, these new topics.

Uh, how did you land on these topics and how did you land on, on these niches as it related to a general travel blog, as you said at that point? Yeah, I think I 

Nina: started, um, I think as most travel bloggers do, and lots of them continue to do writing about places I’ve been that I’ve wanted to write about. So I know people, like, I’ve had coaching students who have a blog on Portugal, but then they go on a holiday to Russia and they’re like, I wanna write two posts on Russia.

And I’m like, don’t do it . Like, just, it, it doesn’t, if your entire site is Portugal, it makes no sense. Mm-hmm. . Um, so for me it was looking at it that way of like, if I went to an expat site and I am looking for my next adventure abroad, what is exactly what I wanna know and what is extraneous that I would need to like the person enough to bother reading?

And I just assumed. I was as unlikeable as possible in those moments. So I’m like, they only want exactly what they want and I wanna give them that. Um, so for me, I looked at my top posts, my top, basically, I did look at the top 20, but three were like pretty indicative. And they were about living abroad, Canada and New Zealand.

And I was like, okay. I’ve got my three, but because I wanna focus on two things, I cut out New Zealand. I wasn’t living in New Zealand then I was living in Canada. So I was like, I’m here. I’ve got the original images, , I’ve got the experiences. Um, and it’s really easy to like give advice on Canada, um, generally.

And because living abroad it’s very hard to find like a living abroad tour . So for affiliates it just doesn’t work the same way. Um, unless, and like you’d need to like be a Visa specialist or something. And I’m not and I don’t wanna be. So for me, I picked two things that I knew would be good for affiliate income and good for ad income.

Um, and that I saw weren’t being served in the way that I wanted them to be. Cuz a lot of people for both of those niches, um, are very Instagram focus. So from there I just like deep dived into keywords. So I love competitive analysis. I think it’s super, super fun. Um, and so for me, I really started looking at like who were people ranking in the top 10 for posts I was already doing well with?

Who are people that if I searched, like I know the traditional way is you just search like best travel blogs or Best Canada blogs, um, I don’t find that is as useful for travel bloggers for us. Instead, I find looking at the keyword itself, um, because most people don’t niche as much as they should in travel.

So search, like if your thing is on Canada search, things to do in Canada, search Canada bucket list and then see the top 10 serve results and then mine, those competitors, some of them will be completely irrelevant, but some will be hyper, hyper-relevant and will be Canada. And then that’s where I started to build this.

Like I spent a week doing this and I built a list of like 1400 keywords that were solely Canada posts. And then I built one about living abroad. And so from there, um, I created like a little content calendar for myself where every, um, every, every week I had to publish minimum two posts, but in a month I would publish 10 new posts, um, completely new, not existing on my site, already, not an updated post brand new.

And I would go for anything that was over 300 monthly page views. Um, they didn’t need to be thousands, they needed to be relevant and that I could connect and then I would build in extra secondary keywords for sure. Um, and so, Kind of like two weeks. I just did a ton of keyword research. I’d mined my competitors, I saw their site structure.

I looked at different ways that they were building things out. And I noticed that the main thing was, and it’s is very true in travel, people will post one thing on the subject and then move on. So if they do things to do in Canada, most niche site people and niche site experts, I would say, um, they would do things to do in Canada, then things to do in Canada at night, then free things to do in Canada.

And I think people know. Be more varied, but in travel we just wanna like move on to the next fun thing. Um, it’s kind of part of our personalities. I think we’re always like hunting for the next fun thing. And I realize the not fun posts do really, really well. And to this day when I coach my travel blogging students on this, I get the most pushback when I’m like, right on this keyword that’s on like the local drinking laws.

And they’re like, no, that’s boring. I don’t want to, or, or like the big one that I see a lot is like, can I buy alcohol in whatever? With a US id. And I’m like, that is such a good question. And it’s a question a lot of people have and no one asks, like no one writes on it, but everyone asks it. Same for 

Jared: like, can I rent a car?

