Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington. And today, I have a pretty exciting interview. Kristen Haynes is a former radio journalist turned blogger at the Wayward Home. She started her blog in 2017, and it grew to 400,000 monthly page views from Google search and Pinterest before getting hit.
In September of 2023, by the helpful content update, pretty sad. We’re hearing a lot of these stories lately. The wayward home is about living minimally in a camper van, RV, sailboat, or tiny home. And Kristen splits her time between a camper van in the U S and a sailboat in Mexico. Thanks a lot for joining me today.
How are you doing?
Kristin: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I’m doing really well. I followed you for many years. It’s exciting to be on the podcast.
Doug: Awesome. Yeah, I started to reach out to a handful of people, and I looked, honestly, over at my friend’s podcast, Niche Pursuits, and I was like Trying to find some interesting stories and started emailing a handful of people, and your story seemed pretty interesting to me for a few reasons One you recently got hit by the update and you’re willing to talk about it A lot of people just don’t want to share a story that isn’t a success story, which thank you for coming on.
I know it’s a touchy subject right now, and you’re working through the issues. And we’re going to talk about some of those details, but it’s so helpful because there are so many like hundreds, thousands of people that are in the same situation, trying to figure this out. So we’re going to start kind of at the beginning and talk about your.
Your journey as a blogger and your background as a radio professional. I was telling you earlier, I’m a little nervous to even record with you because you know how to, you know how to do it for real. But you also have a podcast, a YouTube channel, and a lot of pieces, pieces that I like encourage people to start and work on.
And we’re going to talk about your plan for recovering the traffic on the blog. So let’s go back to. How did you get into blogging in the first place?
Kristin: Yeah. So back in, um, 2016, I was laid off as a radio news reporter. I’d been a reporter for 15 years at radio stations up and down the West Coast, most recently at KGO radio in San Francisco. And when I was laid off, I just really had nothing. I had no idea what I wanted to do when you train in journalism and especially radio, you don’t have a lot of transferable skills to other professions.
So I was just like, what am I going to do? And I had just started dating a guy that had a. sailboat and he was very interested in leaving the Bay Area and going cruising and traveling on the sailboat. And I’m just racking my brain. Like, how am I going to make money so I can keep up with this guy?
He had, he was a electrical contractor, so he could work when he wanted to bank some money and go travel. And he had his own business. And so at the, at the time I was just racking my brain, trying to figure out, like, I need to. Create a remote income. So I was looking at freelance writing and maybe voiceover work, just stuff I could do from anywhere.
And that’s when I randomly stumbled on blogging. I had had a wordpress.com blog in like 2008. That was about my daily life that nobody read, but my mom and I was like, blogs make money. There is no way I was just blown away by this. And I realized this cause I read an interview on Michelle Schroeder gardener of making sense of sense.
She has a huge personal finance blog. And in that interview, it said she made a hundred thousand dollars per month blogging. And I was like, what? Like my mind was totally blown when I read that interview. And so I thought like. I want to try that. I want to see if I can make that work. And that’s really how everything started was reading that one interview where I learned blogs made money because I literally had no idea ever.
So it was pretty shocking.
Doug: And did it seem like a scam in the beginning? Like it’s that amount of money is a little bit too much for most people. To think, Hey, this is possible. So did, did you believe it right away?
Kristin: You know, weirdly, I did believe it. Cause the article was pretty in depth in the ways that she made money and how she brought her site up from, you know, nothing in the beginning, I think I went over to her website where she had published income reports since like 2012.
And I read every income report and I saw how incrementally her money got bigger and bigger over the years, and that it wasn’t just a quick. deal, you know, thing where you could instantly make money. I saw like, Oh, she worked at it and it took time. And so I knew, and I was in an interesting situation at the time where right after I got laid off, I moved onto my partner Tom’s sailboat to save money on rent.
I was like, I cannot pay rent if I don’t have a job. So my living expenses got really low. I was living, you know, I think. 400 bucks a month for the slip and some groceries, like very low living expenses. And so I thought like, this is the right time to try to start a business. I don’t have a lot of money that I need to be spending every month.
I can focus on it, do a little freelance writing on the side. And so I decided to just jump all into it and just try my hardest at this new business endeavor, because I did see that potential in it from reading that interview.
Doug: How did the first few months look if you could remember back so you had the seed of an idea, you saw that it was possible, you kind of knew a little bit about blogging, obviously, with your journalism background, a great communicator.
So how did it look at the very beginning?
Kristin: Yeah, so it was kind of Painful at first because I had to figure out how to build a website because I couldn’t afford to hire a designer and this was before we had those exciting cadence themes we have now that makes it really easy to throw up a website and so I used the Divi page builder and my website looked like crap.
I thought it was terrible but then I started interviewing people. I did an interview based site at first because I knew nothing about SEO or what that meant and I would interview Nomads, like people living in school buses or camper vans or sailboats. And I would start doing these interview pieces and my blog posts look terrible.
They had no headings. They had weirdly sized photos. I think I was uploading like PNGs that were massive. I’d had no idea what I was doing and I would share it in random Facebook groups, according to interests like, Oh, here’s a sailing Facebook group. I’m going to share some of those stories. And that’s how I got some of the initial traffic in the beginning was.
