How Kylie Got into Mediavine in 1 Year & Makes €5K/Month from Her Blog

This is an interview with Kylie Lang of Life In Rural France.

Hey, Kylie. Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do.

I’m a travel journalist living in rural France in the beautiful Charente department in the southwest. I work as a freelance writer and maintain my own blog about life in the rural French countryside. 

I split my time between traveling around France and writing about the places I’ve been to. I love nothing better than digging into the history of the places I’ve seen and the villages and towns I’ve visited.

What was your life like before becoming a full-time blogger?

I’ve reinvented myself a few times but started life as a classical musician after studying at the Royal College of Music in London, where I played violin and piano. I played in the pit orchestra of a few London shows and dabbled in teaching. Although I still play, I don’t play professionally anymore.

It was when I started playing piano at weddings and corporate events I started my first business running an entertainment agency and eventually an event management company.

I’ve always been a traveler and love nothing more than discovering new places. In 2003, I sold my business and moved to Australia in search of a new adventure. 

I was there for ten years and started another business, The Wedding Academy, which I ran for fifteen years before finally selling it to focus on my writing full-time. I learned how to research and write running the Academy, which sparked my passion for writing.

When and why did you start your blog? 

After moving to France in 2016, I started writing about the renovation of our property, life living in the French countryside, and the history of the villages around me. I loved having an excuse to go further afield in France and discover places steeped in history, often closely tied to the UK, where I’m from. 

I’ve always been fascinated by history, and France has as much as the UK, and it’s so well preserved. I can easily go down a rabbit hole researching information about people like Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lionheart, and Isabella of Angouleme, all of whom have left their mark on the Aquitaine region where I live. 

How did you decide on the name and pick a niche?

When I launched the blog, it was really in response to how many times people would ask me about my life in France and why I’d made the move over there. It seemed to fascinate people. 

They wanted to know about my lifestyle, speaking French, and the different traditions and events I attended. This influenced the name I chose, Life in Rural France, as it summed up perfectly what I wanted to write about.

What were your writing about in the early days of the blog? And what topics did you start covering later on?

In the early days, I was very much focused on the specifics of what I encountered in my everyday life. I interviewed other expats who had made the move over here, wrote a lot about the food and stories behind how different dishes had developed, and wrote plenty of articles about my local area.

As time went on, I started covering more than just my life here and spent time researching the culture and history surrounding some of the time-honored traditions the French have, everything from where the baguette really came from to why All Saints Day is celebrated instead of Halloween.

I took regular trips to Paris, each time staying in a different arrondissement and visiting different attractions, diving deep into the stories behind each one.

Slowly but surely, it became a blog about more than just rural areas. I was writing about the cities and towns in all different regions, the festivals and events, and famous people in French history.

How long did it take you to make your first money blogging?

It didn’t take long at all for me to start making money, although it wasn’t enough to call it a full-time income.

Within three months, I’d had my first €350 month in affiliate income, and by the end of 2023, I got into the ad network Mediavine as I’d hit the 50K monthly sessions required.

Going into 2024, my two main forms of income were affiliates and ads.

How did your first year as a blogger go in terms of traffic, income, and site growth?

My first year of blogging went well, and I grew really quickly. I hit 50K sessions in just under 12 months and had around 120 posts published, all written by myself without the help of AI.

I also wrote a lot of guest posts and was included in quite a few round-up posts, which helped with backlinks. 

My guest post strategy was to get guest articles and interviews on the big Expat sites that focused on France, and that helped a lot. These sites had a high DA and a lot of authority, which helped me gain authority in the eyes of Google.

I also spent some time finding podcasts that focused on travel or France and was a guest on several in the first year, which also helped push me up in the rankings.

How did the Google Helpful Content affect you and what did you do about it?

I got hit hard in the March 2024 update but have started to recover now, and luckily, my big money-earning posts are still ranking in the top 3 on Google.

However, being hit got me thinking about other avenues for traffic, so in March, I launched my podcast, Life in Rural France. 

This has been a great way of getting to a new and very different audience. I love doing the podcast as I simply take my longer, well-researched posts and turn them into a podcast episode. It doesn’t require brand new content, just using the existing content on my site.

I also, more recently, diversified into Facebook pages and worked hard to get my page onto the Creator program, which is invite only.

I post ten times a day with a variety of different posts and have found this drives traffic back to my site, as well as providing an income from Facebook for the engagement on my posts.

Finally, I got serious about Pinterest, and I’m now starting to reap the rewards from that. I don’t manage my own Pinterest account, though, as I don’t have time to learn the ins and outs, so I subcontract this out to a Pinterest management consultant.

It’s a long game, though, and it’s only been in the last six weeks that I’ve started to see some substantial traffic coming in.

How much traffic does your blog get now? What are your top traffic sources?

Since starting to recover from the March update, my blog has been averaging around 60K sessions a month, and by far, my best traffic sources are Facebook and Pinterest.

Google still accounts for around 56% of my traffic, though.

What’s your current content strategy like? 

Now, I try not to write for Google but more for my audience. Thanks to my Facebook page, I have a much better understanding of what my audience wants.

I regularly ask questions on the page that tell me what they’d like to hear about, and that influences the keyword research I do and the articles I write.

I tend to publish three new posts weekly and update 2-to 5 during that week as part of my content strategy. I pick 3 to 4 subjects to focus on for a month so I don’t go stale writing about the same thing. 

Sometimes, this will be influenced by my trips or if I’ve been invited to an event. Mostly, though, I try to write one seasonal post a week, a history-based one, and then another one about one of the places I’m focusing on.

It seems to work really well, so I’m sticking with this moving forward.

When did you get into SEO? And do you optimize every blog post?

