Have you ever wondered how to make money blogging? In this episode, I tell you all about how I made my website, The Wayward Home, a money-making machine. It took tons of time and effort but I hope this episode inspires you that it IS POSSIBLE.
Sign up for my FREE 5-day How to Start a Blog course.
Or you can join my BRAND NEW Niche Site Course here: Niche Sites for Nomads: The Nomad's Guide to Making Money Online
Links and Resources
Connect with Kristin Hanes and The Wayward Home!
Have you ever wondered how to make money blogging? In this episode, I tell you all about how I made my website, The Wayward Home, a money-making machine. It took tons of time and effort but I hope this episode inspires you that it IS POSSIBLE.
Sign up for my FREE 5-day How to Start a Blog course.
Or you can join my BRAND NEW Niche Site Course here: Niche Sites for Nomads: The Nomad's Guide to Making Money Online
Links and Resources
Connect with Kristin Hanes and The Wayward Home!
Are you curious about how I make money from my camper van and on my sailboat? Well, it's all from my successful blog, the Wayward Home. In this episode of the Wayward Home Podcast, I'll tell you all about my blogging journey and just how I got my site where it is today. Let's go. Welcome to the Wayward Home Podcast, all about Van Life, boat life, and Nomadic Living.
We'll bring you tips, interviews, and stories from the road and on the water. Now, here's your. Kristin Haynes. Hey there. My name is Kristin Haynes and I'm publisher of the wayward home.com. I spend half the year in my camper van in the United States, and half on my sailboat in Mexico. In this episode of the Wayward Home Podcast, we're talking all about making money blogging.
Last week we talked about how to create an online business you love with RV Kimberly Crossland. And this week we're going to talk about my online business, how I created it from scratch, and just how difficult it was getting my website up to 300. Oh, To 500,000 monthly page views. Let me tell you, it wasn't easy, but we're gonna start that journey now, so you can think if you also wanna start a profitable niche.
Back in 2016, I was laid off from my full-time job as a radio news reporter at KGO in San Francisco. That was a job I had done for 15 years and it was my identity. So getting laid off while exciting and liberating was also pretty challenging. I knew I wanted to travel with my partner Tom on his sailboat and.
I didn't know how to do that. What kind of work could I do to support that kind of adventure? Would I do freelance writing? Would I do voiceover? I dabbled with some of those and I got some pretty cool travel writing gigs. Actually. We went to Mexico, we were sent to Jamaica. Um, that was really fun, but I knew it wasn't releases.
Sustainable for full time travel, especially on a sailboat. I couldn't be just flying to cover exotic destinations all the time, so I had to figure it out. What was I going to do? I was reading blogs and online articles about making money remotely and starting your own business when I stumbled upon an article about a woman named Michelle Schroeder Gardner of making sense of sense.
Now, this was a really interesting article because it said Michelle made $100,000 per month. On her blog. I was totally floored because I had no idea blogs even made money. I used to have blogs back in the old days, maybe back in uh, 2005, 2006, back when blogs were just a diary of someone's daily life or a journal and just something that they pretty much wrote for friends and family.
Now, this is what a lot of people still think a blog is today. When I tell them I make money blogging, they're just like, what? Like they're just really confused. Anyway, so I heard that Michelle Shorter, Gardner made that much money per month blogging and I. I need to learn everything I can about blogging.
So I started researching blogging, what it was today, how blogs make money, how I could get involved with blogging. And I thought, oh my gosh, this is the perfect online business for me as a former journalist. I already love to write. I love, um, bringing stories to people. I love interviewing people, so I thought that writing about the alternative lifestyle would be perfect.
I was already living. Sailboat with Tom, and we'd also experimented with living in a Prius. Uh, that's how I paid off my debt and saved up money, so I was no stranger to alternative living. I also saw that these types of stories were really making it big in the news media. When people wrote about living in vans or living in boats, the media ate it up.
So I thought I should just start a website about alternative living. I'll get tons of traffic and people will love coming to my site. And so I started brainstorming ideas on what I would. Site, I, I wrote ideas down in a yellow, uh, legal pad for days, and I finally came up with the name, the Wayward Home, and I purchased that domain name.
