The Ultimate Blog Podcast - Keyword Research Reinvented: A New Path with Outdoor Blogger Kate Cooper

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

Kate Cooper is joining us today to talk about how she started and grew her outdoor blog with the goal of helping people get more information on a topic she’s passionate about: hiking in Colorado and... the American West. Not only is Kate the owner of Kate Outdoors, an outdoor blog, but she’s also an attorney for creators and owner of The Legal Influence, a business that helps creators navigate the legal side of their job. Today, Kate is sharing all the details on her approach to SEO to drive more traffic to her blog, how she consistently creates blog content without having to constantly travel, and how she was approved for Journey by Mediavine to make a more consistent income. If you’re ready to be inspired to share more of what you love on your blog, you need to tune in to this one! 🔗Check out the show notes for Episode 156

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey bloggers, are you serious about turning your blog into a money-making machine? One of the ultimate milestones is getting on an ad network. And let's be honest, figuring out how to get there can feel overwhelming. That's where the ultimate blog roadmap comes in. Our course and membership community are designed to help beginner bloggers like you build a rock-solid foundation for success. For just $97 a month, you'll get access to step-by-step training, all the resources you need,
Starting point is 00:00:30 and a supportive community to keep you accountable and motivated. You'll learn exactly how to create content that works, focus on the right steps to reach your goals faster, and also avoid wasting time on the things that don't really matter. Plus, our membership includes ongoing support and cheerleading and also guidance from other bloggers who have been where you are.
Starting point is 00:00:49 We have three monthly calls and a forum that's always open for collaboration and help. The best part, no more overwhelm. With the ultimate blog roadmap, you'll know exactly what to do and when to do it. It's a monthly membership designed to take the guesswork out of blogging and help you reach your goals for just $97 a month. If you're ready to join us, head over to ultimateblogroadmap.com and let's get started. Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. This podcast is the podcast we wish we had when we started blogging. I'm Amy Reinike and I'm Jennifer Draper.
Starting point is 00:01:27 Our episodes dive deep into how to monetize your blog, sharing unique insights and practical tips. We bring you in-depth interviews with successful bloggers and experts who offer valuable, actionable advice. Our mission is to educate, support, inspire, and empower you in your blogging business. Welcome to The Ultimate Blog Podcast. A while back, I got an email from a podcast listener actually who pitched to us, which is really exciting because we just had Christina Lincowski on the podcast talking about bloggers pitching yourself to podcasts. And Kate Cooper did that. And I took her up on her offer because I was so intrigued by her journey as a
Starting point is 00:02:14 blogger and intrigued enough that I think that you guys are really going to learn something today as well. So Kate is an outdoor blogger and she's also an attorney for creators. And this is why this is going to be so exciting and you are going to learn so much today. So welcome to the podcast, Kate. Hi there. Thanks for having me. Yes. I'm so glad that you've reached out. I'm just really intrigued with all that you do with blogging and the legal side with creators and everything. So I would love for you just
Starting point is 00:02:43 to kick it off here and share a little bit about who you are and what you do. Yeah, so as Amy mentioned, my name's Kate Cooper, and I have a couple of different business ventures. I have my blog, Kate Outdoors, and I'm also a social media content creator in that space. And then I'm also an attorney, and I have another business
Starting point is 00:03:05 called The Legal Influence, which helps influencers, content creators, bloggers navigate the legal side of being in the creator economy. That's exciting and very needed, very needed. So today we want to talk to you about your blogging journey. And that is something that's been really exciting that we've been talking about before hitting record here and about how that's kind of shifted for you
Starting point is 00:03:32 and how it's gone, especially here in 2024. But I wanna kind of like roll the curtain back and have you share a little bit about what made you start a blog? What was that moment that you were like, I think I actually wanna start a blog. Like, when did that happen for you? So I was a content creator on social media long before I started my blog. I started as a health and fitness creator on Instagram back in 2013, just as a way
Starting point is 00:03:58 to document my own health and fitness journey. And so over the years, the content that I created kind of evolved. I kind of left that space and I started pivoting into more outdoor content after I moved to Colorado. And for a long time, it was really just my creative outlet while I was in law school. And then when I started practicing law, I just needed to have something that wasn't so kind of technical. Dry? Just to get dry. Yeah, exactly. Something a little bit more exciting.