Facebook group sharing, which I don’t think is really a feasible way to do it now, but it worked back in 2017.
Doug: And I think there was probably some kind of charming authenticity about the lack of SEO chops that you had. So it literally looked like you were just sharing some stories that were interesting, which is all you were really doing, right?
Kristin: Yeah, that’s very true. It was very different back then and how I was sharing these human interest type stories because coming from a news background. I saw that they were doing really well in the local media. People were really interested in those articles. They were widely shared and commented on. And that’s why I thought I could run a whole website based on these informational, inspiring articles that featured real people.
And I put a few like ads on my site from Google AdSense. They were making like 20 cents a day. And I was like, Hmm, this isn’t really making me very much money. But they were articles that people like to read so much. In fact, my friends over at SF gate, the local San Francisco Chronicle newspaper wanted to syndicate my articles just like.
a few months after I got started because they liked them. They were human interest and people liked reading them. And so that’s, yeah, it was way different then I feel like now. And maybe that’s something we can think about after this HCU and doing so much SEO targeting.
Doug: Well, let’s dive into that one really quick.
So syndication, what is it? Um, it sounds like your connections, your network from your previous career. did help out quite a bit. But how does that look? Is that possible for someone else? Can you just define it and tell us some details and any benefits or negative impacts that you observed?
Kristin: Yeah. So for me, you know, I didn’t even know what it was at the time, but my friends over at that web publishing SF gate, they just reached out and said, can I republish?
We’ll use a canonical link. And I was like, what’s that? I had to research what a canonical link was. It basically tells Google that this is a copy of the original, and they point it back to the original. So it’s not duplicate content. And I learned that later. And. So they syndicate started syndicating these articles and they went out across the entire Hearst platform.
They would appear in newspapers all across the country. And what’s funny is still to this day, sometimes they republish them. I don’t know why, but I’ll see these backlinks pop up in like age refs, like. These random newspapers publishing these articles from five years ago with a new date and like, what are they doing?
But I think that did help me improve my DA in the beginning and probably helped me get a little more Google traffic right off the bat. I wasn’t targeting any SEO, but I was still managing to rank for some keywords, which was kind of amazing at the time.
Doug: That’s pretty cool. So I have in my notes here that you.
Grew the business to 400k monthly page views and 25, 000 per month. So we’re skipping a lot of steps here. All right. So you figured out how to put up a website, sort of publishing stuff. Didn’t know what you were doing. How did you get it to that level? How long did it take? And maybe you could let us know when you think you sort of figured things out and you hit your stride.
Kristin: Yeah. So the blog started in 2017. By 2018, I was accepted to, to Mediavine, but I still didn’t know much about SEO until 2019, like January of 2019. I was like, I need to learn about SEO. I want to get more traffic in different ways. So I took a course about SEO and it started applying the principles. I remember I was still, you know, living on a boat at the time that didn’t have any internet access.
And so every day I would go to this Jim, I had joined and it was a nice gym. It had a cafe and so, it was wifi. So I would sit in there like eight to 10 hours a day. I did this for years working on my website and I would take these, this SEO course, and I remember just being at the gym, like just trying to figure this out, creating spreadsheets, creating article ideas, and I just started.
Producing articles like SEO based articles in 2019. And by that summer, my traffic had really skyrocketed. And that’s when I really started making a good income from the site. I think it was probably over like 10, 000 a month at that point, if I can remember correctly. But that was that fall that I started hiring my first writers and a VA.
I was like, I need help. I see how this is working. It’s getting picked up on Google. I’m getting a ton more traffic. And so that’s when I started expanding. And so once I started expanding and assigning articles is when I, the site traffic really went up and it was briefly hit in 2019 by an update. And then I gradually brought that back over, you know, the last number of years to finally get hit again.
That’s what Google is, you know, it’s just kind of ups and downs, but I wrote the ups for a long time and it was able to save money, which I’m really thankful for. So yeah, that’s kind of when it hit the stride is taking that SEO course and going full on into finding those keywords.
Doug: Just to be clear, you, when it started getting traction, you still kind of didn’t know what you were doing, and you actually were doing really well before you went to take that course, right?
Kristin: Yeah, and that’s how I got, my one thing I wanted to do when I started site was get on Mediavine. That’s what I had heard in the blogging groups I had joined. And so I was determined that I was going to get on Mediavine and at the time they only required 25, 000 sessions. Now it’s 50, 000 and it’s a little harder to get on there, but I wanted to reach 25, 000.
I did so in six months. And that was doing Pinterest and Facebook and just random Google traffic I was getting without trying. And I think that’s because I was getting linked out to from all these newspapers on these various articles. And also at the time these were a lot of my van life and camper van conversion articles.
And this was still in 2017, a newer thing, like the van life, the camper vans. Now, if you go to Google, there’s tons more websites writing about this. And so I think. It would be more difficult to rank really quickly for a new website. But at that time, many years ago, I was just ranking without trying. And that was kind of amazing.