I see the lawyer in you coming out right now, by the way, . It’s true, it’s true. . 

Nina: But even like, can I rent a car in X with whatever, like with this other license? People wanna know. Cuz like, I think with travel you become such an expert, you forget that other people don’t know everything. So like I’ve traveled, I once like maruka suitcases inside of each other to travel abroad.

So I had three suitcases stacked inside of each other to prepare for moving abroad so that I could like expand what I got there and buying more stuff. . And people are like, what? How did, how did you do that? Like, or, or, I lived out of a suitcase with eight t-shirts for another year. Like I do weird things with packing that I thought everyone did and I didn’t, didn’t occur to me.

So it’s, it’s really not being afraid to write on the boring stuff and the fun stuff and write on one thing to death is kind of what I did. Like I thought right now I’d be off these pillars and I’m not 

Jared: still. Yeah. I think another thing you did that, um, might be worth highlighting as well is you actually went to these websites of people that were writing about it and didn’t just rely on a tool, like a, a keyword research tool or something, because you can learn a lot from a keyword research tool and from, you know, using these tools to get competitors that are maybe lower in competition or that are, you know, hyper relevant to your niche, but man, when you get on to their content and really actually observe it and you can kind of find those holes that way, that no tool really shows you in many.

Nina: Yeah, I don’t, I have trust issues and I don’t trust keyword research tools, . So I, um, and I did all of this with Key Search too, I should say. I think a lot of people upgrade pretty quickly to HS and things like that, which like, I love hrs. I am very much pro atress, but when you’re not making money, like you can’t afford it and it’s not the tools that I think make or break your SEO strategy.

It is the strategy and the commitment to implementation. Like you just need to be tenacious and keep pushing even when it seems very, very helpful. , 

Jared: as you go. So let’s talk about that. I mean, what, how long until you started seeing some success in terms of organic rankings? This probably takes us into early 2022 in terms of, uh, writing these keyword optimized articles after you’ve gone out and done a ton of competitor analysis, but you had a fairly quick ramp up from what it feels like to me.

You were on Mediavine in April of 2022, and I think they’re what, 50, 60, 70,000 page views on a minimum. So you clearly got this site doing well. What was the ramp up in terms of traffic and how many articles were you publishing every month? 

Nina: So I published a minimum of 10 articles a month. Um, I did try and add in like one collab post where I would get people to collab on my site rather than just doing theirs.

Um, so I didn’t start writing new posts until February of 2022. Um, so from February to end of April, those were all new posts. Um, and I think some months I definitely did more than 10. I was able to get closer to 20. Yeah. Um, I think that was one month that I got like really close to 20, but kind of at average 10 to 12 a month.

Um, on top of that I was building back lengths, which I think is a dirty word in the niche site community of like building them rather than buying them or waiting . Um, I’ve never paid for a link. I didn’t have the money to, to be honest. I would’ve loved to like fast track, but I couldn’t. Um, but at the time I needed back links as well to like build those.

So I. . Basically, I wrote those articles from February to April. Um, and I don’t know exactly like I, I saw like triples of things happening. Um, I think it was in March that I hit 30,000 page views, but by the end of April, um, I think actually it might have been like a bit into May. Um, I hit 60,000 page views and for me that was 50,000 sessions.

So, um, it basically doubled in two months. Yeah. And two of the really big ways, or I guess there were three things I did in that time, um, that we can then probably break down a bit more. I built back links. Um, I built like at least 15 a month. Then, um, I did internal linking, which I had never done before and it was a disaster beforehand,

Um, and then I started writing zero volume keywords. And that last one brought me 14,500 sessions in one month from about eight posts 

Jared: that has zero search volume according to a, uh, keyword research 

Nina: tool. Yeah, I mean, I think the term zero search volume is really misleading. I prefer like, zero competition keywords.

Okay. Because some of them had like a hundred or 200 on key search. Um, I know another method is like just searching on Google, but for me, I, I found a way to basically mine Quora or Reddit or the TripAdvisor forum inside of Key Search, um, which you can do in a trust more easily, but like this is a newer thing on key search where when you do your competitor analysis, you can filter by keyword and by rank.