Starting point is 00:04:28 I'm not a lawyer, but I'm just kidding. Yeah, something that was just a little bit more exciting than my kind of day job. And so I was creating content on social media, doing a lot of hiking content, outdoor content. And at a certain point, I realized that just Instagram and platforms like that, the amount of information that you can share in any given post is just so limited. And when it
Starting point is 00:04:52 comes to hiking and outdoor adventures and outdoor travel, there's so much information that people really need to know before they head out. And so that was my inspiration to getting a blog started. And I actually bought my domain in February of 2020. And so we all know what happened shortly after that. And so I had a few months where I was able to start working on actually like building out the website. And I initially started building my website on wordpress.com, not wordpress.org. And it was just such a hassle, I feel like building out the website.
Starting point is 00:05:29 The first blog post I wrote literally took me weeks to write, I think in part because I wanted to make it as good as possible. I was like a little bit overwhelmed though, because I'm like, if it's taking me this long to write a post about a topic that I like actually know a lot of information about, I'm like, this is just going to be such a long game. And I think on the one hand, that was kind of a good experience to have because blogging is very much a long game,
Starting point is 00:05:54 especially if you want to monetize it. But it was a little demoralizing. And so over the first couple of years, I really inconsistently posted. I got very few posts out per year. And a lot of them were really in-depth, but they weren't necessarily structured in the best way in terms of being SEO optimized. They had keywords in them, but they were a little bit long and lengthy and weren't broken up the way that you'd want to have it broken up to actually make it digestible and easy for readers to understand. And so there was definitely a learning curve in terms of actually learning how to write a good SEO optimized blog post. And it took me a couple of years. It also took me a couple of iterations of my website. I bounced around on a couple of different
Starting point is 00:06:40 platforms and I eventually settled on building my website on Show It just because the platform itself is just so easy to use. It's just drag and drop. And to be completely honest, I don't know if it's the best platform for bloggers specifically. I also use it for my business and I find it's a little bit better for a service provider or for a business just because you do have a lot of flexibility in terms of building out custom pages. But the blogging platform associated with ShowIt is WordPress. And so that was one of the reasons why I wanted to go with it. And so finally after a few years, I felt like I was in a good place where my website looked nice. I was in a groove in terms of creating blog posts and earlier this year I was like,
Starting point is 00:07:25 okay, it's been a few years. I have a solid number of posts out there and I actually want to start monetizing the blog consistently because up until that point I had a little bit of affiliate income here and there, but I was spending more money to maintain the blog than I was making money. spending more money to maintain the blog than I was making money. What I love about what you've shared is that where you came from was a place of helping people. You were like, people need this information and I'm going to find a way to get this information to them. So you really kept at it.