I knew about SEO from the start, as I’ve always maintained my own website since the Wedding Academy days. I certainly wasn’t an expert, though, and I did take two great courses to help me understand article writing.

I started with Scale Your Travel Blog and then also did one with Nina Clapperton of She Knows SEO. Both of these were excellent, and I’m still an active part of the community for the courses.

I still do keyword research for all my posts, but I don’t over optimize and write more for my audience than for Google.

I’ve found my readers keep coming back if I write for humans rather than machines. I have a great audience who love my writing style and historical storytelling, so I focus more on that than being too focused on SEO.

What’s one SEO strategy that has worked best for you, and that you constantly rely on?

One of the best SEO strategies I’ve used is to show authority. I think the fact that I live in France has helped me in Google’s eyes, as I’m speaking about things I know.

I make sure I mention this in one way, shape, or form in the first three paragraphs of every article. I also make sure I write articles that aren’t always travel-focused but talk about the way of life in France, as that seems to help, too.

What blog metrics do you track?

I’m not metric-obsessed and only check once a month; otherwise, I’d send myself insane.

I use Google Analytics each month to see which articles are doing well and look for keyword opportunities. I analyse the articles that are consistently ranking to see if I can find gaps for other articles and look for any that have dropped.

Other than that, I try to be more influenced by what my audience responds to on Facebook, as this tells me so much.

For example, I’ve recently started writing a series of articles about the well-known chateaux in the Loire Valley. The decision to write these articles was based on the phenomenal response I got to images I posted of these chateaux. With some posts getting over 1000 shares, I knew this was a good topic. 

How have you grown your email list?

Along with blogging, I have developed a strategy for building my email list using high-converting quizzes. I now teach others how to do this under my personal brand and also build quizzes as lead magnets for clients, although I only take on one a month as I don’t have time for more than that.

Quizzes are an amazing way to get people on your list. They are engaging, allow you to segment your audience, and then drive them to articles relevant to their interests. They also help you understand your audience and their likes and dislikes.

I’m currently using three quizzes, and they have helped me grow my list to over 10,000 subscribers in under a year. I have high open rates and always see a surge in Mediavine earnings when I send out my weekly newsletter.

I also use the Grow by Mediavine plugin for my newsletter, which helps with subscribers, and I include a CTA at the end of my blog posts for either one of the quizzes or the newsletter. I understand how to manipulate my CRM (ConvertKit) and have built some great automations to help send people emails that they’ll actually want to read.

I also use my Facebook Page to get people to take my quizzes and sign up for my newsletter. From time to time, I run ads on Facebook for my main quiz, which has worked well. The CPL is very low with a quiz, so it’s worth it.

How much are you currently earning per month?

I now earn approximately €5,000 per month from my blog, although that fluctuates depending on the time of year. From a revenue perspective, the final quarter of the year is the best. 

My Mediavine revenue fluctuates between €1,500 and €1750, and my affiliate income is between €1,000 and €1,500.

By far, my biggest earner is my Facebook Page. September was my best month so far, earning just over €2,500 from the Creator program.

How long did it take you to get into Mediavine?

I got into Mediavine in just under 12 months, but I didn’t do anything specific other than focus on writing articles with low-competition keywords and try to write five posts a week.

I made sure I didn’t get distracted by new things and focused solely on writing and building backlinks.

I have always been on social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook, although I didn’t rely on them for traffic. I used them to show Google that I was real and had a brand rather than a hobby blog.

Once I got into Mediavine, I started to look at other traffic sources. I think the key for me was not to spread myself too thin.

Do you accept sponsored posts on your blog?

I am open to sponsored posts on my blog, but I haven’t actively promoted them.

I’ve had people approach me about guest posts, and on a couple of occasions, I’ve agreed to collaborate. However, this isn’t part of my revenue strategy at the moment.

How do you attract new readers?

I’ve found that guesting on podcasts is a great way to gain new readers, and it’s quicker and easier than writing guest posts.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve also had success with my Facebook Page. Sometimes, you need to “pay to play,” that’s what I did to promote my quiz lead magnet, and it worked. My ads on Facebook aren’t expensive, and I don’t run them all the time.

I was doing Flipboard but have stopped focusing on that as the traffic dropped substantially. Now, I stay in my lane and don’t allow distractions, as it’s easy to keep jumping around looking for the next great thing.

Getting into the Facebook Creator program has been a game changer for me as it drives traffic back to my site and pays me for the engagement on my page.

Do you use AI tools as a blogger in any way?

I do use AI, but only to help me do my research. I’m a storyteller who speaks from experience, which AI can’t do.

ChatGPT is good for certain things, but it isn’t me. It doesn’t live in France, and it can’t talk about the experiences I’ve had or give tips in the way I can.

I use it to speed up my blog writing process, but I always fact-check. So often, it spurts out things I know are wrong, so I let it do the hard yards and then check everything before writing.

I love using it for headlines and social media. It’s also come up with some cracking titles for my podcast episodes, but only because I feed it with my style first.

How do you plan your week and structure your workdays?

Ooh, good question. Mondays are social media days for me. Posting ten times a day on Facebook requires some planning. I use Post Planner to help develop ideas and schedule things, but creating the posts takes a full day.

Tuesday is Podcast Day and Post Update Day, and I write and research articles on the other days.

I try to keep my writing light on Fridays, as I’m not as creative at the end of the week.

I also make sure I’ve done my keyword research at the start of the week, so I know what I’m writing about and have a list of articles for the week.

What’s next for you and Life In Rural France?

I’m planning more trips around France, and being a member of the British Guild of Travel Writers as an accredited travel journalist has opened doors for me with Tourist Boards. My plan over the next couple of years is to get involved more with covering some of the big events in France. 

I also have plans to do more podcast episodes and potentially up it to twice a week, so we’ll see how that goes.