Case Study: 6 Months of Blogging

It’s been just over 6 months since I started my new niche Spain blog, The Spain Travel Guru.

If you missed out on the first two updates, you can see the one-month update here and my three-month blog update here.

These updates serve a few purposes, the largest being that I hold myself accountable for keeping track of the growth of this site.

With traveling nearly full time these last few months, working on this blog, and filming and editing videos for YouTube, trying to start a new blog perhaps didn’t come at the best time, but I’m doing my best to show up to it as much as I can.

The second reason that I want to write these case studies is to show you the realities of starting a blog from scratch and how long it takes to make it profitable.

There is a lot of gatekeeping in the blogging world and I have always tried to be as transparent as I can about this journey and how to make money in it.

I am proud to say that, despite not putting in quite as many hours the last few months, The Spain Travel Guru is growing at a rate that I never expected.

Let’s see how I’m doing keeping up with my short and long-term goals.

Short Term Goals

My short-term goals for the blog ever since month one were to focus all of my efforts on:

SEO
Affiliate Content

All of my efforts have been focused on these two things, but I have to admit, I have been leaning more towards SEO content than affiliate content.

When I say “affiliate content,” what I mean is content that people search for when they are ready to spend. In the travel sphere, this means articles that focus on hotels, tours, car rentals, and other similar travel-related purchases that people make when planning their travels.

I haven’t put quite as much energy into this as I have into creating SEO-focused content that will drive a lot of traffic. Building this blog has made me realize that my expertise (and therefore my comfort zone) lies in creating blog posts that focus heavily on search engine optimization.

And it is paying off because my traffic is nearly doubling month over month. In August, The Spain Travel Guru received over 10,000 page views and it looks like in September it will receive over 16,000 page views. I am inching ever closer to my goal of 50,000 page views which will allow me to join Mediavine, a high-paying ad network that is what I use with Eternal Expat.

However, I definitely need to spend more time growing my affiliate content, because while I wait for the traffic to increase, the main way that I am making money through the blog is through affiliate content.

I have already started making a small amount from my favorite tour booking site, GetYourGuide. In the 3 month update, I mentioned that I wanted to figure out how to make sure I was being honest with my readers while still finding ways to use affiliate programs that I know and trust – this is mostly. booking.com (which I use almost exclusively for hotels, I’m headed to a hotel right now on the train which I booked on booking.com) and GetYourGuide.

I need to push myself more to find more affiliate programs that I trust and center the articles around that information rather than focusing solely on SEO and then only inserting affiliates when appropriate.

Long Term Goals

I mentioned in the 3 month update that one of my long-term goals was to reach 50,000 page views.

I thought a realistic timeframe would be two years from the time the website started, but based on how quickly the site is currently growing and how much more content I have after a summer of traveling Spain, I want to push myself to try to achieve this goal in about 13-14 months from when the blog was started, which would be around April or May 2024.

I think to say 12 months would be a bit of a stretch, although not entirely unachievable.

However, I still have so many other responsibilities at the moment, so I don’t want to put too much focus on this website and lose sight of the other businesses I’m running that are actually paying my bills.

So I think just over a year – around the 14-month mark is a fair amount of time to get this website onto Mediavine.

I also said that I wanted to write 100 articles within the first year of The Spain Travel Guru, which I still think is an achievable goal, despite not writing very much in the last three months.

I have SO many articles in the pipeline now since our summer travels all over Spain and between that and the writers that are part of my team, we can definitely achieve this by March 2024.

Current Stats

As of September 20, 2023, I am receiving 16,772 page views per month. This is from 14,288 users.

I now have 49 backlinks to the website and I wrote a 4th guest post about Spain for a larger blog that I believe has been a huge help in gaining some points on my Domain Authority (which is now at 24!).

How Much Time Am I Spending Per Week?

Since I moved out of my apartment in Lithuania in late June of this year, I have been traveling almost entirely full-time.

I have spent most of the summer traveling around Spain taking tons of notes, snapping hundreds of photos, learning as much as I can about the different places I’m visiting, eating all the tapas and Iberico Secreto, and drinking all of the locally made vermouth and Rioja.

This all counts as hours spent working, right?

How many hours per week have I spent this summer sitting at my desk and writing, editing, and researching content? Very few. Maybe 2-3 hours max per week.

This is already changing this month as I start tackling the huge list of articles that are on my to-do list.

I am so grateful to be able to use some of the resources from this website and put them towards The Spain Travel Guru by having some writers from our team who have lots of experience traveling Spain dedicate some of their time to writing articles about Spain, which has definitely kept the website growing this summer.

My plan for the rest of the year is to dedicate roughly 10 hours per week to The Spain Travel Guru in order to get it closer to the 50,000 page view mark and to learn more about affiliate marketing-focused content.

Wins in the last 3 months

Since the last update, several of my blog posts have started ranking #1 on Google which is a huge win for me and a huge confidence booster. Many more are on page one and receiving a good amount of traffic.

According to Moz, The Spain Travel Guru is now ranking for over 500 keywords.

Getting to 10,000 page views in under 6 months has been such a huge win. I cannot believe how quickly the website is already growing and I am looking forward to reaching more milestones each month.

I Caved on the “No Social Media” Rule

For the first few months after I started the new website, I promised myself that I would spend my time growing the website. I have never made money from social media on any of my websites in the past and I find that sort of content creation a bit like banging my head against a brick wall.

But I guess I like brick, because I started an Instagram account for The Spain Travel Guru.

I follow a lot of niche location accounts on Instagram, especially when I’m about to travel to somewhere that I’ve never been before and I love that the content focuses solely on that destination.

So I’m giving it a try for Spain. I think it will be a good asset to sell alongside the blog when the day comes to try and sell The Spain Travel Guru.

It’s also been a good experiment to see how quickly I can grow a social media account when it has a clear message and idea that I am trying to get across (which has never really been the case with my personal Instagram account).

The reels that I have created for the account are receiving more views than ones that I used to make for Eternal Expat, so it’s already been an interesting experiment.

What’s Next?

I think an update every three months is enough time for things to have changed quite dramatically, but not so much time that it can’t be clearly measured.

I plan to give a 9-month update where I’ll share whether or not I’ve stuck to my plan to work 10 hours a week and created more affiliate-focused content.

My goals with this website are still simple and straightforward – create high-quality travel guides, grow the readership, and create two strong income streams (affiliate income and display ads).

One other thing that I need to work on that I haven’t done a great job with thus far is to try to grow my email list.

Just like with Instagram, I think having an email list that is strictly interested in Spain travel is a great asset to have for the website and one that in the long term will allow me to bring more loyal readers back to the site to read fresh weekly content.