Starting point is 00:07:58 I know we all go through that process. We're like, I'm going to make the best blog post I can possibly make. It's going to have all of the information that people will need and then we soon realize, hey that's completely overwhelming for us but it's also completely overwhelming for the reader. So it's marrying those things where you're creating really good content for the reader but you also have to figure out how are they gonna get here? How are they going to find me? So you mentioned like diving into SEO. Can you talk a little bit more about like when that kind of light bulb went off and how you started implementing
Starting point is 00:08:35 SEO and what that's done for your blog in terms of being able to grow your traffic? So during I think the first few years of my blogging journey, I obviously heard of SEO, knew what SEO was, and I had done some research on it in terms of reading articles, listening to some podcasts about it, but I didn't really dive too deep into it. I was trying to prioritize, obviously, if I was writing a post, you know, this is the topic I'm writing on, these are the keywords I'm trying to target, but I still feel like I was writing a post, you know, this is the topic I'm writing on. These are the keywords I'm trying to target. But I still feel like I was missing different pieces of the puzzle. Like I would have certain posts that would start ranking on page one of Google,
Starting point is 00:09:13 but then other posts weren't really ranking at all. And so last year, towards the end of the year, I started taking SEO research more seriously. I finally signed up for keyarch and started actually using an SEO research tool versus just me guessing which keywords people might be searching for. And so that was a really big help. I also started investing more in courses and memberships just to get actual expert advice from people who had that experience. And that was just such a huge
Starting point is 00:09:44 game changer for me because I think in the outdoor space specifically, and I'm sure in different niches as well, but a lot of the searches that you would think have really high search volume, they don't necessarily show that on keyword research tools. If you're searching for like I live in Grand Junction, Colorado. So if you're searching for best hikes in Grand Junction, Colorado, that's a very long keyword. And there's so many different ways that somebody could break that up and search for the same topic, hiking trails in Grand Junction, Grand Junction hiking trails, best hiking trails, Grand Junction. And so there's just so many different ways to configure those keywords that it might look like it's something that people aren't searching for when in reality they are.
Starting point is 00:10:29 And there was one workshop that I did from Nina Clapperton regarding the zero search volume keywords. And she was essentially saying, like, when you search on a platform like KeySearch, it might show that there are no searches for this keyword, but you know that that is something that people actually are searching for. And it's a little bit hard to… you kind of have to be discerning and, you know, are people actually searching for this topic or not. But especially when it comes to those long-tailed keywords, there's just so many different ways
Starting point is 00:11:01 they can configure that KeySearch might show something that has a really low search volume, but it actually has a much higher search volume. And so I found as an outdoor blogger, if I can target those really specific keywords that people are looking for, whether it's like a best hike in a certain area or a sunset hike in a certain area versus just general best hikes, it really helps to kind of narrow in on one, helping write the posts, but then also people are searching for those things. And it's a little bit easier to rank for those than these kind of more generic topics, you know? Writing about the best hiking boots. That has a really high search volume, but there's so many posts out there about the best hiking boots. And so instead, like getting a
Starting point is 00:11:50 little bit more granular about what specifically you're talking about. And that actually leads to more traffic because you're ranking higher. And it also, I think, takes into account user experience. Somebody who is coming to your website to gain information on that instead of strictly writing just for, I'm going to call it search engines, but like for a search engine tool like Key Search. I think when we are experts in our niche, then we know a lot of times what people are searching for. So it might feel like you are working a little bit against the grain.
Starting point is 00:12:22 And I'm sure that's how you felt when you first started doing that. Did you just kind of like dip your toe into that, or did you just go all in, and how did that end up working for you in regards to traffic? Yeah, so I kind of went all in. I built out this really elaborate keyword research spreadsheet on Notion,
Starting point is 00:12:41 and so I just started tracking all of these different metrics. And obviously search volume is going to be one of them. But I also started looking at, okay, what posts are currently ranking on page one of Google? What's the domain authority for these blogs? Are there, you know, different what are they like a forum like Reddit? Are those ranking on the first page? Or is it all blog posts? Or if it's something related to like Reddit? Are those ranking on the first page or is it all blog posts or if it's something related to hiking gear, are these all retailers that are appearing on page one? And so looking at the current results and then being honest with myself and asking,
Starting point is 00:13:16 could I write a post that is better than these that would rank on the first page? And that really helped me dial in on the specific posts that I was writing, because I have a list of like over 200 potential blog post ideas. I'll be, you know, if I stopped adventuring tomorrow, I still have plenty of blog content that I could put out there. And so for me, one of the things I was struggling with is like, okay, I have all these ideas. I can't get to them at once, obviously. I want to be a little bit more organized about what topics I'm actually writing about and are they actually going to help me grow my blog, and along with helping people get the information that they're looking for. So, like I said, I just built out this elaborate spreadsheet to start tracking keywords. I
Starting point is 00:14:04 also track once I write a blog post about a keyword, I kind of mark the date and then I come back six months later and then one year later to see where I'm ranking. And I found that most of the posts that I've written since I started implementing this strategy are ranking on page one of Google, most of them within the top five. There's a couple of outliers where I'm like, oh, I thought I was going to be able to rank for this and Google clearly thought differently. But for the most part, I think my strategy has been pretty spot on. So yeah, that's really been huge in helping me grow my blog traffic. This time last year, I was probably getting under a thousand page views a month,
Starting point is 00:14:46 and now I'm at over 10,000 page views a month, and that's not a huge difference, but... Yes, it is. I guess in the early stages of comparing myself to other bloggers who have much more traffic, I guess, yeah, that early stage of getting from a really small blog just off the ground to finally getting to a place where there's consistent traffic coming in every month. So that's where I feel like I'm at now and I feel good about it. And now I'm hoping to get to that place of, you know, it's hard not to compare yourself to bloggers who've been doing this for so much longer.
