Nina Clapperton on SEO and Exploding Your Blog Traffic

Nina Clapperton is a publisher, course developer, and travel writer who has taken her first blog from a perpetual laggard to one that gets more than 100K monthly page views and now earns five figures monthly. Nina Out and About is one of five sites that she runs, however, in addition to several successful courses. She has gone from working four jobs and running websites to now working less than 20 hours a week on content development. Settle in and hear her inspiring story of success.

What did you do before becoming a travel blogger and what mistakes did you make before you found your footing?

Blogging kind of started before any other career for me. And it came with so many mistakes.

I started my first travel blog after spending a year working across Europe. I was supposed to go to law school, got my acceptance with a full scholarship, but was more excited about a Starbucks cookie and that seemed like a bad omen.

So I found a $200 flight to New Zealand from Toronto, told my disappointed family, and headed to New Zealand where I started my site. I tried to start my blog like it was 2008. I had 0 keywords, no idea what pagespeed was, and barely even knew enough to have a paid domain name. My posts ranged from 500-1200 words typically, with blurry images, random diary-style posts, and no actual helpful information for others.

I burnt through my savings in the first month in New Zealand and ended up getting an admin job at the Commerce Commission in Auckland. I worked there while doing my blog on the side, although I cut my posting schedule to about once every 2 weeks. What time I did spend on my blog was mostly occupied with Facebook groups—and not in a helpful way. I used all those “comment for comment” or “you Google my site and I’ll Google yours” threads. Within the first three months, my site had 5k pageviews, but I was spending 60-80 hours a week to get them.

I ended up leaving New Zealand to do a Master’s in Publishing in Oxford. Again, blogging was a part-time hobby. I convinced myself I could “make it” if I just wanted it enough. But I still refused to tell other people I wanted it. I downplayed it constantly or wrote posts at 2 a.m. after a night out with my friends.

The pandemic was kind of a blessing in disguise for me. I ended up back in Canada since my visa meant I couldn’t stay without school…and then my school closed down. I was living in my sister’s basement doing my thesis and trying to get my blog to make it big on Pinterest or Instagram when I didn’t even own a camera.

I ended up taking a job as a law clerk at a firm I’d done summer work for during high school. It was then that I had any semblance of a disposable income to consider spending on courses. I bought two, went through about an hour of each, and then decided “Yep, I know everything now”

So I spent a year (wasted, more like), jumping from platform to platform, never sticking with a strategy long enough to see it out, and never really giving myself the opportunity to truly learn about any platform enough to be able to see success. I would spend a week on Tiktok, then a week on Instagram, then two days on Pinterest (I really don’t like Pinterest), then convince myself I knew SEO because I found a “keyword” (aka I Googled something and results showed up).

I ended up taking on three extra side jobs to make money because Canada is incredibly expensive and I was living alone. So blogging kept getting pushed farther down the list.

In the Niche Pursuits Podcast interview you were on you talked about how you had a goal to get onto Mediavine’s ad network, which requires 50K unique monthly visitors these days, and at the time you have 1/10th that. How did you create that kind of major growth in traffic?

I gave myself an ultimatum: either I get this blogging thing making me money or I had to go back to law school. I had 1 year to do it and I managed to make it work in 6 months which still feels surreal.

My first step was picking one thing to focus on. I wasn’t allowed to veer from that thing. For me, it was SEO. It was the strategy I enjoyed the most and did have a vague grasp of at that point.

It was also the thing that I had learned was the most passive in terms of ongoing results. I could write the post today and have it continue to rank for years.

Since I had one post go accidentally viral during the elections in the US—about moving to Canada—I saw how well something ranking high on Google could perform.

Then I sat down and made a plan.

I work best on a batch system. I can’t find the keyword, outline the post, write the post, format the post, etc. in that sequence. I like to find 100 keywords on one sitting, then outline 5 posts at once, and continue in that way.

Similarly, I can’t jump from backlinks to writing for myself to a content audit in the same day.

I didn’t fully realize I was doing it this way until it was happening, but I ended up breaking the months into a theme. The first month was all about keywords and niching down since at that point I was still in a solo travel niche—or trying to focus in that direction anyway.

Once I picked a niche, I got rid of anything not applicable to it. Then I updated what did exist so they were actually following SEO best practices. (This meant losing traffic for a couple of months, by the way, which terrified me.)

From there, I was determined to produce as much content as possible. I did about 10-12 new posts a month, completely rewrote over 50 posts in one month, did at least 2 guest posts and 8 collabs a month, and was doing it all while working 4 jobs (2 of them full-time).

Obviously, I’ve learned how to work very effectively so I don’t waste time. Even now, students of mine will say “How the heck did you do that so fast?” when I come up with the idea for a product and have it launched in a week.

It seems simple to me that once you have the idea, you execute it, and then you can have free time later when you’re off the clock. I’d rather have high-quality blocks of free time I guess, versus the 10 minutes idly scrolling on Facebook.

I also put a sticky note of my goal of Mediavine on my laptop so I had to see it every day. Any time I tried to click to something else or waste time, I’d ask myself “is this working towards my goal?” If not, I’m out.

I invested about $12k in courses, with half of them completely unhelpful, unfortunately. But a couple had some great tidbits that really propelled me forward.