And so I think that’s why I was able to get on Mediavine so quickly. I had diverse traffic and some from Google, Pinterest, Facebook, and yeah, I got on there. And that was like my one focus for those six months.
Doug: That’s great. It’s cool how it really did happen organically overall. One of my guilty pleasures, especially on YouTube, is to watch like, like van life, just vlogs and videos.
I don’t aspire to do that. I maybe would rent one, but I think it’d be a little too small for me. I like having a lot of stuff around, right? So it’s really cool. I watch those videos. And there are so many more, there’s like, whatever, hundreds or thousands and there’s really good ones and hardly anyone watches the videos at all.
It’s crazy. So you have a YouTube channel too. When did that come into the mix?
Kristin: Yeah, so the YouTube channel, I, You know, it’s funny. I didn’t totally take advantage of that. I did some keyword research. I threw up some Videos and the videos are still doing really well on YouTube. And so to this day, I think like gosh Maybe I should just do some more YouTube videos.
I’m not really a YouTube person. I don’t like Weirdly, I know I come from a media background, but I don’t really I really hate editing videos and putting them together I guess I could hire someone but I do see the potential in YouTube because A few years ago, you know, I put up this video and it’s gotten like, I don’t know how many page views, but a tons of views, like.
Tens of like thousands of views and I don’t even work on my channel and I started putting my podcast up there and those weren’t getting very many views, but I still feel like well keyworded YouTube videos could be a really good way to go and maybe something I should look at since the website got hit so badly that that’s just another way to pursue keywords and pursue revenue.
But we’ll see. I haven’t done that in a while, but maybe I’ll throw some up in the future.
Doug: Yeah. It’s a lot different than the, you know, the written word or audio, which you’re probably a lot more comfortable with. And I don’t really enjoy, you know what? I like the idea of editing video, but I don’t like the idea of sitting at my desk for like six hours, like going through it.
And then you could always make another pass and like trim a little bit more and make it a little bit better. So my solution is like live streams or like no edits or very minimal in it. You know, it’s lower quality. Like that’s the bottom line. It’s lower quality if you don’t put in the time, but I could hire someone.
You could hire someone, of course, but it’s a different beast. All right. So you said you have a podcast too. When did that start?
Kristin: So I started that in 2021 and I did it for about six months. And then I took a little break, like a six month break. And then I hired a business coach who told me to get the podcast.
Back up and going. And he said, it’s a great way to connect with your audience to have more of a personal connection other than just the written word and the email list. So he encouraged me to do that and he thought it was good if I ever wanted to sell, you know, courses and products as well as to have a podcast.
So I did that again for about another year and a half. And I recently, just in December, decided to stop doing it. I don’t know if that’s going to be permanent or just for a little while, because I felt like I was spending money on it and I was making no money on it. And with all the income loss from the HCU, I was like, Oh, I don’t have discretionary income right now.
I had hired an editor to help me produce it. And so I’ve stopped it, but I might bring it back at some point because it was fun to do.
Doug: Yeah, and I love podcasts. I mean, I consider these interviews really like audio first and then the video like I tried and do a good job on the on the quality of the video, but really, it’s secondary, which is kind of interesting.
I just I like I grew up listening to talk radio and I like the audio format and there’s there’s no distractions, right? People put on the episode usually doing something else is on their phone on YouTube. There’s like, a million other things you could do instead of watch the video. So, okay. So is there anything else you want to share about sort of the, the success portion, the growth of the site?
I will link back to Spencer’s interview with you, which was some time ago, but if people want to hear some more backstory, but is there anything else you want to add before we shift into what happened in September of 2023?
Kristin: Yeah, only that having, you know, that amount of success and the high number of page views and ad revenue was very exciting and something I was very thankful for.
And I do know that there are ebbs and flows in business and, but it allowed me to go sailing on my boat in Mexico and to explore in the camper van largely hands off. And that’s what’s something that’s amazing about when niche sites are working really well, you can hire a team and they. Take care of everything.
So I was barely working like for a long time. I felt like a retired person and now I’m back into it. I’m back into the grind and it’s fine because I love it. But once you get that niche site going and it’s working, it’s something you can step back from and it becomes more passive, which is something that was really exciting to me and something I strive to do again.
I want to get back to that point. And so that was something that was really fantastic for me.
Doug: And side question, which you could. Punt and not answer if you don’t want to so you were making a pretty solid chunk of money your expenses I think we’re still pretty low the whole time. Is that accurate? Yeah.
Yeah, they were okay So were you saving everything my other interest my other podcast is financial independence and Just early retirement and stuff. So were you sucking that away and investing it or whatever?
Kristin: Oh yeah. I was maxing out my 401k, both the business and the personal business match and the personal.
And also there’s tons of savings in my business checking account right now, which I haven’t done anything with, but that is enough that it can keep me moving forward in the business. And I can still hire and pay people. And my living expenses here in Mexico right now are insanely low, like. I think 700 bucks a month or something on living expenses for two people.
And so all these factors lead me to not feel that stressed out right now due to my severe income loss. But I love talking about personal finance and money. I think it’s so important to be debt free and to have savings and investments, especially as a business owner, because you never know what’s going to happen.