Starting point is 00:15:19 And it's like, well, I'm getting 50,000 page views a month after a year or hundreds of thousands of page views per month. But yeah, going from under a thousand to 10,000 page views a month after a year or hundreds of thousands of page views per month. But yeah, going from under a thousand to 10,000, I guess I should give myself a little bit more credit for that. I would call that a huge win because if you think of that percentage increase, imagine if you kept going on that trajectory, you'd have all kinds of traffic in no time. So yeah, incredible.
Starting point is 00:15:43 I think that's a really amazing thing that you've tested and implemented and you've seen, like you've watched it. You know for sure that it's working for you. And I think that's what's so important. Implementing keyword research and competition analysis into your content strategy is a surefire way to improve your chances of people finding your content, and we love how simple KeySearch makes it to find keywords we actually want to use in our posts. KeySearch is a powerful keyword research tool that makes finding relevant, low-competition keywords for your blog simple and easy. If you think optimizing your blog and doing keyword
Starting point is 00:16:19 research has to be hard, think again. Give this powerhouse tool a try and see how much easier it will be to create content for your blog. Not this powerhouse tool a try and see how much easier it will be to create content for your blog. Not only is it reasonably priced, even for beginning bloggers, but you can use our code for 20% off your subscription. Click the link in our show notes to learn more. The other piece that I think people will be interested in is you kind of touched on this a little bit, but you're not just like having to do all this traveling or have all these adventures in order to create content.
Starting point is 00:16:50 You're finding ways to create content in multiple ways, I would assume based on maybe one destination or one trip. Can you just talk a little bit about that? Because I think what people struggle with, especially in a niche where it does require you to kind of go out and get some content and travel somewhere and that's hard to do all the time, especially like if you've got another business or another job. So I think that holds people back.
Starting point is 00:17:17 But I think you're the proof that you can create content still without having to constantly travel. Can you just talk a little bit about the challenges of creating enough content to grow on Google while not while being a travel blogger? Sorry, I'm rambling. No worries. Yeah. So I think for me, I live in Western Colorado, so I'm a little bit spoiled in terms of the places that I have access to. And most of my blog content, it's pretty much solely focused on the Western United States, specifically within Colorado and Utah, because that's where I spend the most time.