And so I was able to find thousands of questions ver like that, um, us drinking law examples from that where people were asking these questions like, is Canada in Europe? And I was like, that’s a dumb question. And it’s like, but actually if a thousand people are gonna end up searching for. Why don’t I write like, who cares if it’s dumb, let’s write on it

And so doing things like that where I definitely tried to build in a fun keyword here and there to like keep my spirits alive. Cuz it’s more fun to talk about skating the RTO canal than it is to like talk about us drinking laws abroad and stuff like that. Um, but really that jump in one month was very much these low competition keywords that would rank in like a couple days and not that usual like Google test ranking of, oh we’ll like put you on page one for a minute.

And then they’re like a really withholding, like high school boyfriend and they just take it all 

Jared: away. And you’re like very quickly too. Very quickly. 

Nina: And like, and that’s always like so depressing to have it moved down. Yeah. Yeah. So like I thought it was too good to be true, to be honest. I was. Ranking, when’s it gonna fall?

And then it never fell. And that worked massively well. And with that one, it’s actually what I use now to build new sites, new niche sites, to rank without a da, without like a full site structure up yet, is those keywords that can rank immediately. And you don’t need to build 15 back links a month to them.

Jared: Well, let’s talk about backlinks. I mean, I think, um, you know, uh, you might say that it’s, it’s not a popular topic or whatnot, but it’s a very popular topic. I think people love to hear backlink strategies or, well, I mean, you were building 15 backlinks a month. That’s, um, that’s certainly not, uh, amateur, you know, in terms of the, the, the amount of time and effort and perhaps also expertise required.

What were your strategies? You can keep it high level so that we, you know, cause we could, boy, we could probably get into the weeds and do an entire episode on it. But from a high level, like what were your strategies to start driving these links to the, to the website? 

Nina: So the first thing I did that I saw a lot of success with is a lot of those posts that were well written and that like were, they could rank for a keyword, but it’d be so far out of my reach.

My DA was about 24 when I started this, um, which is pretty high. And a lot of that is from just like all the synthetic nonsense I did. And I know people who have gotten media. Vine was far less, but that’s why I think DA is kind of vanity too. Um, but I would find sites at a DA of like 50 and I would pitch them this post I already had that existed that I would like tweak a little bit and I would say, Can, I guess post this on your site and I’ll redirect it from my site that already exists to make sure that there’s no like, canonical issues with the u r URL or with like copy content or anything.

Um, I , this is a lawyer in me coming out again. I kept offering to like sign agreements to like show that I would keep the redirect up and they were like, no, no, no, it’s fine. We trust you. And I was like, okay, that’s great. I love this. This is so much better than law. Um, which it, I dunno. Blogging proves every single day that it’s better than law, I think.

And from that I already had these posts that I had written. I had about five that I did this with cuz I was like, they’re already there. And like I know someone whose site is at like a DA of 55. They could rank for this so easily. And I just, it’s so far out of my reach. Same with those solo female travel ones.

There’s so many seats, solo, female travel blogs out there who I offered those posts to who I could be like, here’s a post. I’m not looking for money, I’m just looking for like a couple back links. And that worked really well from there. That buoyed me up, I think to like, Just start not fearing a no. So I was like, okay, you know what?

I am just gonna hold outreach to everybody . And um, so what I did is, first of all, I searched on Google for sites with Mediavine, um, that were in Mediavine in my niche. And you can do that just by searching for, um, the Mediavine privacy policy. They have this like one sentence in the top, and I don’t remember off the top of my head, but it’s like Media Vine, V 1.4, programmatic something.

And if you search that on Google plus your niche, you can find all these blogs in Mediavine. Um, which usually means that they’re doing pretty well with their traffic. Mm-hmm. . So I would go onto those and then I would look to see if they had guest posts already somewhere on their site, if they had it written in their work with me page or their contact page.

