For roughly a year before refocusing, Matt split his time between the travel blog and a portfolio of unrelated, low-quality AdSense arbitrage sites built purely to capture high-ad-rate search terms, unconnected to travel.

“I had websites on teaching English, growing corn, taking care of dogs and turtles, and even raising pigs.”

A mentor on a paid coaching call told him bluntly he was wasting his real advantage (travel knowledge and an already-read website) on cheap tricks; Matt agreed the work itself didn't interest him and wasn't sustainable once Google got better at detecting spam sites.

“All I was doing was taking advantage of the fact that Google couldn't differentiate spam websites from real websites. It wasn't exactly work I liked.”

Selling text-link placements for other sites' SEO purposes was one of Matt's earliest income sources directly from the blog itself.

“When I started out, I sold a lot of text links”

A Google algorithm update targeting paid link schemes wiped that income to zero essentially overnight.

“Then one day it all went to zero after Google changed its algorithm.”

About six years into the blog, Matt crowdfunded and built a standalone travel app, funding the project in a way that left him living on credit cards for three months until the Kickstarter campaign closed.

“I had put all my money into a Kickstarter project, and until that ended, I was broke.”

As a non-technical founder, he underestimated the ongoing engineering and maintenance workload an app requires, and eventually stopped updating it.

“it turned out I didn't know how much work apps were”

The Superstar Blogging course business once grossed roughly $500,000 a year on its own before sales dropped as the online-course market became saturated with competitors spending heavily on ads.

“We used to gross $500,000 a year just from our blogging courses. Then sales dropped.”

Customer expectations shifted toward video-heavy courses with live weekly calls, a format Matt says he tried to match but that ultimately wasn't the kind of business he wanted to run, so the course's relative position weakened even after attempting to adapt.

“Customers wanted more videos and weekly calls. We tried to adapt, but in the end, what the course market became wasn't what really interested me.”

Beyond the app and the course decline, Matt describes a long run of smaller flops across different formats over the years: promotions that fell flat, self-published books nobody bought, and poorly attended webinars.

“I've run sales that didn't go anywhere. Launched books no one bought. Hosted webinars no one showed up to.”