August 25, 2023
This is one of the most interesting interviews from Niche Pursuits that I’ve watched and analyzed so far. After learning how to sail a sunfish, I’ve fallen in love with the idea of owning and living on a bigger sailboat. Of course my partner thinks I’m crazy and it will never happen, but it’s nice to dream.
Here are my notes from the interview.
Introduction
- Kristin Hanes - Founder of The Wayward Home
- Rags to riches, living on a sailboat right after being laid off
- Had to go to the gym to shower and get Internet to write her blog
- Shares her steps in the beginning
- Got onto Media Vine after 6 months
- Was a radio news reporter, journalist major
- In 2016 the entire newsroom was laid off
- A year and a half later turned into blogging
- Never thought about niche sites or online affiliate stuff
- Her partner Tom purchased a sailboat, she wanted to find a job that would let her travel full-time
- AH HA moment was when she read about a digital nomad making $100k per month
- Was doing travel writing, didn’t make a lot of money, a lot of work
- It was her first website and built it in June 2017
- Made a lot of mistakes
- Wrote articles about interviewing nomads, interview based articles, didn’t know about SEO
Growing the Site
- Interview based articles were meant to inspire people about nomad life
- Published on SFGate, the nomad stories got a lot hits
- Her articles republished on SFGate through canonicals, and got a lot of traffic
- Got a lot of viewership through that
- Did social sharing in the beginning, might not be the way to go today
- In 2017/2018 there wasn’t anybody about van life, and ended up on the first page of Google SERP
- Then got on Media Vine by doing accidentally google and Pinterest
- Wanted to make money through ads, wasn’t interested in writing affiliate marketing
- Wanted to do a news-like site
- Was making $20/$30 a day, then got a private ad for $500 a month
- Was living on a sailboat: no running water, no shower, the boat was in a state of disrepair
- Living on the boat allowed her to live with no rent and wait for the $500 a month ad revenue
- Current income: $25k to $30k per month, very seasonal, summer the most income, winter the least
- 400,000 page views on average per month
- Started farming out Pinterest work (50k to 70k page views per month)
Strategies
- Only social strategy is Pinterest, doesn’t do FB anymore
- 100% uses Google (optimization) for growth
- Took the course Stupid Simple SEO in 2019
- Took the course and started implemented the changes right away
- Traffic went way up, started with 20k page views in January and by May was at 120k pageviews
- By the summer page views went up to 300k
- That turned her into an SEO convert
- Doing keyword research and how to put them in naturally helped
- Now has hired writers
- Guess had about 100 articles in the beginning
End Notes
This is the third set of notes I’ve generated after listening to the Niche Pursuits YouTube channel and to make money online, whether passively or not, you need to do the following things:
- You need over 100 high quality articles
- Monetize each one of those high quality articles
- Do Keyword Research
- Optimize your articles for SEO or tweak old ones
That’s seems to be gist of it all to building niche websites.