And then I would write them and I would first praise two articles of their site. You always wanna like show that you know, their. And then from there, um, I would pitch a guest post and I’d make it super, super clear. I do not want money. I’m not one of those people who’s like, I dunno, we all get those emails every day that’s like, hi sir or madam.

And it’s like, come on. Like my name is in my site. Like, or my name is on the sidebar, or my name is on the Contact Me page where you got this email like, do something, do some work. Um, and I made really clear that like, I just wanna help out, here’s some ideas. And then I would research keywords and I would pitch really good keywords.

So I wasn’t pitching like the US drinking law post . I was like researching these great things to do posts, even affiliate posts for some of them, if their DA was high enough, I would write them a free affiliate post that I knew would rank for them that way, like they’d make the money. But I would get that juicy, juicy back leg

And it really did help grow my site. And then I made sure as well that I pointed the back link at articles that needed help. So I kept a little spreadsheet. I love spreadsheets. It’s like I literally had to make like three separate Google drives cause I keep maxing out the memory from all the spreadsheets I have and I’m too cheap to just upgrade

So, um, I had this spreadsheet of like, which posts needed a bit of love to like get a bit higher and then I would write, um, articles for these other people. And then in travel, honestly for travel, we do have it a bit easier cuz there’s like 10 Facebook groups that offer collab posts for travel. You go into them and then you just like stalk them to find opportunities for something you can write on.

Um, I actually didn’t use Haro at all for this, like, help a reporter out. I’ve done it before. I do find it’s more work and for me during this, like I needed the Lazy Girls guide to rank on Google basically cuz like until, um, I, I quit three of my jobs at the beginning of uh, or no, I guess middle of March.

Um, cause I was moving house anyway, so I was like, I need. Pair down a little bit as I move. Um, and so from there, I also think because I lost income, I was like really motivated to do this Mm, mm-hmm. . But when I quit those jobs, um, it did free me up to write some more of these. And I wasn’t gonna spend all my time on horror pitching things I wanted, like an immediate return.

And those collab groups, like I would write on things not related to like, to my site, which I think people are confused about. Like I said, I’m living abroad in Canada, why am I writing a post about like, um, doing a like, uh, a World War II tour in Portugal or something? But if you can skew the back link to be relevant, like, oh, when I was living abroad, I visited Portugal.

You use living abroad as your, um, your, your anchor text, you get a link back to something relevant. So it’s just about like skewing it a little bit. And that’s also with guest posts where I would write those posts that I think a lot of travel bloggers find fun, but they can’t fit on their site. So okay, I did this really fun thing in like Oxford or I don’t know, I went to Stratford upon Avon and saw Shakespeare’s like tombstone.

From there I was like, well, doesn’t fit my site, but there’s so many UK sites out there, let’s write it for them. And then I will get like the recognition that I wrote it and I get those back links. Um, and you build great connections that way too. Like I’ve made some of my best friends from random cold outreach and I think people are really scared of it.

But the worst they can do is say no. Like, and mostly what’ll happen is like half the time they’ll just delete it. They won’t even read it. Who cares? That’s fine. And then like 25% of the time, if not more, my rates closer to 40%. They’ll say, yes, you write a post and then you get great back links. and to me, like having looked at the price, buying back links to get a good one, like if you’re getting three good ones, probably need to spend over 500 bucks.

So I saved that money by writing this really quick post for them instead. And then I started looking at, at it as a way of like budget link building, almost . And that also motivated me cuz I didn’t wanna spend 500 years, every time I needed a couple back. 

Jared: Wow. That’s a, that’s a great success story. I think a lot of people can get a lot out of that.

I mean, you know, in sales they teach you that every no is just one step closer to the next. Yes. , which is incredibly cheesy, but, uh, psychologically definitely helpful, you know, and, and you just have to used to, you have to get used to, to hearing. No, and it sounds like you got really good at hearing No, but saw the silver lining through all of it.

