It’s been a minute. Nearly two years, in fact, since I last wrote a blogging business report, something we once published monthly. So, why the long break? Well, in this update, I’ll share how we’ve fared during what has been a tumultuous period for travel bloggers. There has been a lot of anguish in our community, but also a ray of hope from somewhere unexpected; Stay22, a tech company you’ve probably never heard of before.
At a time when we were beginning to feel lost with how to re-grow our affiliate income, Stay22 has been an absolute game-changer for us. And we’re not alone. As you will read here, we were convinced to try their AI-powered affiliate tools after hearing an array of success stories from our blogging friends.
We now have a little success story of our own to share, so let’s get into it.
A rollercoaster for bloggers (more downs than ups!)
Before diving into our experience with Stay22, there’s some important backstory to cover. In our last report at the end of 2022, I wrote with a tone of optimism in a moment when our monthly traffic had recovered to nearly pre-pandemic levels. After the chaos of 2020–21 (which needs no recap), things were finally looking positive again.
So, what happened? Just when things were looking bright for many in our community, Google’s “Helpful Content Update” (HCU) landed in September 2023 to shake things up. Not all of you reading this are bloggers, and this might be a foreign language to you, so I will explain.
Google core algorithm updates are nothing new. They come along several times a year, tweaking how search results are served, and they always bring uncertainty for bloggers who rely on search engines for traffic (and thus income). Seasoned bloggers will tell you these updates always create winners and losers, but also that it’s usually possible to bounce back after a hit with a few adjustments. HCU was different. It was seismic – and it took many of us down.
The supposed intention of the HCU update was to prioritise content that is relevant and useful. In practice, the outcome has been anything but. For example, you might have seen stories about Google queries throwing up dodgy information from decade-old Reddit threads. (Little coincidence, given that Google has recently expanded its partnership with Reddit.)
Bloggers and other small independent publishers have been the biggest losers. Our original, genuinely helpful content has been pushed down the rankings in favour of the likes of Reddit, Quora and TripAdvisor.
Google’s own AI feature and its impact on bloggers
Even if you haven’t noticed the curtailment of blog content in Google search results, you will surely have seen the emergence of its own AI feature; an “AI Overview” that often appears at the top of search results, with a sublte disclaimer that it is “experimental”.
From where does Google’s AI tool scrape the content shown in these snippets? You’ve guessed: it often comes from blogs. Here’s an example of Google taking content word-for-word from our site and displaying it as an AI response, without any credit given:
We have friends who have seen their entire businesses collapse overnight as a result of the HCU update. People whose blogs that were drawing hundreds of thousands of page views per month that have been decimated to a tiny fraction of that, in some cases to a few hundred.
And this time, there are no easy adjustments that can bring all that traffic back.
How did these changes impact us?
It’s hard to say for sure. After the HCU and the subsequent core update in March 2024, we experienced immediate traffic drops – about 20% after each update. On top of that, we suspect these changes have held back our growth, making the full impact impossible to measure.
Rewinding to earlier in 2023, we noticed a sharp drop in traffic to many of our previous best-performing content, and we decided to do something about it. In May of that year, we invested in speed optimisations for both of our websites and brought in a professional SEO audit.
We quickly got to work implementing the audit’s recommendations, and we saw some immediate improvements. But we were also counting on longer-term gains, expected to show a few months later – around the time when the HCU hit. This timing makes us wonder if our actual traffic loss was even greater than the numbers suggest.
How Stay22 has changed the game for us
In February this year, Lisa I travelled to Georgia for the Traverse conference, which brings together a community of content creators from around the world. A lot of bloggers there were talking about something called Stay22.
This wasn’t entirely new to us. We had already signed up to Stay22’s affiliate platform back in early 2021, in the aftermath of Airbnb’s sudden affiliate programme closure – a move that left many bloggers, including us, scrambling for alternatives.
But we had only implemented their tools to a limited extent. Stay22’s major partners are mostly accommodation providers, and that hadn’t been a big focus for us. We were about to discover what we had been missing out on.
The stories we heard in Georgia were hard to believe. Several of our old blogging friends claimed they were earning 10x more with Stay22 than they had been with recognised affiliate programmes like Booking.com.
After seeing Stay22’s Yuliya Karpenko give a very impressive talk at one of the conference panel discussions, I had the chance to meet with her and learn more about Let Me Allez, the tool that was about to breathe life into our affiliate performance.
A little friendly peer pressure and a chat with an expert was all it took to make the leap.
Minutes to set up, and near-instant results
Let Me Allez is an AI-powered feature that optimises how website visitors are redirected to accommodation providers. It also improves user experience in other subtle ways, like fixing broken links.
Some people may still recoil at the idea of using AI, but as a blogger, it has become unavoidable. And in this case, AI is not being used to create content or plagiarise; that is something I would never do. This is all about giving the user the smoothest experience possible in transitioning from our original content to accommodation booking agents.
I had some serious reservations at first about moving to Stay22. Why would I leave well established platforms, which included some of the world’s biggest online travel agencies (OTAs), to join these guys who hardly anybody had heard of until a few minutes ago?
But I didn’t need to worry about that. As Yuliya explained to me, I wouldn’t even need to change my affiliate links over. She connected me with another member of the Stay22 team, Margot, who sent me a simple script to add to our site that would automatically redirect my existing links.
That’s it. All I needed to do was copy and paste a script, and watch the bookings start to roll in.
This also meant I could try Stay22 while still keeping a foot in my existing platforms. Now, several months later, the only regrets I have are that I didn’t make the move earlier.