Doug: Just to clarify. So you have a solo 401k. Yes. Okay. So, everyone, Kristen is, is brilliant. Do research, consult your your accountant and whoever you need to talk to. But instead of the normal, like, whatever, 22, 000 for a 401k that you can contribute, you can contribute that plus the employer side, even though she’s self employed.
So I think the max is like 66, 000 per year. Something like that. So you could sock away a huge amount in your tax advantaged accounts and do whatever you need to do. So good job. You’re brilliant.
Kristin: I highly recommend doing that.
Doug: Yeah, so it’s an advanced topic, but not that hard to do. Just a couple of forms.
Okay, cool. So, financially, you’re in good shape. You made sure that you can continue to stay in business, which is one of the big things, right? Like, I know some people, they had to fold. Get a new job and they’re still not like, I know a handful of people, like when the good times were good, they spent everything that they had instead of saving it.
So the, the main thing is like, if you could keep some chips on the table and like keep playing, you’re going to be okay, like you’ll figure it out. So fast forward to September. 2023 what happened?
Kristin: Yeah. So it’s kind of, funny in a way, I guess, cause I was over in Europe actually doing camper van rentals to create content for my site and I was having a blast and I was kind of looking at my Mediavine earnings every day.
Like I do. And suddenly I noticed like. Why is my Mediavine earnings like no longer making any money? I was like, kind of shocked. It was like, they just seriously started dropping. And then I started getting online more and reading about this helpful content update that was happening. And I was like, what is going on?
Like, I thought that I was building, you know, such a good website and brand that I probably. wasn’t, I naively thought I probably wasn’t going to be hit really hard by another Google update. Like I was in 2019 cause I thought I was putting out good content. I was hiring writers specific to the niche. I cover a few niches like RVing, tiny homes, vans and boats.
And I made sure the writers had experience in these topics. They lived in vans and tiny homes. And I thought like, I’m doing a good job, you know, I’m going to be okay. But no, like the site was just destroyed. And it. started on a small destruction level in, in September and October with it dropping, but it just continued to drop as the months went by in December, it continued to drop.
And as I look at the search console now, it’s like really low. It’s crazy. I feel like my Google searches, I started another secret niche site in January, one year ago. And that one it’s Google searches and my wayward home. Google searches are like the same right now. And I’m like, really? That’s not cool. So it was a severe, a severe hit.
It’s crazy.
Doug: And is there anything, so let’s say you were coaching someone and they brought your site to you. Is there anything where you, you kind of know that you were taking a shortcut here or there? Any symptoms or things that you might point your finger at?
Kristin: Yeah, the only thing that I think it could be, which I’m guessing, is I was targeting a lot of the long tail low competition keywords and a lot of these keywords I did not have personal experience in.
I hired writers to just write SEO articles on these topics and Probably why I was hit and examples of those are like the best RV for a family of five or the best truck campers for cold weather, or, you know, these long tail keywords, and I kept doing it and kept doing it because Google kept reinforcing them.
They kept ranking them. They kept giving me money for them. And they were like, Oh, maybe Google likes that I’m doing this. These are written from the third person. They’re written more like research based journalistic articles instead of like interviewing people who lived in. I’m seeing people switch doing this now.
I was looking at a competitor of mine and they’re like actually interviewing people living in these campers that they’re recommending. And so having that personal experience, so mine were written more from a more distant journalistic perspective, targeting keywords. I’m thinking like, Oh, that’s probably maybe.
Why I was hit by the HCU. So that’s the only thing I can really think of right now. Why I was hit so hard. So I’m trying to figure out how to resuscitate that type of post on my site. And so, yeah, it’s hard to know what to do with it.
Doug: And like you said, you felt like you were doing the right thing. I mean, you actually had personal experience for a lot of the content and you have a YouTube channel and you have traffic coming from other social.
Websites, you have the pot like you have a lot of the things that Google says they want. So one thing we haven’t talked about it all. I’m going to connect the dots here. We haven’t talked about AI. You haven’t mentioned it at all, but AI in the last year has Come on the scene and the content is good enough for people to publish especially say like in the last four to six months or So almost like right out of whatever AI tool they’re using.
It’s pretty decent So one interesting thing that I’m hearing on the street is people with good sites are Being hit by HCU, but there’s a least a few examples of AI like pure AI content written With no experience, right? No experience at all. And those sites are actually getting traffic and ranking.
And I can’t wreck it. Like whatever you said, whatever reason you thought, like maybe because it’s written in the third person from a research perspective, a little more like stale or corporate, like I can’t reconcile the two. Those are opposed. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Kristin: No, and it, it all, you know, bothers me a great deal because I haven’t used AI on my site at all.
Like I said before, I hire people that are in that niche. I trust them to like have experience in that niche. And that’s why I hired them as I want someone knowledgeable about the space to be writing these articles. And so I was frustrated that I was hit that hard, given that I haven’t even used AI. And I’m like, really?
Like, that’s just not fair, but I do understand what Google’s doing. I do think they have a huge influx of AI articles that they’re trying to figure out what to do with. And maybe they inadvertently hit some sites that were trying to do a good job and who knows, like exactly what they were thinking, but I do know they they’re dealing with a lot more weird stuff on the internet now than they have been in the past.