You’ve also mentioned, so we, we talked about a couple of things that, that you said were fundamental in growth. Um, uh, picking pillars. We talked about that. Uh, you kind of niched, niched down to Canada and living abroad. Talked about backlinks. That’s a healthy number of backlinks you were building. And, um, I, I can’t, I, that had to have no wonder you had to quit a couple jobs to get that accomplished.

That that sounds like it was pretty time intensive. Now what about internal linking? You said the internal linking was a hot mess on the. 

Nina: Yeah, so I had looked at like what other people did, which I think is the biggest flaw you can do as a blogger is looking at anybody, look at the successful people and they’re harder to find.

It’s harder to figure out who they are, but I saw people just like, they would have the word New Zealand and then they would just link to any New Zealand post on their site, but there was no rhyme or reason for it. So I did that for a while and then I was, but I also didn’t check what posts had links.

There were so many orphan posts on my site that were like poor baby orphans just sitting in the corner like, please help me. So I set aside a month in my original plan to do internal linking cuz I had heard it was really, really hard and I was like prepped for that. And then I found the link whisper plugin, which like, oh my god, saving grace.

Honestly, I tell everyone like it changed my life cuz I. I had so many posts on my site and I have the memory of a goldfish, like I did not remember what they all were, so I wouldn’t think as I’m writing to include all of them, it just didn’t like mesh with me and it would just take so much more time. So with Link Whisper, I plugged it into my site and then I immediately just started going through, um, sorting by category to make sure it was within the pillar.

And then I found like all of these internal linking opportunities that I would’ve straight up missed, like I wouldn’t have ever considered. Um, I don’t know, certain posts on my site that I didn’t remember immediately. I also wouldn’t have known how many they were getting per post. I usually, I used to add like maybe three on a good day to a post suddenly, like my post, I had a couple that were like 12,000 word posts.

And so in there I was like, yeah. I was like, why do I have three internal links in here? This is ridiculous. Like, there’s so many opportunities. And so I started adding them in. It took me like probably. An hour to add the majority of them and then a couple I needed to like make some tweaks cause I realized that post needs a couple more.

How can I adjust for it? Um, but within like three days my entire site had an intentional internal linking strategy, right? Someone went to it, click on a link, they would kind of know what they were getting. So if they clicked on New Zealand, they were going to like my New Zealand like archive silo page sort of thing.

But if they clicked on New Zealand in winter, they were going to my winter and New Zealand guide. Like it was different where before, who would, they would’ve gone to like a post on Portugal by accident somehow. Like, I don’t know, Lin whisper speed sped up so much faster. And with that I kind of got a month back to this strategy.

Cause I definitely think with between it and the zero volume keyword. I had budgeted more time for this. Like I got to about March and I was like, not like close enough yet. I might have to like media v’s a 2022 goal, but maybe it’s like summer 2022 a little bit further. Um, and same with the internal linking.

I was like, before that month, like how am I, if I have to do this and map every single post on my site, it’s gonna take me at least a month. I had over a hundred posts at that point. I think I was close to about 150, like, I don’t know, all 150 posts on my site by heart. I don’t know, like mm-hmm. , which orphan immediately.

Um, so that massively sped up and I really liked that it pulled from Google Search Console as well. So it wasn’t just targeting primary keywords that I had put in. It was targeting secondary keywords and even those like keywords I didn’t intend for it to rank for, but it was ranking really well. So I was like, great, let’s.

Like add that in as an anchor text too. And then that created even more organic opportunities for that. And suddenly like my click-through rate on my site got a lot better too because I was bringing all these people in and then kind of abandoning them. Cause I was like, here’s this great article. Bye.

Like I don’t have anything else for you. And suddenly there was like, they were able to go on a journey through my site and kind of, yeah, they had this like roadmap itinerary built for them by me and Lin Whisper, which was really great. And like, honestly, You’re doing God’s work. It’s great. . 

Jared: Yeah. Spencer hit, hit a home run with that plugin.

