In this week’s podcast episode, I’m doing something totally different. Instead of talking about my own experiences with blogging and online business or sharing some specific tips and tricks with you, today is going to be all about celebrating the successes of others.
I’m sharing 5 stories of dietitians who are running successful blogs and online businesses, with the goal of highlighting some of the unique ways people in this space are absolutely crushing it online and using blogging to grow their businesses and income.
These stories of blogging success will leave you feeling inspired to take action no matter what niche you’re in or what monetization method you ultimately aspire to. So, grab a cup of coffee and tune in!
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Mentioned Links
- SEO Made Simple course waitlist
- Blog #1: forkintheroad.co
- Blog #2: thekidneydietitian.org
- Blog #3: rbitzer.com
- Blog #4: childrensnutrition.co.uk
- Blog #5: migrainestrong.com
Episode Transcript
I’m going to do something totally different on this week’s podcast episode…
It’s just going to be me on the podcast today, but instead of talking about my own experiences with blogging and online business or sharing some specific tips and tricks with you, today is going to be all about celebrating the successes of others.
I’m sharing 5 stories of dietitians who are running successful blogs and online businesses, with the goal of highlighting some of the unique ways people in our space are absolutely kicking butt online and using blogging to grow their businesses and income.
Some of the people I’m talking about today are students of my SEO Made Simple course and some are just online blogger friends I’ve made over the years, but all of them have at a unique facet to their story that I know will each speak to at least one person listening to the podcast right now.
Of course, if you’re a long-time listener, you probably remember some of the episodes I’ve done bloggers where we spent a whole hour diving into their journey and paths to success, but today I’d like to go broad and highlight a wider variety of stories within this one episode with the hope that at least one will resonate with you, no matter what niche or monetization method you ultimately aspire to.
The common thread here is that all of these examples are dietitians who use BLOGGING as one of their main methods for growing their audiences and making money online.
I think it’d also be cool to do individual deep dive episodes with each of these bloggers in the future, so stay tuned cause I’ll probably do that, but I thought it’d be cool to try out a mini roundup-style episode today instead!
So let’s get into these inspiring stories! And if you really connect with someone I mention here on the podcast today, be sure to swing by their website and send them some love!
Inspiring blogger #1) Kristina Todini from the food blog forkintheroad.co
Kristina is a food blogger dietitian friend that I originally met on Facebook many years ago when I was also still food blogging and just starting up The Unconventional RD brand and Facebook group.
At that time, Kristina and I were both running relatively small food blogs and were hoping to grow them into something that could make money online via display ads and affiliate links.
We connected over our shared love for food and blogging and being in the same place-ish on our journey where we were publishing content and trying to take good photos and get traffic and learn SEO etc. etc.
Kristina was (and still is) working a full time job while running her blog, while I was working a zillion side jobs to stay afloat.
For the sake of this podcast, I tried to figure out exactly when Kristina started blogging. The earliest recipe she has on her site right now is dated May 2017, but I was able to see on the wayback machine that her site was actually up and running all the way back in 2015, before she was an official RD.
Back then, her branding was “a food, travel, and adventure blog” and she was posting recipes and a lot of travel posts about things to do in different countries around the world.
Flash forward to today and her branding is “good for you + good for the planet” and she shares plant-based recipes and sustainable kitchen tips. She has over 300 posts on her blog right now, built up over many many years and is currently publishing at a pace of roughly 10 posts a month, which breaks down to 2 or 3 posts per week.
So there are a few things I want to highlight about Kristina’s blogging journey.
#1: She started her blog while she was still in the process of finishing her internship and becoming an RD.
And I think this is REALLY important to highlight right now. You DO NOT need to be an RD to start a website. In fact, you probably SHOULDN’T wait until you’re done w. School or your internship in order to start. Especially since blogging is a long-game and takes a long time to pick up steam with.
Of course, if you plan to write about topics that can impact someone’s health, then sure, having formal credentials will be important in the long run, but if you aspire to create a blog around a less EAT-heavy topic, like food or travel, then there is seriously no need to wait! Start NOW!
