How I Made My First $500 Blogging

After starting my blog, it took a good year before I saw any money from it at all. My first blogging paycheck, when I finally decided to monetize it, was over $500. I want to share with you how that happened and how I earned my first $500 blogging.

The Create Your Blog Dream Course bundle

Now I don’t normally talk blogging, business and money BUT this is a special week. I just launched the new and improved version of my course, Create Your Blog Dream + Video for Bloggers. It has over 100 video lessons and 15 modules. I go into everything from the tech side of blogging, to actually growing an audience for your blog and social media platforms. I show all the tutorials on how to do hosting, WordPress plugins, how to create graphics, and how to promote posts.

I also go in depth on creating video content!

I go into everything that I’ve learned over the past five years to take my blog from an idea to a multiple six figure business. (Honestly, I can’t believe I even get to say that!)

Now don’t worry, if you aren’t keen on starting your own blog, you can just ignore my posts over the next week. I will soon be back to food from scratch, natural living, and a handmade home, as usual.

But, if online business is your thing, let’s talk how I made my first 500 bucks through my blog!

How I made my first $500 blogging

I want to share with you today how I made my first $500 blogging. So many of you know, if you follow along with my blog, that I shared two and a half years ago that my husband quit his full-time job for us to do this blogging gig full-time. He worked there for over 13 years and, although the transition was scary, we have never looked back since. The opportunity to earn an income with blogging blows my mind. Every time I turn around there is another opportunity and another way to earn an income with the blog.

I get a lot of questions from people who are curious about the dollar amounts and some of the specifics on how the money comes in. I had hoped to maybe share some income reports, but it’s just so dang awkward to talk money. There was actually a video I recorded, but before getting to the editing I just decided to delete it. Maybe I will share our real income in the future, but for now let’s just say that it is more than double my husband’s old job. The best part is, there is no limit! There is no getting paid an hourly wage, or being limited by the number of hours you can physically put in on a weekly basis.

It’s possible to diversify your income, so your eggs are never in one basket.

The beginning of Farmhouse On Boone

I started my blog back in December of 2015. The first year, I seriously spent all my time learning what I was even supposed to post about and what drove traffic. I struggled through learning how to use my camera and working on my photography skills.

(When I look back at my old posts..they are hilarious. I did NOT know what I was doing at all.)

In January of 2017, just over a year after starting my blog, I met up with a local blogger who I met through Instagram. We found out that we lived just 15 minutes apart (it turns out she actually lived on the property where I grew up on an elk farm, back in the day. My dad sold the property when I was 18, but that’s all a different story for a different day). We were sitting down at dinner and she was telling me about how she was making money through an ad network company.

At this point I was not making a dime. I had people send me free products to feature in my home and on Instagram, but you just can’t pay the bills with free products. Trust me, I thought it was awesome to get free stuff at the time. 😉

So far, the only ads I had heard about were Google Adsense, and from my understanding you needed some pretty big traffic to make those pay anything substantial. She told me about an ad network company called Mediavine and she said that you had to have 30,000 page views a month to get on with them.

Getting Google Analytics

At this point, I had no idea how many page views I had. I had never even installed Google Analytics to monitor my traffic and find out where it was coming from. Shame on me, I know.

I installed it, and lo and behold I met the 30,000 page view traffic requirement. I applied for Mediavine ads. At this point, I was thinking if they accepted me I may make an extra $50-100. Not that I wouldn’t have been super excited about that, because just making a dollar at all with the content I was putting out online would have fired me up!

But, no, my first check came in and it was 500 bucks. I was like whaaaaa? You can actually make some serious money with this blogging thing (yes, this was my idea of serious money). It would be enough to pay groceries for three weeks, a small mortgage, or a car payment. If I could make $500 with a year’s worth of content (and that wasn’t posting more than three or four times a month) I started to wonder what would happen if I started cranking out content. I was excited.

This realization, of how possible making money blogging really is, was what spurred me on to take my blog very seriously that year.

Setting a goal

I made a goal to post two times every week, no matter what.

As the good Lord would have it, I found myself pregnant with baby #5 just a few months into my year long goal. There were a few weeks I barely squeezed out my two posts, but by golly I did. I  even called in my sister Laura from Our Oily House to guest post a few times for me in my first trimester. Whatever I could do to keep my goal!

I kept telling myself that if I just posted twice a week, that by the end of 2017 I could have over 100 posts circulating the internet.

100 different ways for people to find me on Google and Pinterest.

It took seeing a little monetary success to get my wheels turning, but boy oh boy did they!

Can you make an income blogging, too?

You bet you can! I think anyone willing to put in the work to create great quality content on a regular basis can make it in the blogging world.

But, what is great quality content? How do you create a blog? And once you do, how do you get folks to read it?

I go into ALL of this, and so much more, in my new and improved blogging course, Create Your Blog Dream + Video for Bloggers. I share step by step tech tutorials to walk you through the process every step of the way.

There is even a private Facebook group, where you can get your questions answered along the way and find other bloggers who have similar goals. I believe one of the keys to blogging success is finding your blogging community, and I’m so happy to have a place to facilitate that!

Check out the course HERE to see if it’s a good fit for you and your business in 2021 and beyond!

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