It’s interesting you talk about it too, because I think a lot of people will understand. It makes sense even when you’re brand new at internal linking. Like, hey, if there’s an article on your site that has no internal links going to it, like that’s a bad thing, right? You reference the orphan post and sending some internal links allows Google and readers to, to see it, to crawl it, to be there more often.

But the anchor text is really, really important. And um, if you are, I’ll say, I mean obviously it, this isn’t a podcast about over optimizing the anchor text and that that is a thing, but. Generally speaking, it’s highly possible to underoptimized your anchor text when it comes to your internal links, and then you end up just sending a lot of confusing signals to Google about what your articles are uniquely about, like you said, your New Zealand example.

I mean, if every article just uses the anchor text New Zealand, it’s, it’s actually kind of confusing for Google to understand what makes each article unique. So I’m glad you brought that up. Um, but happy to, it was a problem for me, . Yeah, it, well, and I know, um, I, I, I know that pain also, we have bought a site before and we’ve inherited some of these bad internal link practices.

Right? And so you’re kind of like, How do you kind of get in there? And, and that’s where we really saw it, uh, rear it’s ugly head for us. So, uh, um, something we were working on. So it it bring back some, some bad memories, some painful memories. . Um, hey, so as we wrap up, let me ask you about where the site is at in terms of monetization right now.

You, you referenced the $10,000 month, uh, over the summer, and I, I, I think I, I don’t think I’m overstepping by suggesting that summer is probably travel travel’s, uh, big season, right? Like where you’re gonna make the most amount of money. How is that revenue split? Uh, we know you’re on media Vine. We also have heard you talk about affiliate.

Um, I’m just curious to learn the different channels you’re making money through and maybe how much as a percentage or total revenue each of those provides for your. 

Nina: Yeah, so media buying, I will say this is one of the reasons I’m diversifying out of travel is because all of my travel sites are Canadian.

Um, and was a mistake because RPMs for Canada are, I think my RPMs for Canada are about $15 and my RPMs for the US are about 40, right? The show how Stark Stark the difference is. Um, and so even though I do get majority US traffic, I get like 32% US probably like 30%. This is like, that’s a few months ago.

I haven’t checked recently, but like 30% Canadian. And so if like a large chunk of my audience is Canadian, I’m losing a decent chunk of the ad revenue. Um, so I had these, like, I thought, a hundred thousand page views on Media Vine, you’re guaranteed X amount of dollars and you’re not, it’s all about the RPMs.

So I’ve, I think my best month was about $2,000 US on Media Vine. Um, which is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s also definitely not near a lot of other people. So for me, from there, it was ads, or not ads, sorry, affiliates. Not just ads. And so my affiliates, um, I was really relying on email for quite a while because I have a very dedicated email list that like, love ’em to death.

Um, I started using SEO to grow it and then gain like 1500 people a month for a number of months there. And really just started saying like, here’s this cool thing, do you want it? like wasn’t super structured. It was, wasn’t anything super fancy, but I was like, here’s some stuff. Um, and email for a long time was my main affiliate earner because on my site I, by the time I got into Media Vine, I had 180 posts.

Um, and two of them had affiliate links and that was it. Wow. And they were broken and they were broken from CJ from years ago. So I went through and did, um, in, uh, I think in May. I did the first half of my affiliate audit where I went through a hundred posts on the site and added affiliate links. Um, I added call to action, calls to action.

I added like little sections about hotels and stuff, um, which I had previously added, but didn’t really do the links for because I was in a rush. I was like, I need to get this done. And I do work best personally on a batch system. So like every month I like, like I had like the summer of affiliates this summer where I just wrote affiliate posts.

Um, and I dunno why, but calling things fund names like that, it helps. Um, and from there I really started to see, um, the affiliate income come from just like these things that were already optimized. I hadn’t thought like, oh, hey, this post is about. Why don’t I have like Rosetta Stone or Babbel or Duo Lingo or something in here and I just hadn’t done it.

So I really did that up optimization and like within a week, $1,500 that like came in and I was like, what? Like I was leaving this on the table for so long and I think I, I also decided in my weird little brain affiliates come after ads, which is like historically not true for anybody. For me, it kind of was.