I purchased hosting and I got my blog up and running. Now I wanna tell you that I knew absolutely nothing about blogging. When I started the Wayward Home, I, I enrolled in a class actually called Elite Blog Academy because I knew that starting an online business was basically learning a new degree. I had been trained in school, in journalism, and actually also in Spanish.
And while some of those would come in handy for blogging, like the writing aspect, um, I knew I needed to learn what was. Business, and I knew to do that I would have to spend some money and enroll in courses. Now, I was newly laid off from my job, so spending $800 on an online course was pretty shocking to me.
I questioned myself. I wondered if I was doing the right thing. It was a really hard step to take. But I also was really committed to blogging and learning how to make an income. So I enrolled in that course. I studied hard, I. Every single day working on that blog while also freelance writing on the side, doing voiceover work on the side, because I had to bring in some type of income.
It was really hard because blogging is not going to bring you income right away. In fact, I hooked up AdSense, which puts ads on your site, and I think I was making like two or 3 cents per day from my blog for the first six months, and I was working on it like 40 hours a week. It was ridiculous. While also doing these other types of jobs, I was pretty lucky because I was living on Tom's sailboat.
My cost of living was really low and I didn't have much savings. I was living on unemployment. And so that gave me the opportunity to really focus on online business was to reduce, um, my, what I had to spend every month. And that gave me the freedom to really buckle down and focus on the wayward home, and I'm.
Super glad that I did that. So six months into the journey, I actually made my first $500 on my website. Um, four wheel campers. They make popup truck campers. They approached me and they said, we wanna place ads on your site. I was totally floored. Oh my gosh. $500 a month. This was my first money blogging, and so I've had an agreement with them now for like five years.
They still purchase a sponsored post for my site and have a really good relationship with four wheel campers, but those initial ads that they put on my site really convinced me that I could make money blogging. It was an amazing feeling and at that moment I doubled down even harder on my blog. I was like, if I can make that much from ad revenue, Six months into blogging, I can make this thing grow pretty big.
And so I started studying even more. I started putting out more articles and I was just really motivated when I made those first $500. . So one of the first things I had to figure out with my new blog was how was I gonna get traffic to the site? I was writing all kinds of articles about alternative living.
For example, oh, this family of four has lived on their sailboat for 12 years, or this couple lives in an rv. I was just interviewing people and writing articles about them. So how would I get people on my site? I had no idea. So I started posting in Facebook groups. What I would do is find Facebook groups with like-minded people, like for example, Several sailing Facebook groups.
So I'd post my sailing articles there. There were RVing Facebook groups, so I'd post my RVing articles there. Now, in the years past, I've learned that you're not really supposed to do self-promotion in Facebook groups. I didn't know that at the time, and sometimes you can get kicked out of groups for doing that, but that's what I was doing and nobody seemed to care.
In fact, people like the articles and I got a lot of traffic to my site in the beginning by posting to Facebook groups. And I also got people on my email list. And once people are on your email list, then you. Start sending them articles and that's another way to get traffic. I was also super lucky that I had a partnership with SF Gate, that's the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle.
I was friends with some of the editors there, you know, back from my career as a news reporter in San Francisco. I'd actually worked in their office as a Fillin editor and they saw what I was doing with the wayward home and that I was publishing these articles. Alternative living, and they really liked it and they asked if they could republish my articles.
So that was huge. That got me tons more traffic to my site. People would land on their page, and from there they would find me. And it also created links to my site, which Google likes. Google likes to see higher authority sites linking to your site so they know that you're legit. So I did a lot of that in the beginning.
So back in those days, I knew nothing about keyword research or seo, which means search engine optimization. And that's a way that you can get your articles to rank on Google. That's actually the preferred way to, to get eyes on your content, is to learn all about seo. But I knew nothing about it. And also in the first.
Six to nine months of a new blog, Google's probably not going to rank your content. It takes them a long time to find you, uh, to figure out what you're writing about and to start putting you on Google. But once you're hitting the first and second page on Google, that's like hitting the jackpot and it's amazing.
Another strategy I did was. Pinterest, you might not know that Pinterest is actually a search engine. So what I did was I created pins and I added text and I added photos. And then you add keywords to those pins and you hope as people are scrolling through Pinterest, they click on the pin and that takes 'em to your site.