And if you do plan to create a very nutrition-focused blog, I would STILL recommend starting now and at least getting familiar with how WordPress works, how to do keyword research, how to create a content and promotion calendar, how to set up an email list, etc. etc.
There is A LOT to learn that we’re not taught in school, so you could get started now, create content around topics that don’t require formal expertise just to get some experience, and then hone your niche as you actually obtain your degree and certifications.
#2: And another thing I want to point out is that Kristina actually started her website on squarespace!
As time went on and she learned more about blogging best practices, she eventually moved over to a self-hosted wordpress website, but again, this is a GREAT example of done is better than perfect.
From what I can tell, it looks like Kristina spent maybe 2 years or so before switching over to WordPress, and I’m sure she learned A TON during that time.
And it’s so funny to look back at her older site cause she was doing so much of the same newbie blogger things as I was back then. Like titling a recipe “easy peasy pot roast” cause it sounds like a fun and catchy name, whereas if she had name it after an actual keyword phrase that people type into Google, like weeknight pot roast or something, she probably would have gotten a lot more traffic to that post.
#3: What I love about Kristina’s story is that she is NOT an overnight success story.
And SO MANY of us in the online space HAVE been working at this blogging thing for years! Some of us have spent a literal decade in the online space, publishing and learning and tweaking and growing imperfectly over time.
And after all that time, you start to learn, piece by piece, what to do and what not to do, and eventually find your way to success.
Yes, you can fast-track that path if you find a good course or mentor who has experience in this space to guide you, and there are a lot more incredible resources available today than there were 5 or 10 years ago, but honestly, tenacity, a desire to learn, and an intrinsic love for content creation will eventually get you far as well.
The important thing is being open to learning and trying new things. If you bury your head in the sand and just blog like a personal journal, then sure, that may never pay off for you in a monetzary way, but if all you can handle is learning and implementing ONE new thing a month. Start there. Any progress is progress, no matter how small it may seem in the moment.
#4: Kristina is super transparent about her food blogging journey
So anyway, in 2017, I remember chatting with Kristina about how we both found blogging income reports to be very inspiring and motivating for us on our blogging journey. I believe we were both avid followers of the pinch of yum income reports and food blogger pro podcast and at some point, we both decided to publish income reports on our sites.
I was publishing mine on The Unconventional RD, since that’s where my focus had started shifting, and Kristina was publishing hers right on her food blog at forkintheroad.co
And sometimes people question what the purpose of income reports are, and I really see it as two-fold. It’s a way to spread the word to others about how blogging can actually be a viable and profifable business and what all the details look like in terms of income streams and expenses AND it’s a form of accountablity for you, the blogger, since you know all your traffic stats and income are going to be posted publicly each month! It can give you that little push to keep going when you know other people are following along on your journey.
So Kristina has some blogging income reports on her site right now. The earliest one is Jan 2019 where she shares how she made just under $1500 on her blog that month. The breakdown was about $10 from ads, about $60 in affiliate income, $1000 from two sponsored posts, and $400 from freelance writing and photography she was doing on the side.
She had just under $300 in expense that month, bringing her profit to around $1200 for the month. And again, that’s on the side of a full time job.
And for reference, these were the income #’s Kristina was hitting when her blog was getting about 20,000 sessions per month.
Flash forward to her last published income report from January 2022, which is usually one of the lowest earning months for bloggers, and you can see that Kristina brought in over $3,100 that month, with roughly $2,000 coming from ads on Mediavine and $1,000 from affiliate income.
Her traffic at that time was now around 75,000 sessions per month.
She’s no longer doing freelance work – all of the income from the blog is actually passive. And that’s freaking awesome! And such a great way to make this blogging thing work.
It’s a really common path to start out doing some freelance work that compliments your blogging skills, like freelance writing or freelance food photography and/or recipe development.
That’s exactly what I did while trying to get my online businesses up and running as well. I freelance wrote for healthline and did freelance recipe development and photography projects as they came up.