So they’re trying to figure it out. I think. Hopefully.
Doug: Yeah. I hope so too. So I really don’t know what they’re going to do. It seems like a very difficult problem to solve and all the parameters are changing very quickly. So everything’s a moving target. All right. Let’s, let’s move on to how you’re, you’re pivoting and sort of your strategy.
So the traffic was going down, you’re, you’re devastated, but you’re keeping a cool head. Yeah. What kind of plans do you have currently?
Kristin: Yeah. So what I’ve currently been doing is trying to update older articles that I have on my site that maybe aren’t getting a lot of traffic or search traffic, and I’ve hired another writer and she has a lot of connections within like the van life community.
And so I’m having her update a lot of these articles that were written more in that third person with. interviewing her friends, like, and that’s not typically how I have been trained as a journalist to write articles, but maybe that’s what Google wants. So she’s writing not only about her own personal experience but she’s interviewing other people about maybe what they use in their van and what they recommend in their van.
So I’m having her do redo some of my articles in that way. And I’m also trying to take on some of my articles and add my own. Some more of my own personal experience, and I’m also publishing a lot more articles that are like social friendly, like Facebook friendly, that are just more fun to read instead of just targeting a keyword.
So I’m trying to mix up the types of articles that are going on my site. I am still targeting some keywords, but I’m also trying to throw some more fun, non SEO articles. into the mix that are just maybe inspiring, like more like what I did in the beginning, maybe more interviews, maybe some more fun, like listicles, people can read things that’ll get clicks on Facebook.
And so I’m trying to just change it up a little and see what I can do differently that that might help solve the problem.
Doug: Okay. That’s a great idea. Just overall, I know I’m trying to make sure I’m not too specific but someone that I’ve interviewed in the past, they had a whole series where they were getting stories from the field.
They were sort of interviews, kind of like what you’re talking about, and they were very specific in going for like, sort of diverse and underrepresented groups, especially in that specific industry. And I think that was really good for shareability. That said, I think, I think her site got hit. So I don’t know if it helped, but I mean, you’re probably still getting traffic and those shares and the people that care.
They would read the article. So from an industry perspective, it absolutely makes sense, like regardless of what Google thinks of it, which is an interesting point, right? You made a comment where your journalism background taught you how to publish a certain type of article or a certain kind of piece of content, which has been sort of proven over time.
Hundreds of years, right? So do you have any reservations about catering and pandering to some search engine when potentially it’s just a worse product at the end of the day?
Kristin: Yeah. I mean, I do think about that and it, it bothers me because I have tried to uphold good standards on my site and having things written well and like in depth research, you know, I don’t think I’m pushing out crap.
And so I’m thinking like, is all this personal experience like necessary, but I guess Google thinks it is because it helps combat the AI. So I’m, I’m kind of mixed on it, but I do think if the experience can help people, then it’s fine. Like, for example, if. There’s an article about like the best heating source for a van.
I can either list all the heating sources and why, which is what I’ve been doing. Like pros, cons, here’s your options. Or I can have interviews. This person says how it’s worked for them, why they like it, why they don’t like it. And maybe that will make it sound more authentic. And maybe that will help people more.
And so that kind of article I’m fine with. kind of pandering more to what Google is asking us to do, because I think maybe it is helpful. So that’s okay. So that’s how I’ll continue to think about it. And that’s only as far as I’ll, I’ll go with it, I think.
Doug: And it does make sense from, you know, if, if you had a story, you would go potentially interview some experts to get their pros and cons or whatever.
So, so that does make sense. I could, I could see it going off the rails a little bit. Depending on, I mean, the incentives are lined up for things to go off the rails. So, if Google keeps ranking a certain thing, we’ll keep publishing that thing until it changes. So, maybe it’s changing. Okay. So, you’re going and updating some older content.
You’re taking a little bit of a different approach. What else are you doing?
Kristin: So I’ve also decided to target Facebook traffic more, which is something I’ve never ever done in the past. And so I set up a Facebook page that is not related to my brand name at all. Cause my brand name, the way we’re at home.
I think if someone hears that, they don’t really know what that means. If, if, if they’re just on Facebook, they’re like, what’s. that. So I started a Facebook page. It’s very niche. It’s called the van life collective, and it’s all about just van life. And I started running a like campaign to that page, a very general basic ad campaign.
I didn’t even select any interest targeting. Super easy to set up. And the whole format and I learned this from the guy that runs a site called Strevio, which helps you figure out which posts are doing well on Google or on Facebook and to analyze that and duplicate it. So I’m following his process of creating this like campaign.
That’s very easy and sharing content and testing various types of content to see what people like and click on. So I started posting five times per day over to Facebook through buffer and I post only an image and. In the, in the caption above is where I put the link. And so it’s not a link. It’s not a link click.
It’s, I don’t know if that makes sense, but it’s an image with a link posted somewhere else. And so Facebook seems to like that. And the people respond well to the image. And I’ve driven my Facebook traffic up about 600 percent in the last month. And so I went from like 3000 monthly viewers from Facebook to about.