Starting point is 00:17:54 And so honestly, most weekends I am out traveling or adventuring. And I really try to be intentional about choosing the activities and the hikes that I do based on what do I genuinely want to do versus I'm only going to go do this thing because I want to write about it because I think I can rank about it, rank with this type of topic. And so I know for some travel bloggers, I've seen people share that when they go on a trip somewhere, they'll do keyword research ahead of time and they'll have a list of posts that they're planning on making ahead of time. And I kind of take the opposite approach to that. I try to focus on keywords and topics that I feel
Starting point is 00:18:35 like I actually have the expertise in to write about. So I'm not going to write like best hikes in California because even though I've done a handful of hikes in California, I can't genuinely say these are the best hikes. I feel more confident sharing best hikes in Colorado because I've done well over a hundred. I think I have more expertise in being able to kind of narrow it down and classify these hikes. Okay, these are the creme de la creme, the best of the best. And so I really try to focus on what do I actually have expertise in and then do keyword research a little bit
Starting point is 00:19:12 backwards. So if I come back from a trip and I just got back from Zion National Park, I already have a blog post about Zion on my blog. And so I'm thinking, okay, well, how can I possibly write about maybe some more content about Zion now? And what types of topics might I be able to write about based on the experiences I had on this past trip, but then also on trips that I've taken prior to this. So I stayed at a new hotel. So now I feel like, okay, well, I had a great experience at this hotel. Let me incorporate that in my itinerary and it includes recommendations on places to stay.
Starting point is 00:19:47 So now I can incorporate that into this existing blog post. Now that I've stated a few different places around Zion, I might do a post on different places to stay in the area just to get a little bit more targeted there for something that might potentially bring in affiliate income. That's something that I personally struggle with as a blogger. I know a lot of travel bloggers, they get a lot of affiliate income from like hotel bookings and flight bookings and things like that. And I have not had that experience despite having hotel recommendations in a lot of my posts. But that's because a lot of my posts aren't really focused on here's where to stay, it's more what to do. And then it's, you know, the recommendations are kind of secondary to that. But now I'm thinking, well, maybe I can write a post that's a little bit more focused on where to stay versus what to do. And obviously, internally back linking between the existing posts that I already have. So I feel like I have a very backwards approach to the keyword research and figuring out what I'm going to write about.
Starting point is 00:20:45 But I really try to focus on traveling first and hiking first and then creating content from there. And same with social media content, because I'll go out. I'll just take a bunch of footage on a hike. I don't know what I'm going to do with it. And then it's once I get home, OK, I think I want to create a video maybe with a voiceover breaking down my experience on this hike. Or maybe I want to use a trending
Starting point is 00:21:12 audio and just take a couple of clips from the hike that I already did versus I'm going to go on this hike, I'm going to get these exact shots, these are the exact videos that I'm going to make. Just because I feel like if I approached it that way, I think that's going to lead to burnout. It's going to impact my own experience, and I really want to focus on getting outdoors, connecting with nature. And at the end of the day, my whole goal with my blog and social media is to encourage people to get outdoors and develop their own connection with nature. And so I try my best to put that first and then put the content creation second. I think that's really wise advice, quite honestly. I don't think it's backwards either.
Starting point is 00:21:57 I think what it is is in a day and age where we think that there's only one right way to do things, you're giving a voice to a different way to do something that somebody might really need to hear today. And I think that when we sit down and start our blog, a lot of us are starting a blog on a specific topic that either means a lot to us, it has something to do with our story, our perspective, our beliefs, or something that we're just really passionate
Starting point is 00:22:23 about, and that's what you did by starting an outdoor blog. And you're keeping the main thing the main thing. You're keeping, I want to still enjoy hiking. I still want to enjoy traveling. And I think that that's just really wise advice to say to any blogger, you did start this for a reason. It's likely because you enjoyed it or were passionate about it. And have you lost that? And if you have, then maybe take some of your advice, Kate,
Starting point is 00:22:49 and do it how you're saying the backwards way. But think about it very differently. Because I was in a Facebook group yesterday, and it was for food bloggers. But it was just this like bum, bum, bum. This very like, I was so depressed when I left the Facebook group. And I'm like, we just have to shift the way
Starting point is 00:23:08 that we're thinking about things. No, things have not always worked the way that they've always worked, but maybe they can work differently and they can work better. And so having that positive mindset, I think is really impactful when we are sitting down to create content in order to stay relevant
Starting point is 00:23:23 to who we're speaking to and who we're inspiring to go out on a hike or to eat healthier or to put food on the table or whatever it is that a blogger is saying to do. So I love that. I love that you've shared exactly how you do it because I find it to be incredibly inspiring actually that you're keeping the main thing, the main thing. And something else I kind of want to dive into because you mentioned that you got to that 10,000 threshold. So that means that you've applied for Journey, is that correct?