And then as your own business starts to grow and earn revenue, you can slowly start to phase out those freelance projects until you’re only working on your own stuff.
And just to give everyone a more recent update as well – Kristina is a member of my free Facebook group, The Unconventional RD Community on Facebook, and she recently shared that her blog is getting around 125,000 sessions per month now as of August 2022 and is bringing in about $5k every month, mostly from passive ad revenue.
She shared that she’s so thankful for the steady passive income because she was able to take almost a whole month off of work and still earn $5k in revenue from her blog, even when not actively working on anything and without having to post on social media because her traffic sources are evergreen thanks to seo!
And I love even more that Kristina is such a wonderful of example of working on something on the side over many years and eventually seeing that asset grow into something significant that could eventually replace her full time income if she wanted.
She also mentioned that now she’s starting a few new blogs that she hopes to sell and flip once they are bringing in some good traffic and monthly income. So essentially getting into website flipping. It’s sort of like house flipping, but online.
You put in the initial time investment to build a site up to a certain point, let’s say, $5k per month for this example, and then you can “flip it” aka sell it to someone else for up to 30x the month revenue. So if you grew a blog to where it was making $5k in profit per month, you could feasibly sell that blog for a lump sum of $150,000. Which could be lifechanging for a lot of people! I mean, helloooo down-payment for a house in California! Haha.
Of course, it will take a few years to grow a website to that size, but it’s definitely a REAL opportunity out there in the online space if you’re passionate about blogging.
We’ve talked about flipping websites on the podcast before, in episode 74, where I interviewed Greg Elfrink from Empire Flippers. So if you’re curious about what the world of buying and selling websites looks like, definitely check out that episode.
But anyway, I just wanted to highlight Kristina’s food blog and the successful business she has built around it over the last 7 years by learning about SEO and monetizing primarily via display ads and affiliate income.
So if you are currently working a full time job but are considering starting a blog on the side, I hope Kristina’s story inspires you to see that growing a profitable blog is still possible if you only have part-time hours to put towards it if you stay committed to learning and implementing month after month and year after year.
If you want to check out more of Kristina’s food blog, you can find it at forkintheroad.co.
#2) The Kidney Dietitian – melanie betz – 0 to 50k in 14 months after taking my course
Blogging success story #2 is dietitian Melanie Betz – aka The Kidney Dietitian. And you can find her website at thekidneydietitian.org.
Melanie is a student in my SEO Made Simple course and she was able to grow her website from scratch to qualify for the ad network Mediavine in 14 months by following my SEO framework. (And for reference, that is a REALLY incredible feat so kudos to Melanie for being such a great implementer!)
So that means she was able to go from getting ZERO monthly visitors on her website to 50,000 monthly sessions in just over 1 year. And once you qualify for Mediavine, you should bring in at least $1,000 per month in ad revenue from then on out, and that number will climb as your traffic grows and you better optimize the ads on your site.
I wanted to highlight Melanie on the podcast today because she is NOT a traditional food blogger. I think sometimes people listening think that you have to run a food blog to make it in the online space, but that is definitely not the case.
Melanie’s website is focused on nutrition for people with kidney stones and kidney disease, and while yes, she does include some recipes on her site (specifically things like low-oxalate and low-potassium recipes), she also has a hefty article section on her site where she writes about nutrition topics related to kidney stones and chronic kidney disease.
I love Melanie’s success story because she focused first and foremost on making her website an actual helpful resource for her ideal reader – someone with kidney disease.
Then she worked backward from there to figure out what type of content would actually help people in that space, and the answer was BOTH information AND recipes to help put some of that information into practice.
She currently has 117 posts on her site and monetizes via display ads through Mediavine. Roughly 60% of the posts are articles and roughly 40% are recipes, categorized as low oxalate, low potassium, and/or plant-based.
In addition to ad revenue, Melanie also has 3 e-cookbooks for sale for people with kidney stones that range in price from around $20 to $35, two kidney stone diet guides that sell for $30 and $75 each, AND an online kidney stone course that she is selling for $350 to $500, depending on which level of access you sign up for.