The biggest uptick for my traffic was when I got reintroduced to zero volume keywords (or hidden keywords). I spent three days learning everything I could about them across the internet. I wrote 10 posts with them and bam, 14k sessions in one month!

What is your main blog, the one that gets the most traffic, and what’s it about? What other business offshoots do you have that generate significant revenue?

My main site is an expat site about living abroad. I’ve lived in 18 countries in the last 11 years and get to share all about my experiences moving abroad alone from ages 16 to 27.

After I saw success with that blog, I launched She Knows SEO, which is my SEO agency.

I teach travel bloggers how to grow their blogs to $30k passive income months like I have experienced in the last 18 months.

I also run 3 other niche sites in a portfolio that I’m growing to sell.

I know you have a course on using AI for content creation, which is a hot topic these days and one loaded with controversy. Is using bots to write articles a crutch, a cop-out, a cool assistant, or Bladerunner come to life?

I totally get the fear of AI. I was a freelance writer so I get that people think it’s “coming for their jobs.” But realistically there are sites online (usually pretty terrible ones) that outrank us who have never been to the places featured in the articles. They hire 50 writers, get really thin content, but they can also pay outreach specialists to grow their DA by getting links back.

AI writers just even the playing field so those of us who don’t have $1 million to spend on staff or an army of freelance content writers can actually output content in volume. I’ve been using the Jasper.ai writer since 2021. My site has never been hit by a Google update, even the ones targeting AI or thin content.

Why? Because I don’t let the AI be the author. They help me write for sure, but I do all of the research, include my personal experience, structure the outline, and just use the AI to speed up filling in the syntax between my notes. I now have both human writers and AI writers (I’ve trialed over 67 writers at this point and my accountant is…let’s just say concerned for my spending habits on this).

The common thing you’ll notice amongst all of them is that none can create publication-perfect, SEO optimized content with one click. Every single article needs some form of editing. And most AI tools need significant prompt engineering to make them half readable. There’s one that SEO twitter really loves right now called Koala AI that’s supposed to write a blog post with just a title and a keyword. The outputs are cool, sure. But nothing I’ve ever had produced by it was something that doesn’t need me to edit it.

AI, much like automation tools on our sites, just speeds up the process so we can help more people. I don’t think there’s an issue with that. Honestly, I think anyone not utilizing AI in some form is actually hurting their business and their profit margins.

Not to mention, 99.9% of bloggers are using it and don’t realize it. AI is the basis of so many algorithms and apps we use to run our sites. Rankmath and Yoast are both technically AI tools. So is Keysearch.

I recently went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and they had these videos running of senators panicking about this new genre of music and how it’s going to ruin the world. So much of their diatribe is exactly what I’m hearing from people about AI writers.

Marie Hayes said it really well and I’m going to paraphrase: if you asked accountants in the 1970s if anyone would trust a computer to help with their taxes, they would have said no. Nowadays, every accountant is using computer programs to do our taxes. We have to evolve with it for sure, but I don’t think we’re spiraling toward a Matrix or Bladerunner kind of thing.

I actually have a few courses now on using AI as a blogger in an ethical and helpful way.

How does your revenue mix play out these days? In terms of time spent vs. money made, which activities have the best return on your time investment?

I now work a maximum of 20 hours per week on all 5 of my sites. I separate out my profit by site.

My main travel blog in March made over $32.5k USD. The majority of that is from affiliates (over 2/3rds). I am also monetized with Mediavine and have two $7 products. There was no sponsorship money this month, but sometimes I have some of that in the mix too.

My three baby sites are new: two started at the end of December and one from June that I hadn’t touched in months. I hired an editorial team to keep them running on autopilot.

I don’t share my SEO agency income statements, but it’s been especially lucrative in 2023, even with me closing my coaching services to only open a few times a year.

Affiliate and ad income are my favorite ways to monetize a travel site. They are so passive and just keep working—even if it’s much harder to get them started.

Products I find are way easier on the B2B site. B2C products are challenging and I don’t put as much effort in as I should to market them. It’s on my wishlist to do a better job at promoting them across the site and creating some better funnels for them, but it’s not as significant to me as the big update I’m doing to my signature SEO course to include my strategies for affiliates on a travel blog that got me to $30k months regularly.

I don’t spend much time on my travel sites now. The most I spent recently was one week I did 10 hours organizing a content audit a month or two ago.

What advice would you give to a new travel blogger starting out today who doesn’t want to wait three years to get real traction?

Pay someone to help you. I was so terrified of spending money that I spent 5 years making none.

Treat it like university and get a program that is going to fast-track your success. Pick one platform and stick to it. Learn everything you can about it and put all your effort into it.

In my opinion, SEO is the #1 thing to focus on. I’ve tried Pinterest, Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, Facebook groups, and even press trips again since hitting my first $10k passively with SEO. All of them still pale in comparison in terms of the amount you can make vs. how much effort it takes to maintain, and none lasts as long as SEO’s impact does.

If you’re looking to learn about SEO, I recommend joining my SEO Roadmap for Travel Bloggers course.

Nina Clapperton is the founder of She Knows SEO. She has worked as a niche blogger since 2018, grew her travel blog to 50k sessions in 6 months, and now runs a portfolio of niche sites. She has helped over 2,500 students and clients with their blogs since starting She Knows SEO. She’s on a mission to help bloggers achieve financial freedom via passive income from their blogs.