Um, and then from there I started writing a lot of, um, affiliate posts as well. And now it’s actually, I’ve started promoting it less in my email list as well. So where my email list before was probably like 80% of my affiliate income. It’s now closer to 40. Um, and it’s just those posts that really drive it home.

Um, and I’ve started, like now I’m now just starting to add products, which I didn’t have for a while. Um, I had like some one-to-one call thing in a corner where it’s like, do you want a one-to-one call with me? Or like, but I didn’t promote it. I didn’t tell them what the one-to-one call was, so it wasn’t exactly helpful.

Um, and as I’ve gotten better at like building digital products on my SEO site, I realized that’s a great way to monetize this site too. Um, and I’ve got like a bunch of courses that I’m kind of slowly dripping out as well about living abroad because I was getting the same questions over and over to my email.

And I think once I have those, that’ll kind of. Sub out for that lost, um, affiliate income over winter, which yes, in travel. Affiliates in winter are hard . Yeah. Unless you’re in like, like Mexico or I don’t know, Fiji or something, that’s always kind of warm. Um, I don’t know. I don’t want to go to Canada in the winter.

I’m living here and I don’t wanna be here in the winter. It, like last year in winter, my hair froze as I was walking my dog outside and it was dry. I was like, how does dry hair freeze? But it was negative 30. That’s how, and it was horrible. . 

Jared: Yep. That’s cold. That’s cold. . That’s, I can see why, I mean, maybe a few people, but probably not as many people travel to Canada in the winter as they do in the summer, so, okay.

Wow. That’s, um, that’s fascinating. With all the conversation we’ve had about the focus on Mediavine and the type of articles that you wrote to hear that, you know, it really is actually a smaller percentage of your revenue compared to some, uh, well, affiliate, but also the way you’ve utilized email to increase your revenues substantially.

I mean, add $10,000. 8,000 or so is coming from affiliate with maybe, you know, 40 to 50 to 60% of that being emails, uh, sending emails at drive, affiliate sales. And then the other part being on your website. I love the Rosetta Stone example. Cause that makes so much sense. And I can see that being, I wonder how many people listening have, have that on the table.

Like you talked about the, the people are just leaving money on the table. So , um, so many people stay focused on Amazon, right? And like your ability to look at an article and say, huh, I’m writing about foreign languages. Uh, let me just go add an affiliate for this product. And, and so that I, I just feel like that is interesting and I want everyone to think a little bit differently about their site perhaps in terms of what they might be leaving on the.

Nina: Yeah, I recommend look at your top 10 posts especially and add three different affiliates to it. And te you have to test stuff out too. I was really bad for a long time at testing and I’m getting a lot better at like, some affiliates don’t work, some do. You have to figure it out. In travel, there’s always debates about like Expedia versus booking.com and which is better And it’s like, it really depends on your site.

Viader is supposed to be better in the US but in Canada get your guide has more Canadian tours, even though Get Your Guide is a European company. And like I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t tested both and then saw what happened. And I definitely find in travel, um, people focus on the Amazon for sure of like weird packing lists of stuff and it’s like, I don’t wanna buy a parca off of Amazon.

I need to try it on . Like meanwhile a tour or a hotel booking. Those do really, really well. Um, yeah, like I think finding. A couple different affiliate options and then diversifying amongst them and making sure that like you give people the option to book. Cause I think that’s something a lot of us forget where we added like, oh, we don’t wanna bother you, but at the end, here’s this thing that might help me make money.

It’s like, no, you’re helping them. They want, they want this tour, 

Jared: give them the tour. It’s so interesting to hear you talk about it. I mean, I was, uh, I’m planning a trip right now with my family and, um, I’m not spending the mo the majority of my time looking for the best spots to go on on this at this location.

I, I did that, but I’ll be honest with you, where I get stuck, is trying to figure out is this rental car company at the airport or not? And how do I get there and how far is it and when are the hours that it’s open and if once I get to my, and so it’s all these questions that you have that, um, I know I don’t really realize I have until I get into it.