And Melanie’s story is super duper inspiring because thanks to all of the front-end work she’s put into her blog and online business over the last few years, she has been able to achieve 5-figure months this year WHILE also becoming a parent during the same time frame. That equates to a solid 6 figure income WITHOUT having to do any 1:1 work. Like what a blessing, right??
So if you are listening and you love helping a specific population but you don’t want to be a typical food blogger, know that you can TOTALLY create a successful site that helps people with more than just recipes, including things like nutrition articles, ebooks, and online courses, and that it’s definitely possible (and probably preferable) to eventually diversify your revenue streams so all your eggs are not in one basket over the long run.
So if you’d like to check out Melanie’s site for some blogging/online biz inspiration, you can find it at thekidneydietitian.org.
#3) rbitzer.com
Example #3 of a successful dietitian blog is Rebecca Bitzer and her team at rbitzer.com
This is yet another great example of the diversity of success stories in the online space. Rebecca is not a traditional blogger.
In fact, she is the owner of an in-person insurance-based group practice called Rebecca Bitzer & Associates with 2 co-owners, 13 team members, and several locations across Maryland!
They became intrigued about the concept of blogging and earning additional passive income online and decided to add a blog to the practice’s website.
Since joining my course and learning about SEO, they have been able to grow the blog to the 50k monthly session minimum required to be eligible for Mediavine and now have an entirely additional passive revenue stream that brings them ad revenue AND a huge audience to their brand via their blog content.
At this point they have published over 800 blog posts, which is an amazing feat, and have a nice little recurring revenue stream from the website.
I really like this example because I often see content from rbitzer.com ranking on page 1 in the wild when I’m just naturally searching for stuff online like low fodmap snacks or best trader joes dinner.
It’s yet another example of a team of motivated RDs learning how to do SEO and then absolutely crushing it.
I think some of the main takeaways here are that…
#1) You can start a blog even if you are an insurance-based private practice RD
Sure, your blog may not bring you many 1:1 clients if you only serve people in a certain in-person geographic location, but it can become its own passive income stream in its owen right that can build brand awareness and revenue totally separate from your 1:1 work.
#2) YOU don’t have to do all the work yourself.
If you visit the rbitzer.com website, you’ll see that there is a whole team of dietitians producing content for the website. It’s NOT all one person shouldering all the work.
Part of the reason they were able to grow so successfully is BECAUSE they were sharing the workload and knew that they could accomplish more as a team than they ever could alone.
By tackling content production as a team, they’re able to put out roughly 2 posts per week at this point, which translates to about 100 posts per year, probably without too much stress.
#3) You can publish content that aligns with your interests and skillset
I’m just going to circle back to this point again – you DON’T have to force yourself to create content you don’t enjoy just because you think there is only one way to success.
For example, most of the articles posted on this site are NOT research heavy, so I don’t see this being a super super time suck on the biz.
A lot of the posts they publish are roundup style or lists posts, where they are compiling practical ideas and tips for people, vs doing a lot of heavy-duty research in PubMed or recipe development and photography.
Think things like 28 easy low fodmap snacks, which includes some links to their own recipes, some quick snack ideas without links, and some links to actual products from the store as well. In the grand scheme of things, content like that can be relatively quick to throw together!
Other examples include things like 8 starbucks drinks for people with diabetes, 28 low fodmap breads to try, or 15 low sodium snacks for high blood pressure.
And of course, there was keyword research done to come up with these topics, they’re not just coming up with these off the top of their heads, but the point is that keywords and blog topics come in all shapes and flavors and you can find a content production style that works for you.
I think this story will resonate you if you currently run a private practice and aren’t sure if adding a blog to your site makes sense, if it would be successful, or if it would align with your interests.
And if you want to check out the Rebecca Bitzer & Associates site for some inspiration, you can find it at rbitzer.com
#4) Sarah Almond Bushell at childrensnutrition.co.uk
Example #4 of a dietitian blogger success story I’d like to share is Sarah Almond Bushell – founder of childrensnutrition.co.uk.
