Google’s HCU last April killed my travel blog. But AI sites me on a lot of the KWs that I used to rank #1 for. So if someone wants exposure and I write about them they may still get exposure on the first page but now my numbers don’t reflect that. I was thinking about screen shoting some of my AI citations and adding it to my media kit to show that the potential for exposure exists still. Has anyone done this? What do we think?

Continuing on with my progress updates for a travel blog that I started two months ago. Will shed some light on what challenges I've faced this month and what comments I've took on board from my last update.

I started a travel blog in July with the aim of sharing the guides and advice that I was already sharing to friends and family on the regular. I spent a few months prior learning about SEO, building a website and just blogging in general. Launched my first 7 posts all at once on the 21st July 2026.

Platform: Wordpress
Hosting: Hostinger
Niche: Travel

Breakdown of my stats from Google Site Kit:

Month 1 : 21st July - 21st August

• Total Clicks: 43
• Total Impressions: 6.02k
• No. of Posts: 12

Month 2: 21st August - 21st September

• Total Clicks: 133
• Total Impressions: 15.1k
• No. of Posts: 13

Month 3: 21st September - 21st October

• Total Clicks: 151
• Total Impressions: 17.4k
• No. of Posts: 6 (31 total)

I noticed an accumulation error in my last post so have fixed here.

My Thoughts:

I've definitely slowed down this past month with only having time to publish 6 posts. It stems from a multitude of things, from more work responsibilities to planning a move back to Japan for another year. Fortunately, I'm still hitting my goal of publishing 1 post per week.

I took onboard a lot of the comments from my last update around the use of Pinterest and whilst I haven't used it yet, I have been building up a back catalogue of pins to use. My plan is to post 1/day and aim to have at least 3-5 pins per post to begin with. Will roll this month.

Something I still strongly believe in is my approach to writing in clusters/silos. I'll group 6-8 posts around keywords for 1 destination and focus on publishing them in order, before moving onto my next cluster. For example, the 6 posts I worked on this month were all about Kyoto (guides, where to stay, best time to visit, listicles, etc.)

I had my first affiliate commission this month! Someone booked their Japan trip through one of my 'where to stay' guides. Using Stay22 I made a whole $26.82! It's small but it's the first real money I've made from blogging.

Questions:

Would people recommend using GA4 over Google Site Kit for stats? I imagine it's the sessions counter on there that matters more for potential future ad requirements.

What's peoples milage with using Facebook to generate traffic? How do you go about translating blog posts to Facebook posts and how do you promote them? I've created a FB page but haven't used it yet.

Won't share the link to my blog here, but it's in my bio if you're curious.

Happy to field any questions and open to any advice.

My blog posts always used to be indexed automatically but recently I have to keep indexing them manually.

My blog and newsletter is often featured in searches for 'top UK solopreneur blogs and newsletters' and I'm an SEO Blogger/Copywriter.

And quite a few of my blog posts are featured on the first page of Google.

Anybody else having similar issues and any idea why this is happening?

Any help would be really appreciated. Thank you! 🙏

My experience with Journey by Mediavine: I was deactivated for IVT (invalid traffic). I owned up to my mistakes, fixed everything (scrapers, crawlers etc) , and now I don't have any more IVT. My blog is getting over a 2-minute average session duration, which feels like a really good metric. I even have 90% of my traffic coming from the US.

So, I submitted an appeal and wrote to Mediavine help, and I have never, ever received a reply. You tell me, what am I supposed to do? I'm desperate!

I have turned a blog into a book twice now, a first edition years ago and a rewritten second edition this fall, both from posts I wrote after night shifts with no plan to publish them. This is the check I would run on any blog before starting.

1. Count the posts on one subject. A dozen on the same story or problem usually means a book is forming, while posts spread across ten subjects are still a blog.
2. Read three of them back to back as if you had never seen your blog. Wherever you would get lost is where the book needs new writing.
3. Look at what readers answered. Comments, email replies and posts that keep getting visits months later show you which ones people would carry into a book.
4. Finish the line "by the last page, she will be able to." If the ending will not come, the posts still need a center.

On numbers, a full-length book usually takes around thirty to fifty posts, and a short how-to book can grow from a dozen strong ones with new writing between them. The biggest lesson from my rewrite was that copying posts in as they are reads like a stack of separate posts. The editing is where it becomes a book.