And so it’s, um, yeah, your approach is really, really, uh, perceptive. That’s probably the right word to use. It’s very perceptive. So, um, hey, so this is, this hour has flown by. Uh, how can people keep up with you and, um, and, and kind of stay engaged with what you’re doing? Uh, is there anywhere, any place we can send them?

Nina: Yeah, so I have two places mainly. I have, um, my SEO o site where I talk about all things seo, but especially SEO for travel bloggers. Um, it’s called She Knows SEO O Um, I really like the alliteration , so, um, you can go to she knows seo.co. And I’ve got tons of articles on there with lots of tips and tricks, um, and my signature courses on exactly how I did all of this and how you can too.

Um, I also post free tips on Instagram every day in my stories, and I share very cute photos of my dog who is whipped cream obsessed, and he demands it. Properly demands it, um, which is at Nina Clapperton. Um, and I wanted to give everyone listening, um, because my content audit was like the big thing that helped me kind of turn things around.

And I still, I think they’re super valuable. I still do one regularly. Um, if you go to, she knows seo.co/content hyphen audit hyphen checklist, um, you’ll get a free checklist there. That’s multiple pages of every single step that I do for, um, my content audits. And I really hope it helps everybody out. And that’s, yeah, that’s completely free.

So I hope you go forth and yeah. Have fun with seo. Cause it is fun. It’s just, it’s a waiting game and I think it’s the kind of thing that pays dividends, um, rather than like being passive income. The way people like on random Instagram stories and Instagram ads try to claim it is. 

Jared: Well, that’s awesome.

Okay, so we’ll include that link in the show notes for people who want to grab your, uh, guide. Or is it like a checklist or a guide or for a content 

Nina: audit? It’s kind of a hybrid. Um, I don’t like checklist. I don’t give you information. So it’s like, there’s a technical aspect. There’s the on page aspect, there’s the rewriting post aspect.

Um, so it’s about 10 pages of half checklist, half, um, guide, I guess, which I, I, I like Frankenstein things as we’ve learned throughout this . So it’s another Frankenstein. 

Jared: Perhaps. My favorite part about hosting this podcast is since we pre-record these, I get to be the first one from the podcast audience to go download it.

So , yeah, definitely check that 

Nina: out. It’s very fun and I will say one person has downloaded already my friend to just like spell check me because I was too excited writing it and I’ve had cups of tea and I don’t handle 

Jared: caffeine well. So , I’ll let you know if I see any typos, but I don’t think most people get too turned off by typos.

So don’t worry too much. . Nina, thanks so much for coming on board. I have learned a lot. I appreciate um, you coming on and sharing. Hey, congratulations also on your success. I. Thank you. We covered it. But really it, it’s, it’s it, you’ve done all this in, in the span of basically a year. You put your head down about a year ago, uh, when recording.

And so huge congratulations on your success. We didn’t get to talk about your other websites today, but you know, I, I hope that, uh, we’ll get to have you back on in the future and we can hear about some of your other success stories from some of your other projects. But, uh, until then, thanks so much for coming on board.

Nina: Thank you so much for having me. This is like my favorite podcast, so I’m very, very excited. I’m sad my dog couldn’t be here cuz he is a big fan of yours. 

Jared: Um, well, you know, your dog’s an adult now and you know, sometimes they just can’t be bothered once they hit adult years, you know, it’s 

Nina: true. I mean, he’s at daycare so he is still kind of being treated like 

Jared: a kid, but ah, no, some we we can’t always kick every adult out of the house.

Right. Sometimes they come back . 

Nina: Exactly. Yeah, he’s a freeloader. . 

Jared: All right, thanks Nina. Until we talk again. Thanks. Hey everyone, it’s Spencer Haws here, founder of the Niche Pursuits Podcast. So I recently read a Twitter thread asking about the most underrated strategy in seo. One of the most common answers given was internal link building.

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