Starting point is 00:23:49 Yes. Okay. So I'd love to kind of share about that or have you share about that. We had Heather Toulouse on the podcast back in May of 2024 talking about this new program that Mediavine launched called Journey and Kate has been able to get on it. So Kate, will you kind of like share your journey through there? Well, Kate, will you share your journey on Journey? And because I find it to be something that
Starting point is 00:24:16 is making it more attainable for bloggers to make money and earn ad revenue at a lower threshold than they ever have been able to before. Yeah, so earlier this year, I kind of made a goal for myself that I wanted to get on an ad network by the end of the year. And obviously Mediavine was the big goal, but 50,000 sessions is really intimidating.
Starting point is 00:24:40 And I knew that in order to get to that threshold, I was going to have to have a lot of content out there on my blog. And I just don't have the time to create the volume of content necessary to get to that level, at least within a year. And so I am in different Facebook groups for travel bloggers. And so I've seen people sharing reviews about other ad networks out there. And so I was thinking to myself, well, when I get to that kind of 10,000 page view threshold, that's when I might start looking into some of these different ad networks that are out
Starting point is 00:25:14 there because once you're at that 10,000 page view, it's at least going to bring in a couple hundred dollars a month. It's not crazy money, but better than not making anything from your blog. And so back, I think it was in March when Mediavine first announced Journey and that it immediately piqued my interest. And I was like, oh, this might be the ad network that I want to go with once I get to that level. And so I was actually on a road trip in Southern Utah when I listened to the episode that you had with Heather Toulouse about Journey.
Starting point is 00:25:46 One of the things she was talking about is having to install the Grow extension onto your blog as kind of a precursor to applying to Journey so that Mediavine Grow can track your analytics and see how much traffic you're bringing in and all that kind of more technical stuff. And so once I got back from that trip, I immediately added the Grow extension to my blog. And then at that same time, I think I just, there was just an easy button to click on the website to like apply for Journey. And I wasn't at 10,000 sessions yet. I had surpassed 10,000 page views, but I was still at about 9,000 sessions.
Starting point is 00:26:25 But I was like, well, I've heard from people that it's taking a little bit of time for them to go through the application, so maybe by the time they get to me, I'll be at that 10,000. So I applied anyways. And then I heard back about a month later that I was accepted and I still wasn't at that 10,000 session threshold yet, and I have heard from some other bloggers that they've gotten in even before that 10,000 session. So I don't know specifically what Mediavine is looking at when determining which blogs to accept and when to accept them, but I will say that my experience was getting accepted prior to hitting that 10K sessions. And I eventually did hit that 10K sessions a couple of months ago, but got accepted at
Starting point is 00:27:07 the end of June, got everything set up on my blog. And I was really nervous about whether or not I'd be able to because, like I said, my website's built on ShowIt. And so I know that they have some resources where they're like, yeah, we've worked with bloggers who have ads on their blog, and Mediavine was one of the companies. But you might have issues. It's kind of like the warning that they give.
Starting point is 00:27:30 And so I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to connect everything. Turned out that wasn't a problem. You just basically install some code, and then you just add in your privacy policy page so that they can add their information onto your website as well. And then, yeah, it got up and running pretty quickly. And now my blog is earning money a little bit more consistently than it had been with
Starting point is 00:27:54 affiliate links. That's still very inconsistent. And obviously ad revenue is going to vary depending on traffic. And so if you have peaks and valleys in your traffic, the ad revenue is going to fluctuate as well. But at least it's something. And like I said, it's not crazy amounts of money, but it's something that, OK, each month I know that I'm bringing in a few hundred dollars from the blog.