For those of you who have turned posts into a book, how many did you start with, and how much did you end up rewriting?

This year I am taking the whole blog post from April - December and creating a new book - that is my writing focus for the year.

Some of you may remember my earlier post here about my Pinterest account dropping overnight on 18 August. Quick update, and something worth reading if this has happened to you.

Where I am now: still down about 95%. Pins linking to my site don’t appear in Pinterest search, even for their exact titles. Support says the account “isn’t flagged”. The one thing I’ve learned since: on the same account, plain photo pins with no link get hundreds of impressions and saves, while the same kind of photo linking to my site gets about 2. So for me it looks like the restriction is on the domain, not the account.

The article: I got talking to a business owner named Sean who has spent months collecting creator reports, support replies and Pinterest’s own statements, and he has just published it all:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pinterest-silencing-critics-while-its-creator-trust-crisis-sean-luger-vxdoc/

The parts I found most useful:

• The “your account isn’t flagged, natural ups and downs” reply is word for word the same across different creators and agents. It’s a template.
• In at least one case support found “a bug in our spam blocker that was mistakenly flagging safe content” once they actually looked at the links.
• Some blocked domains did get unblocked, but only after repeated appeals (one creator said around 12 attempts).

If you’ve been hit, it’s worth adding your case in the comments on the article, ideally with a screenshot of your stats.

And a question for everyone here: has anyone actually recovered from this? If so, what do you think did it?

The first step is always good old SEO. That would be meta descriptions, alt text, page titles, heading hierarchy, and interlinking between, blogs.

• The next piece is mainly to be cited for AI tools, structured content. This would be for AI to lead each section with a direct answer to the question. As AI pulls short, clear passages, so buried answers always get skipped.
• Write around real answers is the next step. Using headings phrased the way people actually ask them, and including FAQ sections for common follow-ups. This, in turn matches the way people prompt AI tools.
• Show clear authorship. This would be authors with credentials a clear about page and sources. For any of the statistics, that show up within the blog. This makes it easier for AI systems to trust the content.
• using clean technical markup. This ties back to the SEO piece for proper heading hierarchy, comma, descriptive alt text, as well as schema markup. This helps AI crawl pages faster.
• Check what AI tools are saying. Each month, you need to run the category questions through LLMs and note whether the blog appears and which sources get cited instead. Over time, this will show you whether the content changes are working and where the gaps still lie.

Domestic violence awareness Trigger warning.

Good morning.

I am writing a blog post about domestic violence awareness.

I am a survivor of DV. I recognize that DV is not just physical violence. I am looking for other survivors of DV who would like to share their stories on my blog.

I know it is a hard topic and can be extremely triggering for some. If you are interested in sharing your story, please reach out to me. Abuse thrives in secrecy and in the dark. I am looking to drag it into the light.

say someone leaves a useful correction under a blog post, the kind that changes the actual advice, not a typo. do you edit the post and credit them, add a dated note at the top, or leave the discussion in the comments?

i'd want the fix in the post itself. otherwise the next reader has to play detective before trusting it lol. but silently changing everything also makes the old comments look weird.

curious what your rule is, especially for posts that still get search traffic months later. do you keep a little change log or is that overkill?

Hey everyone
I currently run a recipe website getting around 9K–12K sessions per day, mostly Tier 1 traffic (US, Canada, etc.).
I’m monetizing with HB Agency, and my RPM is usually between $15–$35, but the user experience is really bad because of too many ads. Visitors keep complaining, and they don’t stay long on my site.
I can’t really reduce the ads because I have a team to pay and need to maintain my earnings.
I was thinking about switching to Journey by Mediavine, but I’ve seen people reporting RPMs as low as $5, which worries me.
Now I’m considering Mediavine or Raptive instead.
The problem is I’ve already applied to Mediavine with two websites and got rejected. One for low-quality content and the other for invalid traffic.
I use AI to help write my recipe posts faster, and most of my traffic comes from social media.
My questions are:
Which network has better RPMs for recipe websites, Mediavine or Raptive?
Is it possible to get $20–$35 RPM with fewer ads?
Does Mediavine accept websites using AI-assisted content and social media traffic?
Has anyone been rejected by Mediavine and later accepted? What did you change?