And Sarah’s story is for you if you have been blogging for a long time and maybe feel like you just have too much history of unoptimized content on your site to turn the ship around and turn your site into something successful.
Sarah has actually had her website since 2008!!! Yes, that’s almost 15 years online, with the majority of those spent not knowing about SEO.
Sarah eventually joined my SEO course a few years ago and got to work on implementing an SEO strategy for her site in order to sell her online childrens nutrition courses and then eventually get enough traffic to be eligible for Mediavine.
And guess what the best part of Sarah’s story is? One that I think will inspire so many of you listening.
Sarah’s website was on Squarespace.
And I know if you listen to this podcast, you know that I’m a huge proponent of having a self-hosted wordpress website rather than being on platforms like Squarespace or Wix where you don’t have full control over everything, but Sarah went all in on the “progress is better than perfection” philosophy and decided to give blogging her best shot with the website she currently had on Squarespace.
You can follow most of the same on-page and off-page SEO strategies that you’d do on a self-hosted wordpress site, but the technical behind the scenes stuff is what you don’t have control over with platforms like squarespace or wix.
Those technical factors are usually smaller ranking factors, so it is usually still possible to see some success with SEO if your website is on squarespace or wix, but it does depend somewhat on your niche.
If you’re in a really competitive space, like food blogging for example, where there are a lot of technical nuances and a lot of competition, then you really do need to be on WordPress.
But if you’re publishing more article-style content, you can probably eventually rank your stuff on a wix or squarespace site, it may just take a little longer than if you could absolutely dial in every bit of your SEO on a wordpress site that you have 100% full control and customizability on.
But anyway – the point of this story is that Sarah decided to stay on Squarespace and give it a shot.
Initially, she was able to get enough traffic and traction to have success selling her online products and membership in the children’s nutrition/ BLW niche, but after about 2 and a half years, she was able to reach the 50k monthly sessions required to join Mediavine as well!
Once she reached Mediavine levels and knew that she would start earning an additional income stream, so it was probably an easier decision to invest in hiring someone to switch her website over to WordPress so that she could apply to Mediavine and have the best shot at optimizing her ads and earning the most revenue possible.
So flash forward to today, the redesign is done, she is officially on wordpress and has mediavine ads on her site to earn an additional 4 figures a month in ad revenue. Yay!
This is in addition to some exciting brand work that she does as well.
So if you are on squarespace or wix, this is your official nudge that that’s not a reason to stay stuck in inaction. If you don’t have the budget or interest in switching platforms right now, you can still start learning about SEO and publish articles that can rank and bring you traffic, even if it ends up taking slightly longer than if you were self-hosted on wordpress.
You CAN get there even if you take the path less-traveled and less-recommended. Sometimes it’s better to work with what you have than to do nothing at all!
#2) Sarah’s website is a .co.uk domain
And the 2nd thing I’d like to highlight about Sarah’s journey is that she is based in the UK and is using a .co.uk domain, not a traditional .com domain.
And some of you listening may be in a similar situation with country-specific top-level domain like .ca for canada or .fr for France.
This is not a super common scenario, but it does come up from time to time.
And I love Sarah’s success story because yes, having a country-level domain name may make it harder for you to grow US traffic than if you just had a .com domain, because you’re sending a signal to Google that you think your content is especially relevant to that specific country.
For example, sometimes big brands have different versions of their websites with different country-level domains like amazon.com, amazon.fr, and amazon.ca, and each version of the site ranks in each respective country and caters to that location.
So for smaller businesses, you are sending a similar message by using a country-level domain, that you think your content is super relevant to people in that specific country.
This could actually HELP you if you are trying to sell a product or service in a specific geographical location, but could make it harder to rank in other countries if that is a goal of yours.
And it should be worth noting that if you are trying to earn ad revenue, they do like to see the bulk of traffic coming from English speaking countries that their advertisers want to target, primarily the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, so keep that in mind when planning your website and content strategy as well.