Starting point is 00:28:18 Now I'm at a point where at least the blog is paying for itself. I'm not losing money from it anymore. And again, not life changing, but it's definitely really made me more motivated to work on the blog, put out more content, put out good content. And so hopefully continue on that kind of upward trajectory. Yeah. I was just thinking that it's got to be really motivating when you get to that
Starting point is 00:28:41 point, even if it's not like earth shattering, at least it's like, oh, hey, I've hit this goal and now the control is a little bit back in my hands. And if I can continue to grow my traffic, that just continues to grow my revenue and open up more opportunities. So congratulations. That's very exciting. I'm so glad they have this program because I just think it's so worthwhile and it's worthwhile for them. It's worthwhile for them.
Starting point is 00:29:05 It's worthwhile for bloggers. It's just such a fantastic thing. So what are you going to do now as you finish out the last couple of weeks of this year and you head into 2025? What are some of your goals in terms of your blog and what are you going to focus on in the coming year? Honestly, I think my biggest goal is just trying to get content out consistently.
Starting point is 00:29:28 I definitely have fallen off the track the past few months. I try to get a blog post out every week, and that just has not been the case the past few months, just because I've been working so much on my other business. And so one thing that I really want to buckle down and do through the winter is get more content out onto Kate Outdoors. Like I said, I have hundreds of blog post topic ideas and just not enough time to write about all of them.
Starting point is 00:29:53 And I will say that a lot of my blog posts, they still are very long and very comprehensive, but I find that those really in-depth comprehensive posts also have very high time on page. And so if people are staying on the page longer, they're seeing more ads, that's bringing in more revenue. So I try to make blog posts as comprehensive as possible. I would rather go in depth on one post than like break it. I'm sure I could write in a way that I could take one post and break it into five different blog posts, but I don't know. I like people to have everything that they need to know in one place. And eventually I might break out those posts into smaller subtopics, but trying to focus on getting more content out there, trying to focus on, again, the topics that I think that I can write
Starting point is 00:30:40 about with expertise, but that also are going to bring in traffic. So finding that kind of balance between those two things. And then, yeah, just working on that consistency piece. One thing I really appreciate about you, Kate, in this conversation today is this was a very real, honest conversation with a blogger. And I think that sometimes we hear people come on different podcasts or we see them wherever. And it's this, I did this in six months and I'm making a million dollars and that feels really suffocating and like you're a failure when that is not your experience. But I think your experience, I mean, we have several students in the ultimate blog roadmap, and your experience mirrors so many
Starting point is 00:31:28 bloggers that we are with. They truly are doing the work, laying the foundation that's important, learning how to write content, making sure they have the right things on their website set up, and then the traffic comes. And so I just want to say I really appreciate that. Like I appreciate the openness and you started this in 2020, it's almost 2025, and you just got out on an ad network.
Starting point is 00:31:53 And so that is a typical journey. I wanna say that. I'm not saying that you can't hit your goals faster. I'm not saying that somebody in four years is guaranteed to be on one either, but I just think it's really important to share real honest stories about people who are behind their computer blogging each and every day and have a full-time job alongside. You're still building another business alongside this and you've been able to find the success in an area of your
Starting point is 00:32:20 life that is a passion of yours and and you wanna help others do it more too and spend more time outside and connect with nature. So just thanks so much for being open and sharing that today. I think it's been incredibly motivating and inspiring to just hear how you've gone about this journey. And I know that people are really gonna wanna connect
Starting point is 00:32:40 with you, so can you please tell them where they can find you? Yeah, so you can find my blog at kateoutdoors.com. And then you can also find me on Instagram at kate.outdoors, a little period between Kate and outdoors. And then I'm also on TikTok at kateoutdoors, one word. So those would be the best places to find me if you want to connect around hiking or outdoor topics and outdoor adventures. Awesome. Thank you so much for being here today.
Starting point is 00:33:09 Thanks again for having me. Thanks for listening to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about building your blog, visit theultimateblogpodcast.com backslash newsletter to get signed up for our email newsletter. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love for you to share it with a friend, subscribe, and leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts. Thanks for tuning in today and we'll see you next time.

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