Our accommodation conversions have skyrocketed with Stay22
As I mentioned above, accommodation affiliates were not a core focus for us before our Stay22 switch. We’ve always given hotel and hostel recommendations in our itinerary articles, but it was never a big earner for us.
Prior to implementing Stay22, our best accommodation performer had been one of the the major OTAs, and over a two-year period with them we had averaged only 12 conversions and barely more than $100 per month.
In our first full month using Stay22’s Let Me Allez feature, we made 23 conversions for a projected affiliate income of $180.78. Nearly double our typical performance. And that was just the start.
In June we broke through $300 from conversions on Stay22. In August, we got close to $1,000, although it dropped down a little following some cancellations. September was a similar story. Then, in October, we hit over $1,200 projected income from 97 conversions. More than 10x what we were averaging on our previous top performer.
The stories we heard in Georgia about Stay22 had seemed too good to be true, but they have turned into a reality for us. And there is no sign of things slowing down; as I write this in November, we’re on course for another record month of accommodation affiliate conversions.
This month I attended WTM London, as I do every year. On the final morning of the event, I logged into my Stay22 dashboard and saw we had earned more in three days than we used to make in an entire month on other platforms.
You don’t need big traffic to convert on Stay22
The growth in affiliate conversions we have experienced on Stay22 is not linked to any significant increase in our website traffic. Our flow of visitors now is only slightly higher than it was when we implemented the Let Me Allez feature back in February/March this year.
Here you can see how our traffic has fluctuated over the last 5 years as pandemics and Google updates have come and gone:
January 2023 was our best month for website traffic since the pandemic, with 26,266 sessions. That month we generated $109 in booked commission with our previous top accommodation performer. In October this year, we generated nearly 12x that amount on Stay22 from only 20,510 sessions.
The difference is how Let Me Allez optimises the user journey towards bookings.
Reshaping our content strategy to grow conversions
When something is working, you should build on it. Little effort was required initially to see our accommodation affiliate income multiply on Stay22, but we’ve also harnessed this momentum and taken some action to spur further growth.
We were not previously optimising our content for accommodation conversions. In recent months, we’ve pivoted our content strategy, dedicating time to creating a lot more accommodation-specific content, while making subtle adjustments to high-performing old posts to signpost hotel recommendations better.
This has contributed to our recent accelerated growth, with a significant proportion of our conversions in August–October coming from new accommodation guides we published in April–June.
Balancing time remains a big challenge
If you recall our previous business reports, managing my time between two blogs and consultancy work was a persistent challenge throughout 2021 and 2022. This hasn’t changed.
This year I have worked with two different consultancy clients, which takes up anything from one to three days per week. That only leaves one or two days to work on each of our blogs.
Having a more reliable form of passive income through Stay22 certainly makes things easier, and the switch has also enabled me to focus my efforts on other areas of the business.
We completed our first paid campaign with a tourist board this year, and October was also our best ever month of advertising income on Mediavine. Along with other affiliate income, this all combined for a month of $3,500 income earned, which isn’t bad for a site I can only spend a handful of days per month working on.
More good news: we are award-winning bloggers!
This year I have also been able to spend extra time developing storytelling content on our second blog, Lincoln and Beyond.
This paid off with an accolade we were not expecting. Earlier this month, Lisa and I won the Best Local Content category at the 2024 Traverse Creator Awards for our work on the Lincoln blog. It was a real honour for us to be recognised in such a way among a field that included some amazing talented creators from all over the world.
Guess who else was among the award winners? Stay22, in the category for Creator Brand of the Year, chosen by content creators. No wonder they are so popular among my peers and colleagues.
We were also thrilled to see our good friend Nele Van Hout, also known as The Navigatio, pick up the 12 Month Achievement award. It couldn’t have gone to anybody more deserving! She has also had a lot of joy with Stay22 in the last year.
Cautious optimism for 2025
So, what next? We have plans on the horizon. I have settled into a sustainable rhythm between blogging and consultancy work, and I’m enjoying the challenge more than ever.
In that last report two years ago, I wrote that: “Travel career breaks and workations share a common quality: they are both ways that ambitious professionals can enjoy adventurous, wandering lives while still having a successful career.”
We’ve worked hard to reposition our brand from focusing solely on career break travel to embracing a more flexible work-and-travel lifestyle. Going forward, we will continue to diversify our content to inspire various types of work travel. My growing consultancy work has brought more business trips into my schedule, a theme we are excited to introduce to the blog. It has a lot of potential to promote accommodation, that’s for sure!
Workation campaigns will still be at the forefront of our work in 2025. I had many positive discussions with tourist boards and hotels at WTM London this month, opening doors for collaboration in the new year.
Less reliance on SEO?
The changed SEO landscape in the wake of Google’s updates has much dampened our appetite for churning out content that is crafted to game the algorithms. I’ve found a lot more enjoyment in writing content that is more genuine and natural. Winning that award has given us further impetus to continue down that road, creating content that we are actually passionate about.
We will continue to build accommodation-focused content too, expanding further on our success with Stay22 – especially when it aligns with our focus on blending work and travel. Hotels with desks and workspaces, for example, are not always easy to find, and we can help with that.
And finally, more than ever, we are acutely aware of the need to diversify our traffic sources, since Google is not the reliable rock that it once was. Growing our social presence will be a significant focus in 2025. We have begun to lay the groundwork for this already, developing a new strategy and investing in tools like CapCut Pro for making video content.
I hope it won’t be another two years before I write our next report. In the meantime, enjoy the rest of the year, and here’s to even brighter times ahead in 2025!