It has been just under two years since I started The Spain Travel Guru, a blog all about travel in Spain.
During the first year of building this website, I shared a lot of my experiences with you in a case study. But with all of the Google changes over the past year,I went a little bit quiet about it.
The Spain Travel Guru outlasted many of the Google updates in 2023 and 2024. While this website was hit badly in April, it wasn’t until August that the Spain site got knocked by one of Google’s latest updates.
Since then I have been trying to figure out the best way forward.
If you haven’t read any of the case studies, you can read month one here, month three here, month six here, and my one-year update here.
Building The Spain Travel Guru
I started building this website back in March of 2023. It’s wild to think it’s been almost two years of working on this and how far it has come in a relatively short period.
Part of my goal for this was to see what I really knew about SEO and whether I could monetize it in a short period of time. In less than 6 months, the website was earning an income and in 12 months, it was on Mediavine earning, in some instances, more than Eternal Expat which has been around for 9 years.
I focused solely on traffic from Google/search engines because I wanted the income to be passive. This worked until August of 2024 when one of the many Google updates that have taken place in the last 18 months finally shifted the number of visitors that the site saw.
I sort of knew this would happen eventually. I don’t think any website has escaped unscathed at this point. So I was preparing as best I could. I started sharing the blog posts on Pinterest and Flipboard and more importantly, I worked to grow my email list. I also started a Facebook group, which has grown slowly, but has some good interaction.
I think one of the best things I could have done, which I can only see in hindsight as being important, was putting affiliate income at the same level of importance as Google traffic. So even when the traffic fell and the ad income was cut in half, I was still making a decent amount of income from hotel and tour bookings across the site.
Deciding to Sell The Spain Travel Guru
Back in April of last year, I had the opportunity to speak at a conference called TravelCon. I spoke to fellow travel bloggers about diversifying into video on YouTube.
At this point, many of us had been pummeled by at least one if not several Google updates, leaving our future in the industry up in the air. Some of my friends had already started working freelance or looking for part-time jobs.
While I was there, I met a woman from a company called Flippa. They specialize in selling digital businesses. We talked about the possibility of selling one of my websites and she said to email her my profit and loss statements when I got back home.
It took me a few months to get back to her. I was still really enjoying writing on The Spain Travel Guru, I felt like there was still some unfinished business with the site that I wanted to accomplish before moving on from the project.
But my feelings about blogging changed a lot in 2024. The Google updates were part of the shift, but I think they were simply the catalyst to open up a door that I have been looking for the key to for a while now.
Paired with the fact that I wasn’t based in Europe anymore and I couldn’t hop on a cheap flight to get there and write more articles about it, the writing was on the wall.
It felt like a good time to sell the Spain site and use the time and money that I got back from this to move forward with some very new projects.
The Process of Selling a Website
Once I got in touch with Flippa, it moved pretty quickly. They gave me a valuation of the website and then they walked me through exactly what would take place once I created the listing.
The website is very user-friendly and offers three different options depending on how much help you want along the way.
I opted for their Premium option which is the middle option. The cheapest of their selling options is only $49, but it doesn’t send the listing to as many people as the Premium option, which is significantly more at $399. The premium option includes paid ads to get the listing in front of way more people. The Ultimate option is $599 and includes an even larger reach of potential buyers as well as an account manager.
I wanted to sell the website quickly so that I could get on with all of the other changes I wanted to make to my business this year. I didn’t want it to be something that I was checking in on for months.
And it worked. The website sold in less than a month to someone who lives in Spain and is so pumped about taking the website to the next level. I’m so happy to know that it’s in the hands of someone who wants to continue to grow it and make it the best Spain travel site on the internet.
Once you agree on a price, the rest moves pretty fast. Flippa has a contract builder that you can use to put together your terms of sale.
The next step was that the buyer sent the money to Flippa. Once Flippa received it, I handed everything over to the new buyer. He then confirmed that he received it and Flippa released the money into my account (after taking a hefty 10% finder’s fee).
Could I have done this on my own without a costly agent? Perhaps I could have, but this felt like it was worth the price. They have an enormous number of interested buyers on their platform who want to invest in content businesses. They handled the legal aspects and the money transfer safely and did it so quickly, at a higher price than I had initially expected to sell it for.
What Would I Have Done Differently?
“Hindsight is 20/20,” as they say. And it’s easy to sit here now that the site is sold and think about what I could have done differently to keep the website.
From the beginning, I would have been more active on social media. However, with all of the drama with TikTok, it’s also a good reminder that you do not own those spaces and you never know how that can change.
I still think it would have been wise to build an audience on Instagram and to have started my Facebook group much earlier. I was too complacent when the website started to grow on Google and I just assumed I could keep that traffic growing without any other work.
I also think that when it came time to sell the website, it would have had more value if I had those social media channels to sell alongside it.
I wish I had started collecting email addresses from the very beginning. I could have created something that would have been more of a draw to get people to sign up. Perhaps a free packing list PDF or a 7-day itinerary PDF would have meant way more signups than simply asking people to sign up as I did.
What’s Next?
My goal is to really focus on Eternal Expat this year. I want to write more creatively here, share more travel stories and opinion pieces similar to what I used to write when I first started this blog.
I will also continue to grow my YouTube channel, which has become a large part of my business.
Most of all, I want to find joy and passion in the work I am creating again.
I have a few other ideas for 2025 that I am keeping close to my chest. However, I found the key to that door that I’ve been looking for and I’m looking forward to going through it and seeing what’s on the other side.