Costa Rica FIRE Turns One

It’s a bit hard to believe how quickly the time goes by, but one year ago Caroline and I started our new website, Costa Rica FIRE!

It was not our first attempt at a website. We had created one previously, while I was still working my corporate job, and over time we felt the name of the site and the direction of the content just didn’t fit our passions and priorities.

Caroline had long been following personal finance websites and FIRE blogs, and she came to the realization that combining FIRE with our interest in real estate and travel was a niche perfectly suited to us.

We think of our vacation rental properties in Costa Rica as our FIRE Escape that will allow us to travel and continue our work wherever we are. While the site continues to evolve, after a year travel, real estate and FIRE still feels like the right niche for us, and we look forward to many more years to come.

Perfect partnership

Operating a website is a lot of work, and that is why many blog websites eventually get abandoned. In fact, of the 172 blogs I’m following in the Feedly RSS reader, 17 of them (10%) are either inactive or dormant! And that’s just in the six months or so that I’ve been following other blogs.

My own running website is another example, where I’ve done virtually nothing to it probably six years besides updating my race results page. Can you believe I’ve run 242 races over the years, which includes 22 marathons in 15 states, and 40 half marathons!

But Caroline and I have the perfect partnership. She is a prolific writer, her Forbes blog being a perfect example, and with an economics degree and management consulting experience, she handles the business stuff.

I bring the technical expertise (computer science degree and 25 years in IT) to the team, and I also write a lot of the lighter stuff (like this post). I also handle all of the pictures.

Modest but growing traffic

We’ve been happy with the modest but growing traffic seen throughout the year. In April 2018 we had just 175 total sessions, and in January 2019 we were all the way up to 1390. There were occasional spikes when our content was featured elsewhere, the biggest coming from when Physician on Fire shared one of our posts as part of their Sunday Best in August. But spikes like that are temporary.

Much of our increase in traffic is coming from Google search and we’ve seen a big spike in Google over the last 2 months. It takes time for Google to figure out your content and to build your authority in your areas of expertise. Our average placement in Google is still only spot number 40, but we’ve seen increasing impressions and increasing click through rates, and we are upwards of 25 clicks per day from Google. In January, 45% of our sessions came from a Google search.

Engaging in social media is another way to grow traffic, but we have not done a good job of that so far. We try to read other blogs and comment on a regular basis, and we post our content to Twitter, but we have otherwise not been terribly engaging on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, so we have to decide if we want to devote the time to growing traffic in that way, or whether we will rely on Google search, or even look to use Facebook or Google advertising.

Surprised by our most popular post

We’ve written a lot of great content that we are very proud of in the areas of real estate, travel, Costa Rica, personal finance and digital nomad career advice. But surprising to us, our most viewed piece of content on the site is a post about seashells!

For some reason, this post seemed to catch the attention of Google. We’ve seen growing traffic to that page all year, and looking at the most recent month, January 2019, the average placement of that post in Google across all searches is number 11, so it is often showing up on page 1 or page 2 in a Google search. Because it appears so high in the Google results, it also has a high click through rate. In January, the click-through rate on that post was 9.78%, way higher than everything else.

While not exactly pulling in our target audience, it does show the promise of using Google search to build traffic. We are only halfway through February, and I’m finally seeing one of our real estate posts eclipse the search traffic of the seashells post. Hopefully this continues as we’d rather have organic traffic to our site on the topic of real estate than seashells!

Where we are going

In the coming months we intend to take a closer look at our content that is doing well in Google, figure out what keywords we want to target, and tailor our content to those keywords.

Our main goal is to use this site to inspire and help others who are looking to achieve the FIRE lifestyle themselves, or looking to build wealth through real estate or a digital nomad career.

We will be more intentional this next year in understanding who our readers are, what they are interested in, and tailoring our content to those interests. We will do that through a combination of interacting with our visitors directly, and understanding what content and keywords resonates most in Google Search.

2019 is already a huge transition year for us, as our youngest child will be going off to college in August. We’ve already written about how we intend to use the latter part of 2019 to start our life of travel, and we look forward to writing about our challenges and experiences as we transition into our own location-independent business.

======

Thanks to all of you who are reading our website, interested in what we write about, and following us on our FIRE Escape journey.

What topics do you want to see covered in year two and beyond?