Hiiii! This is coming from someone who do not show my face often and grew my page from my 3k to 18k on Facebook.

I have roughly 10 groups in total to reach demographics. My main group is over 500,000 members and active.

Some months ago I came to you all about blogging and you all reminded me of my roots. My blog. Now I’m here to help you all.
——

I started from little to NO following. If you have even 100 dedicated followers, get them to join you in a community. Especially on Facebook? Restricted public. Not entirely public or entirely private.

Have them ONLY ask you questions and receive advice from that group. It cannot just be you posting. Others have to post too— even if it’s asking questions or sharing quotes.

Make it optional, but ask members for their email to start growing your email list.

My email list is now in the thousands from this. I do not force anyone, I give them options. My visibility on Google and other search engines are in the top searches.

A drawback: Now I find this to be extremely valuable if you have a niche that helps people. I am not sure for hobby blogs UNLESS it helps others.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Hi guys,

We’ve recently started working on a blog. It’s new, baby-staged, but we’re enjoying the process.

I’m currently considering translating our articles, French to English. Im looking for early stages advices: where to start, what common mistakes to avoid, your own experience.

And, regarding web design, I’m also looking for resources on how to proceed. We’re on WP with a divi builder.

Thanks in advance for the support
Cheers

I've been blogging on and off since 2010 - longer if you count LiveJournal days - and a lot has changed in that time. Alongside SEO considerations, I think the biggest change to how I blog is what's worthy of coverage in the age of search algorithms and AI.

So I'd love to know from long time bloggers, what are you doing differently now that you didn't five or ten years ago?

Hey all,

I'm working on something for recipe creators, but it's nowhere near ready to release, and I'm not here to sell anything.

Before I put in more energy, I'd like to understand what running a food blog is really like. If you publish recipes anywhere, I'd love your take on any of these:

1. When writing a new recipe, where does most of the time go, and is there a step you hate doing?

2. Where does your traffic come from, and (if it does) how does that equate to income?

3. What's the most frustrating thing about running your blog right now, and what have you tried to fix it?

4. Have you ever worried about losing your audience or your recipes (algorithm change, a platform shutting down, AI scraping your recipes and taking your viewers), or has it ever actually happened?

5. If you were to start over today, what would you want from a place to publish recipes that you can't get now?

Thanks in advance for your time!

Apologies if this kind of thing isn't allowed

Hey everyone,
I’ve been thinking about a collaboration model for blogging and wanted to hear from people who have tried something similar.
One person already has an established blog and focuses on the content, while the other focuses mainly on SEO, traffic acquisition, content opportunities, and growth.
I have experience with SEO and generating real traffic from external platforms, so I’m particularly interested in the traffic/growth side.
Has anyone here worked with this kind of arrangement?
How did you structure the partnership and revenue split? And what problems should someone watch out for when doing this with an AdSense-monetized blog?
Curious to hear from people who have actually tried it.

I publish new pages on my site all the time and kept falling behind on Pinterest. After a lot of trial and error, here's what actually made it manageable. None of it needs paid tools.

**1. Make 2–3 pins per post, not one**

Same link, different image. Pinterest treats each new image as a fresh pin. Space them about a week apart so they don't compete.

**2. Pin seasonal posts 6–8 weeks early**

People search for Christmas ideas in October and Halloween in September. If you pin the week before, you've missed most of it.

**3. Write pin titles like search terms**

"Easy pumpkin bread recipe" beats "My cozy fall bake". Pinterest is a search engine, so type your idea into the Pinterest search bar and borrow the suggestions.

**4. Turn on RSS auto-publish**

If your blog has an RSS feed, Pinterest can create a pin for every new post automatically (look under Settings → Bulk create Pins). Point each category's feed at a matching board. Easiest win on this list.

**5. Use bulk CSV upload for your back catalog**

You can upload a spreadsheet of pins with publish dates. Two gotchas that cost me a day: image links must be public and point straight to the image file, and board names must match exactly, capitals included.

**6. Batch it once a week**

Spend one hour on Sunday making the week's pins and scheduling them. Daily pinning is what makes people quit.

**7. Tag your links**

Add UTM parameters (like ?utm_source=pinterest) so your analytics show which pins bring visitors, not just which get saves. Saves feel good; clicks pay the bills.