I think 30, 000. I don’t know if that makes sense with the percentage I said, but I’m looking at the Mediavine dashboard to, to see what the traffic’s doing and it is going way up. And I’m like, Oh, this is interesting. I’m going to keep playing around with this. So that’s, that’s been exciting to see.
Doug: Are you able to easily attribute the earnings from that traffic?
Kristin: Yeah, because I saw like one of the posts that did really well on Facebook was on camper van heaters, and I saw that I got like 3000 clicks like in one day, and I could easily just go to Mediavine and I saw all those. Clicks and my ad revenue had shot up and I was like, Oh, this is, this is really cool.
The RPMs for the Facebook traffic were low, like lower than Google and Pinterest. I thought that was interesting. I’ll need to drive way more Facebook traffic to even make up for the Google. Plus the Facebook is really sporadic. Like one day, I think it was this last Sunday, I got 5, 000 clicks from one article and that drove up my ad revenue, but like two days later, it’s back, it’s gone, and so it’s not as stable as the Google.
Like at least not yet. I haven’t figured it out, but I’m still experimenting and playing with that platform.
Doug: Okay. And yeah, I’m seeing a lot of the newsletters that I receive. A lot of people are they’re probably selling a Facebook traffic course is my guess is why I’m hearing so much about it or someone is and they’re promoting it.
So look out for my emails to have the same shit as everyone else. But It does seem like a source that is sort of revitalized because people are searching for other traffic. So are you looking at other social media as well?
Kristin: No, I don’t think so. I think, I actually think a lot of my audience is on Facebook because I think people interested in RV or like van life.
tend to be a little older. Like a lot of my audience are in their fifties, sixties forties. And I think that’s the last group that’s like kind of on Facebook a lot. Like I know people in their twenties and thirties aren’t really on it, at least in my friend group. And so I do think that I am targeting like people that are my target audience on there.
And I’m not sure which other I do. I am still on Pinterest though. I should say I still get about. 30, 000 to 40, 000 clicks per month off of Pinterest. And I have a Pinterest manager I have doing that. And I started doing some of my own pin generation with this new tool called pin generator, where it just creates pins and schedules them for you, which is really fun.
So I’ve been playing with that and see if I can increase my Pinterest traffic. Other than that, I don’t know if there’s any other platforms that are really good for my audience. I’m not sure. So.
Doug: all right, so one thing I want to talk about is the fact that At this point, I would normally guide people to, like, if their site got hit like yours, I would say, maybe look at going over to YouTube or a podcast and repurpose that content.
Go to a different medium that you control a little bit more. But here we are, Kristen, you already have both of those and you have good traction. So can you talk about why you’re not leaning into those? which I think I know the answer to that, but we’ll talk about maybe the pros and cons of like why someone would focus on spreading their platform versus like recovering their site.
So kind of a wide open question.
Kristin: Sure. So YouTube is something I’ve considered with purely informational videos that target a keyword. And I can go over maybe certain things. My blog went over like here’s the best minivan campers for camping or whatever. I don’t like the kind of YouTube channels where people are talking about their life and like, Recording what they’re doing all the time in their adventures.
I have no interest in that cause I’m more private. I don’t want to do that. But the informational videos are kind of interesting to me. If I could find an editor and someone who could put them together, I think there’s a lot of potential in YouTube, but I also think it requires a constant feeding of the beast and I have to be feeding it.
I think unless I can find, I know people have faceless YouTube channels. I know Spencer tested that and some other people are testing that, but. It seems like it’s more work. Like if I can get the niche site to start churning out the content and to start getting traction on Google again, I can remove myself from the situation where YouTube and the podcast require me to be constantly on the camera or recording an interview.
And with my lifestyle, it’s pretty challenging because I’m traveling full time. So I’m either in a camper van or I’m in the sailboat and to try to schedule these. Interviews, like with the podcast, especially became challenging. There’s been many times where we had to pull over on the side of a random road and set up the star link in the middle of a road trip to like, so I could do an interview and I’m like, this is not like super cohesive, like good for my lifestyle.
So that’s another reason I stopped. is if I had a home in an office, I would totally do the podcast and I’d probably totally do YouTube because I would have just more time and I’m more like in one place, but the fact of moving, it’s pretty hard. And so the blog is appealing cause I can remove myself and hire people to run it and manage it.
And so that’s why that’s my primary focus.
Doug: Okay. And that wasn’t even the one I was thinking of. So one, one thing. All that makes sense, by the way, that that totally makes sense with the revenue that you are earning from the website. It’s so much that you almost have to keep working on it to give it a shot.
It is not a typical, you know, sunk cost where you invested of, you know, whenever 20, 000 in this content over the past year and it wasn’t earning anything. If that’s the case for people like you should probably just walk away. Because that is truly a sunk cost, and you’re throwing money away, potentially, right?
Probably. But in your case, like, it was an asset worth, like, multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it’s worth the time and effort to spend, whatever, a year or two years or whatever, to get it to Whatever the potential is. It could be more than it was. It could be less than it was. What are your thoughts on that?