So anyway, the point I;m trying to make is that despite having a country-specific domain and being on squarespace, Sarah was still able to hit that 50k sessions per month after 2.5 yrs, with a large portion of that traffic coming from the US, followed by the UK, and get into Mediavine. And if that isn’t perseverance, I dont know what is!
So if you’d like to check out Sarah’s site for some inspiration, you can find it at childrensnutrition.co.uk.
#5) Danielle Aberman at Migrainestrong.com
The final example I wanted to share with you today is from dietitian Danielle Aberman, one of the founders of migrainestrong.com.
Danielle is an SEO Made Simple student and is another wonderful example of perseverance in the online space.
The brand Migraine Strong was founded about 5 years ago, but they didn’t start focusing on blogging and SEO until about 2020, I believe, so like maybe 2.5 years ago ish, at this point.
Around that time they decided to start creating SEO optimized content on the site with the goal of growing an audience through Google and possibly being able to apply for Mediavine.
And I wanted to highlight this example because it’s probably the most intensely science-y and medical-y example in this list and that it means it does require a lot more EAT (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) in order to satisy what Google wants to display in the search results for keywords in this niche.
So if you’re listening and your niche is very heavily MNT focused and has the potential to impact someones health and care of their medical conditions, know that the expectations are a little higher for you and the content you produce on your site.
If you’re just writing about recipes and snack ideas, then you don’t really require any formal expertise or education to do so.
However, if you start writing about health topics, like the articles we mentioned previously about kidney disease, or this example here focused on migraines, know that the journey might be a little slower for you for a few reasons…
#1) Health topics are more niched and impact a smaller % of the population than generic content like recipes, so the search volumes tend to be lower.
If you are selling something to your audience, then that may not matter so much, since you can target those keywords and know you are bringing your ideal potential customers right to your site, but if your goal is ad revenue, then it could be a little tougher to achieve.
#2) The competition will general be much higher for the high volume keywords since large authority sites like healthline, medical news today, and other highly regarded websites in your niche will likely have the top spots on page 1 of the search results.
When I say “Authority sites” – I mean websites that have a ton of trust with Google around the topic in question. They usually have pretty high domain authority scores in like the 80s or 90s, tons of great backlinks, lots of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness in the niche, usually run or created by healthcare professionals, and often, but not always, highly niched around a specific topic.
For example, if you google “diet for migraines”, you will see american migraine foundation (da 64), a pubmed article with da 95, john hopkins lupus center, da 54, healthline da 89, headaches.org da 63, everyday health da 79, medical news today da 91, webmd da 94, and another journal article from the british medical journal, da 91.
So essentially websites that Google generally trusts for health information mixed with some highly regarded niche-specifc websites – in this case, websites that specialize in migraines or headaches and have decent authority online.
So that is A LOT harder than ranking for something like low fodmap snacks, which mostly features bloggers, not medical journals, high authority medical news sites, and foundation or hospital websites that specialize in a certain condition.
Now one of the ways to potentially get around this, if your goal is to target high volume keywords for ad revenue, as I’ve talked about in other episodes of this podcast, is to think creatively to possibly target OTHER related keywords that are less medically or that are very diet-focused, since that is what we, as dietitians, have expertise in.
For example, perhaps you can write about XYZ food and migraines. I bet there are a lot of different foods or even herbs or supplements that people have questions about. These more niche topics are generally easier to rank for than the more generic terms.
You can also try to think about diet-related terms that don’t necessarily have the word migraine in it, but that may be relevant, like a low tyramine diet, or low tyramine snack ideas, etc.
Another thing you can still rank for that doesn’t require formal expertise is personal stories. So when Google thinks the search intent of a query is to read personal stories from people who have gone through XYZ thing, then even if you aren’t a super large authority site but you have a strong and clear niche, you might have a shot at ranking.
For example, something like “how i cured my ______” or “how i recovered from _____”, or “how I fixed my ______”.
You’ll see that for those types of keywords, Google still shows authority sites for like half of the results, but the other half are personal stories in the form of blog posts or maybe youtube videos, and if you’re just sharing your own story and not giving out medical or health advice, then Google is not so critical about your EAT.