Bonus: if you're technical, the Pinterest API can automate all of this. That's what I eventually did, but the steps above get you 80% of the way for free.

What's worked for you? Especially curious if anyone's found a good way to make pin images faster.

As Blogger - somewhere along the way, something happens.

People begin to recognize you.

Not because you've become famous or reached some imaginary finish line.

Because they've been watching you do the work. They've learned how you think, what you believe, and what you're willing to change your mind about.

You become familiar.

I was wondering if anyone here is still using Travelpayouts and how it's been performing for you lately.

I used Travelpayouts on my blog a few years ago and received payouts in 2024, so I know it worked well enough for me back then. However, I eventually shifted the direction of my blog and stopped actively using it.

I recently logged into my account for the first time in ages and was pleasantly surprised to discover that I had accumulated some earnings without doing anything! I also noticed that my old affiliate links are still getting clicks almost daily, despite not having promoted them in quite some time.

It's made me consider giving Travelpayouts another go, especially since those older links seem to have some staying power.

Is anyone here still actively using it? Have you noticed any changes in conversions, commissions, or payouts over the past couple of years? I'd be curious to hear whether it's still worth investing time in, particularly for smaller or niche blogs.

Thinking about starting a blog about my field. Not for money, just to share what I know and build some credibility.

But between AI summaries and everyone posting on LinkedIn, I’m not sure a blog still makes sense.

Anyone here blogging professionally right now? Worth the effort, or am I late to the party?

Hello fellow bloggers. Sometimes, I received guest posting request from agency or backlink platform.

I usually open to all niche for guest posting, except porn and gambling.

How about you? Do you accept all niche or decline some niche because your moral/standing? Or do you only accept guest posting that is still within your blog niche.

Curios. What is your consideration of accepting content placement/guest posting. Hope you wouldn't mind to share :)

One year on Journey by Mediavine, RPM stuck at $2 to $5 (it was $15 on Ezoic) and support never answers.

I want to share my experience with Journey by Mediavine and ask for advice, because I'm honestly fed up.

I run a science blog in the wildlife biology and ecology niche. My content is not all informational posts, there are bunch of career posts (jobs, applications, internships). Majority traffic from USA.

Before Journey I was on Ezoic, where my RPM was in range of $15 to $20. I switched because everyone kept saying Journey is a strong network with some of the best RPMs out there. On Journey my RPM has always been around $2 to $5, rarely touching $10.

I understand small sites aren't Mediavine's priority. But if they accept small sites, there should be at least some working support. Emails go unanswered. The community they point you to doesn't answer either. I've spent a year waiting and waiting, hoping things would improve, and they haven't. I implemented all the best practices from their blog.

I'm now seriously planning to move. My traffic fluctuates between 15,000 and 18,000 pageviews a month.

Questions for anyone who has been in a similar spot:

Has anyone moved from Journey to Monumetric? How did RPM and support compare?

TL;DR - I canceled. Here's why.

Some of you may remember my post a few weeks ago asking who had joined Meta One, whether you’d noticed any real benefits, and whether Meta was delivering on its promises.

Thank you again to everyone who shared their experiences. I said I’d report back if I tried it, so here I am!

After my lowest readership day and lowest Facebook click-through rate in over 270 days, I finally took the leap last Friday, Oct. 2, around 9:30 a.m., and started the one-week Max trial.

I didn’t see ANY sustained improvement that justified paying $399 for a full month. That was my desktop renewal price; the mobile offer was $499 for what appeared to be the same plan.

At that price, I needed it to earn its keep!

My Page was already in a downturn before I joined, so I’m not blaming Meta One for that decline. I wanted to see whether the advertised feed exposure, search placement, and automatic follow invites could help turn things around. Facebook is historically my website’s biggest referral source, so this matters a lot to my business.

Here’s what the numbers showed:

Meta Insights, Oct. 1-8 compared with the previous seven days:

• Views: down 27.2%
• Engagement: down 26.0%
• Page visits: down 22.0%
• Follows: down 19.8%
• Facebook monetization earnings: down 42.5%

Separately, Facebook referrals to my website were down 14% for Oct. 1-8 compared with the previous seven days, according to Clicky Analytics.

Views did improve for a few days after joining, which briefly gave me some hope! Then they fell back. I couldn’t distinguish that improvement from the usual Facebook ups and downs.