Kristin: Yeah, I think you’re totally right. As the amount of ad revenue that I was making off the site was just extraordinary, like 20, 000 a month in purely ad revenue, and I was. starting to build up the affiliates maybe 8, 000 a month in affiliates. I was starting to like put more focus on that, but purely to be able to run a content informational site and get so much money in ad revenue and something I barely had to work on was kind of incredible.
And I’d love to get back to that place again. I talked to a friend of mine who was. really into YouTube, tons of subscribers. She produced weekly videos, but I think she said the most she made in a year off of that was like 60 grand or something, or maybe a hundred grand. And she said if she skipped one week of YouTube, her revenue would plummet.
And she started feeling really tied to the YouTube channel and of sharing her life and her story. And she was one of the bloggers that would. She would film her life as she lived in a van and it became really too much for her and too intense. And she’s like, how do I do this blogging thing? And she’s asking me all these questions.
She ended up not liking YouTube. And so that’s just another reason why I just want to focus on the blog. Cause I think the income potential is really high.
Doug: Perfect answer. It’s yeah, it’s so interesting. I mean, the YouTube burnout is so real, which is why. I’ve run my channel into the ground if you if you look at the content that I published over the years It’s just like alright I just got to do some interviews that I enjoy and every now and then I’ll throw one in for the algorithm But I was in the luxurious spot of where like I didn’t need the money like I don’t even run ads.
I’m like 99 percent of the videos so I never like caved in to and I didn’t need the money So again luxurious spot for me to earn revenue from another place and have like digital products and all that stuff, but the One portion I want to go deeper in is the affiliate side of it So you were starting to grow it and you were earning essentially a full time, you know income just from affiliate But you weren’t spending too much time on it I think that could be one of the Focus on what you’re going to focus on, right?
But that could be one of the big pieces for YouTube and the podcast where, like, that’s where the revenue is. Ad revenue on YouTube is kind of a joke. Like, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t even tell people to try to, you have to get so many views to make that a viable option that you should just ignore it. So, yeah, what, tell us about the affiliate side and how you were growing and that sort of thing.
Kristin: So I partnered with a few camper van component companies that sold parts for people doing DIY van conversions and you know, what people were purchasing from those companies are pretty expensive parts. And with a kickback between 6 percent and 10 percent on those, that’s where I started to see more of the affiliate income coming in through those companies.
And those were of course, articles that were ranking really well on Google. Now that the, these articles have totally dropped off. My affiliate income has totally dropped off which has been very sad to see. So I think it’s like 1000 in affiliate income now, like down from like eight or nine because nobody’s seen those articles.
And so, yeah, maybe that is something I could pursue further on YouTube. That’s an interesting idea, but it is, yeah, you need the Google traffic to. Get the affiliate clicks. So it’s like this weird situation. And I was doing like best of kind of articles, like the best roof rack for a sprinter, best roof rack for a pro master, like very long tail keywords, but they were ranking and doing well.
And people were purchasing these items from these. Post, but now those are like on the fifth page of Google. So I’m not quite sure how to recover those because Google has changed the SERPs for these two where companies are now being listed instead of bloggers who are listing many options, you now just have buy now buttons everywhere.
And it’s just terrible to look at. I can’t even look at it.
Doug: So we’re going to start wrapping up here. I know you have a boat things to do. Most likely,
Kristin: of course,
Doug: the ocean freaks me out a little bit. I mean, like, yeah, yeah. Were you an ocean person? Did you grow up on the water and everything?
Kristin: You know, I grew up in Portland, Oregon. We were near the coast. I never went in it, but I’ve always loved boats.
Like, I’m obsessed with boats, but I never sailed before I met Tom, you know, who’s been a sailor for a long time. And I just love it. I think it’s exciting. We sailed from San Francisco all the way up into the Baja Sea of Cortez. And so we were on the ocean a little, and I just love it. Someday we might cross to French Polynesia, but we’ll see.
Doug: That’s crazy. Yeah, I would probably, I would probably get used to it like everything, but just as a thought experiment. It scares me a little bit. So, okay.
Kristin: It should.
Doug: So, going back. Yeah. It’s a serious thing. It’s not crazy. It’s like a normal fear. It is. So, before, before we sort of wrap it up and we have a great other thing that you listed in the notes and I think it fits in really perfectly.
So, going back to YouTube, if you, I think, you know, if you’re more of a private person Yeah, it makes it a little bit tougher in the specific industry, the niche that you’re in because there are so many like personalities in there. So, I would say that’s definitely a little bit tougher. And that that makes sense to me because it is it is a beast you have to keep feeding it and it’s a little bit Better from a keyword research perspective than like a normal social media platform, but you still have some of the same issues so before we move on to The last segment here.
Is there anything else in your plans to help recover the site?
Kristin: The only other thing that is interesting is I just got approved for a feed on msn. com. And so I’m going to start experimenting with pushing content to that platform. They pay their own ad revenue. And if you get referral traffic from MSN, apparently the RPMs on Mediavine are very high.