Obviously, you can only do so many of these since there probably won’t be a ton of these types of keywords in your niche, but it’s another idea to think about.
I won’t sugar coat it – this type of niche is probably one of the hardest ones out there and it will probably take a lot longer to see success. And IF your niche is super condition-specific and you’re not planning on posting recipes at all, I would strongly consider adding additional revenue streams beyond just ads.
Because the truth is, you are developing a very niched audience that you understand inside and out. That means each follower or email subscriber you get is probably much more valuable than a subscriber on a generic food blog, for example.
You would probably have a much higher chance for success developing a digital or physical product, online course, membership etc. that addresses a need of your specific audience than the average online content creator, so I would definitely suggest thinking about how you might go about that!
Because if you’re solely focused on ad revenue in this type of niche, you’re probably missing out on a lot of opportunity AND it will probably take you a lot longer to get there just because you’ll probably have to target longer-tail, lower volume keywords in order to have a chance to rank, so it will just naturally take a lot longer for you to build up those 50k monthly sessions you need in order to get on an ad network.
So those are just some things to ponder if you are in a similar type of niche.
#3) This is a great example of the power of persistence with blogging
But there’s one last thing I want to highlight with this migrainestrong example before we sign off today. And that is the power of persistence and consistency with blogging.
If you create content online, it is likely that you will be negatively impacted by a Google algorithm update at some point. It’s almost unavoidable if you blog for long enough.
And that is actually exactly what happened to migraine strong. They started implementing an SEO strategy and were seeing great results. They were getting close to being eligible for Mediavine, and then bam, they were hit by an algorithm update at the end of 2020.
And this was a pretty large hit. Based on semrush estimates, it looks like they lost about 50% of their traffic from this update. And ouch – that hurts!!
But what did Danielle and her team do? Well, they might have cried for a day or two haha, but then they got back on the horse and kept on going. Confident that if they continued to follow best practices and put out high quality content that they would eventually recover.
And improve they did, slowly but surely, gradually, month after month, they were regaining their lost traffic. Roughly a year and half after being hit, they were having better traffic months than ever and had pretty much recovered from that previous update.
And I had a similar experience with my functional nutrition blog back in the day. I had realy fast growth in the beginning and then we got hit by an algo update in June 2019 that wiped about half of our traffic overnight.
But I kept on going, publishing 1 amazing piece of content per month and trying to drive sign ups to our membership site, and bam, just shy of a year later, we were back to our previous levels of traffic.
(I’ve since shuttered that business to focus fully on the unconventional RD, so I don’t really have any new updates to add, but it’s just another datapoint to highlight that there can be some volatility in SEO, but that with consistency and continuing to follow best practcies, you can usually recover with time.)
So I really wanted to commend Danielle and her company for their perseverance and great example of good content getting rewarded with time if you don’t give up!
So there you have it. That’s 5 examples of RD bloggers who are having success in various types of niches and monetization models.
I sincerely hope this episode opened your mind to the possibilities out there online and helped you see beyond the tiktok IG tunnel vision that can happen sometimes haha.
If you are an introvert, a content creator, and a lover of writing, there is space for you out here in the blogosphere.
If you want to learn more about how YOU can grow a successful blog and monetize an audience online, head over to seowaitlist.com and add your name to the list!
I’ll send you a few emails and stories about SEO, then invite you via email to watch my free masterclass where I go deep into the 4 step framework I teach in my course that shows you exactly how to grow your audience online through blogging.
At the end of the class, you’ll get an exclusive invite to join my course, SEO Made Simple. And being on my waitlist/email list is currently the only way to sign up for the course, so definitely get on tehre if you’re not already because I promise you’ll get a ton of value out of my emails, even if you’re not yet ready to join my course.
As always, hope you have a fabulous rest of your week!
Erica Julson is a registered dietitian turned digital marketing pro. She has over 12 years of experience blogging and building online businesses and has taught over 900 wellness professionals inside her signature program, SEO Made Simple.