What I saw from the advertised benefits:

• Featured in feed / more discovery: No sustained lift. Non-followers accounted for 62.2% of views during my 1-week trial with Meta One (max tier), versus 68.4% in the week before joining Meta One. That’s a drop of 6.2 %. Certainly not the added boost in discovery that Meta One promises.
• Automatic follow invites: New follows were down 19.8% during my time with Meta One compared with the previous seven days. I couldn’t confirm that automatic invitations were being sent at all. The benefit description specifies “Facebook professional profiles,” leaving me unclear whether my publisher Page was even eligible for something included in its offer.
• Extra analytics: I couldn’t find any additional Facebook insights available through the plan.
• Unlimited links: No added value for me during the trial. My Page is categorized as Media/News Company and hasn’t received the two-link monthly restriction, so I continued posting seven to eight clickable article links daily. Publisher Pages are reportedly exempt for now, although I couldn’t confirm exactly how Meta defines a “publisher.” I appreciate that unlimited links could be much more valuable to those of you already facing the restriction.
• Instagram/Threads: Only my Facebook Page appeared subscribed. Instagram and Threads never appeared properly linked, which matches problems others shared here.
• Multiple Pages: My subscription listed just one Facebook Page as covered. Others have reported the same. If each Page needs its own $399 Max subscription, four Pages would cost $1,596 a month. That adds up quickly!
• Support: I didn’t test the human support benefit during my one-week trial. Other publishers and creators who have tried Meta One, as I've seen reported in other groups, say it remains poor. Their reports include being unable to reach a real person despite that being listed as a benefit, being told the issue was “out of scope,” and still not reaching anyone after upgrading. That is secondhand, but it was consistent across several people.

Facebook monetization earnings fell 42.5%. Website ad revenue held up despite fewer Facebook referrals.

The main concern remains how many readers Facebook sends, and I saw no sustained improvement there from Max.

On Oct. 8, the final full day of the trial, Facebook referrals were down 37% compared with Oct. 7, and total website visitors were down 25%. That’s a separate daily comparison, but the brief improvement hadn’t held as the trial finished.

These are just the findings for one Page and one week of use, and the results don’t establish that Meta One caused the declines. That said, nothing I observed justified continuing at $399 a month. I canceled before renewal, with benefits ending this morning at 9:30 a.m. I've seen no noticeable drop in readership since the blue tick was taken away 2 hours ago, but I’ll keep tracking now that the trial has ended.

Hopefully this helps anyone here who’s been weighing up the same decision. For my Page, I saw no sustained benefit, and every Facebook metric listed above declined during the comparison.

I’d still love to hear from other publishers who completed the trial, especially anyone tracking website clicks, sessions and earnings alongside Facebook views. Did it bring enough additional readers or revenue to cover the monthly cost?

And is anyone’s Facebook Page still flourishing and sending strong traffic back to their site, despite the declines many of us have reported over the past four to six weeks? If yours is, please chime in! I’d love to hear what’s working for you.

Thanks again, everyone, and happy Friday!

Your blog is the journey you are on, not the report you file at the end

I was in the middle of writing a post for my blog today when this came out of me, and I had to stop and read it back because it’s the thing I wish somebody had handed me years earlier than they did.

A blog isn’t a place where finished people go to publish their conclusions. It’s the record of somebody building something, written while they’re still building it.

You’re taking your reader along with you: what you tried and how it went, what worked, including the part where you weren’t sure it would, and what flopped completely and cost you a month you’d really like back. It’s what you believed in January that you’ve totally changed your mind about by September, and what changed it.

Nobody needs you to have arrived. They need you to be moving, out loud, somewhere they can watch it happen.

That one shift changes what you’re allowed to write about, and it changes it a lot. If you’ve ever felt like you had nothing to say, it’s probably because you were measuring yourself against some finished expert. Measure yourself against the person two steps behind you instead, and you’ve got something worth writing every single week, because every week you learn something they haven’t learned yet.

My own message has changed more than once over the years. Not because I was wrong to start, but because you can’t think your way to the right version from a standing start. You write, you watch what lands, you adjust, and the blog carries the whole record of that. The people who’ve read me the longest didn’t stay because I had it right at the beginning. They stayed because they could watch me work it out.

Anyone else feel this way? What’s something you’ve completely changed your mind about since you started blogging?