And so that’s something I’m working on really hard right now. That involves an entirely different animal of daily publishing. And so I’m getting into a mindset of, Oh, wow, I need to get daily publishing, which means more writers, more editors, more people adding images. And so it’s a more intense thing, but there’s people killing it on MSN and this group I’m in right now.
And so I’m like, that’s my fire has been lit again. Like when I first learned about blogging, I’m like, I’m going to learn that. And so that’s my next focus and goal is to work on making money over there. So we’ll see how that goes.
Doug: How many people are in your team currently?
Kristin: Mine? You know I mean, I just hired some new people, but maybe like five writers and I have a couple very casual VAs that don’t pay very much and I’m looking to hire an editor.
So I’m trying to expand it a little bit, especially to tackle this daily publishing beast. So we’ll see how that goes.
Doug: Okay. Yeah. I haven’t heard much about that. So I’ll be interested when you start seeing some results. What’s the process like to apply for that?
Kristin: So I joined a blogging group called the insiders group and they actually have a direct content contact and feed at MSN.
And so they facilitate the approval process. And so I went through them, but that means I am a sub brand underneath their brand and we have a revenue share agreement. But I don’t even know how a blogger would go and do that on their own. I don’t even know if MSN is taking people that are applying on their own anymore.
I’m not sure, but I got under their umbrella and that’s how I got in pretty quickly. So that’s cool. Yeah. It’s kind of interesting.
Doug: Networking is important. Everybody. So, all right. Totally. So I sent over some notes and I’m going to read what you, you wrote. So I said tell me one big thing for the podcast discussion.
You said the necessity of pivoting, exploring new options, staying motivated despite changes in the Google algorithm and huge losses in income, plus the benefits of staying passionate about the business and knowing how to save money and live below one’s means when a crisis like the helpful content update strikes.
So can you expand on that?
Kristin: Yeah, for sure. I think I’ve seen a lot of people that are, you know, depressed and quite upset about the helpful content update, which I was at first too, of course. But I’m also very confident in the fact that I do have savings. I do live very cheaply. I mean, I could have taken that money I was making and purchased a house and had a huge mortgage.
And I’m seeing some people in groups I’m in, and they’re like, I don’t know how I’m going to pay my mortgage. And to me, that just. me, that’s just so sad. Like to think about being in that situation where you don’t, where you’re just have all your eggs in that basket of the business. And so, you know, I felt sad about it.
And then I was talking to my partner, Tom, and he was like, don’t worry, we have. Savings. We can live off our savings for years. I mean, you’re okay. We live on a boat. We have like no rent. We have no debt. Like things are fine. Just keep working on your business. And he gave me that pep talk and I was like, that’s true.
And back, I was thinking about back at the beginning when I was working out of the gym for 10 hours a day, you know, living on this boat that had like no internet and no kitchen, like it was really like camping in the San Francisco Bay area. It was insane. And I did that for years. And I’m like, I know how to live this hearty lifestyle.
I can do this. And luckily I love what I do. I love online business and blogging. There’s always something new to learn. Like we were talking about the MSN thing, the Facebook traffic, there’s always something to keep my brain motivated and interested in. And so, and when you start seeing those little like.
positive feedback, like from the Facebook, I was like, yeah, there’s still things to learn. And I just think it’s important to keep that mindset of positivity and learning and also remembering to save money. Like, please save money, like pay off your debt and save money. I think that’s the one thing that’ll help people weather the storm the most.
And hopefully people will do that moving forward that weren’t doing it before. So.
Doug: Awesome. Yeah, and it’s I mean, it’s tough, especially with people that all of a sudden they’re like, oh, I did it. I like I do deserve to whatever buy the new car, new house or whatever. And it’s really easy to get caught up in it.
And I wonder, it’s a whole other discussion, so we, we can’t even do it, but I’m curious about like, your financial background, like growing up again, I have a whole other podcast, a whole other industry about like personal finance, but like, it all comes into play and like, you knew like, Hey, live below your means, if good times are here, like save that money, you don’t know, like the, the ups and downs that are going to come.
So, alright
Kristin: I’m just very thankful for that.
Doug: Okay, well, as we wrap up here, I would love to check in with you in, I don’t know, six, eight months or something like that, but we’ll, we’ll figure it out later. I know you’re, you’re embarking on a, on a trip here, which should be cool. So we’ll have to check in.
When do you have internet access again sometime in the future?
Kristin: Yay for Starlink, I should say, because now I can use Starlink on the boat in the middle of nowhere and it’s phenomenal. So I’m thankful that I’m able to now work from these remote corners of the world. So it’s pretty cool.
Doug: That’s awesome. So where should people find you?
We’ll link up to everything, but you could just tell them verbally here.
Kristin: Of course, yeah, the wayward home.com. And that’s also the same name on Instagram and Facebook. I do have the Wayward Home Facebook page, but also the Van Life Collective, and that’s the one that’s kind of getting a lot of traffic and I’m posting to a lot, but also people can join my, my email list.
I, I email people all the time. I love my email audience, so that’s another way that people can find me.
Doug: Awesome. Yeah, we’ll link up for everything and thanks a lot. Have a great afternoon there.
Kristin: Yeah. Thanks for having me. That was super fun.