So in the beginning, I did get a lot of traffic via Pinterest. I still get some traffic via Pinterest, but it's only about 15% of my website traffic. It's now all seo, which, um, I focused on in 2019, which I will talk about. It was really important for me to get traffic to my site because my goal in the beginning was to get on an ad network called Media Vine.
Now, media Vine is a premium ad network and they pay way more than Google Ads, like five to seven times more than Google Ads sense. So that was my top priority. Plus, I didn't really feel comfortable with selling on my site. I just wanted to provide free, interesting articles for people to read and to join Media Vine at that time.
You need 20. Thousand sessions per month. Um, now it's 50,000, but my goal was to reach that 25,000 sessions per month. And within one year of blogging I did that and my income started to go up even more. And that was also a huge leap in my blogging business. So it was. Winter of 2019 when I decided, okay, I need even more traffic Media Vines paying me so well that I need to kick it up and get more traffic to my site.
And the way to do that was with search engine optimization or keyword research. So I took a course called Stupid Simple SEO to learn all about keywords and how to find good keywords for my site. And I still remember being in the Bay Club, that was my gym at the time. Um, I would sit at the gym for 10 to 12 hours per day.
Working on my blog, doing freelance writing, um, exercising in the gym because I didn't really have anywhere to live in the Bay Area at that time. Our sailboat was under construction. We weren't technically allowed to live on it, and I didn't have a van yet, so I didn't wanna just sit in my two, in my sedan all day working on my site.
So I sat at the Bay Club and I still remember taking this SEO course, and I would just, Sit in the corner of the gym. They had this nice cafe with internet and I would just pour over that course and find my keywords and implement my keywords and what I learned in that course. And after I did that, that year, my traffic went way up in 2019 and so did my income.
So that was really cool. And that was such a, a big deal for me to finally focus on search engine optimiz. So I'm gonna tell you a few statistics from the year 2019, which was two years after I started my site. In January, I made almost $1,400 in ad revenue, January of 2019. Then I took the stupid simple SEO course to learn about seo, and by the end of the year, I was at $7,600 in ad revenue in 20, uh, 19.
That was two years after I started blogging. And to me that is really a lot of money. That's a big monthly income. And in the, in the few years since, uh, 2019, it's only continued to go up as I continue to work on SEO and, um, search engine optimization. Cuz getting that traffic from Google is just so important.
I can't stress that enough. Um, I just, I can't say enough good things about learning sel I'll probably repeat myself 10,000 times. That is how I eventually got really good at revenue to my site, and I still do to this day in 2022. So as soon as my income got higher, starting in 2019, I thought that I wanted to make a change to the wayward home.
So I started hiring people. This is when I made a big shift, and I hired about four different writers that would write most of my content moving forward. Along with those writers, I also hired a virtual assistant, and her job would be to kind of track what those writers were doing and put their blogs up on my site.
The main thing I did was the keyword research. I would find really good keywords. I wanted these writers to target. I would create an outline for them and they would do all the research and write these really amazing articles that have consistently ranked number. You know, on Google, on the first page, on the second page, most of these writers are still with me to this day.
They've been with me for about three years, and right now I'm not doing much writing. Site at all. The writers do basically do all the content. I focus on writing stuff about the van build. We're doing a DIY Sprinter van build, and those are the articles I write. And I also like to update some of the older articles, but I really shifted my site away from relying on my.
Self. I did this because I knew that Tom and I were going to take off on our sailboat and we were going to sail places where I wouldn't be getting very good internet. So it was really important to me to automate my business early on so I could just remove myself from the picture a lot of the time. So I did that and I really could remove myself from the picture.
It was amazing. Uh, Tom and I could go out on sailboat adventures or. Camper Van Adventures. I got my first van in 2018, thanks to revenue from my, my site. Uh, that van cost $6,000 and it felt like a luxury home on wheels, even though it was just a Chevy Astro van. And we would take that out, boom. Docking where we didn't have cell signal and I knew things were running.
So, Smoothly over at the wayward home, thanks to my amazing team of writers and virtual assistant. And so I really scaled my business in that way by hiring people, and I made sure those people did have experience in the areas they were writing about. For example, the person I have writing for Van Life, and now it's going to be even more people writing about Van Life.
They've actually lived in vans or are currently living in a van. It was really important to me to have actual experts writing my articles. Like I have an RVing expert, a tiny home expert, and these people live the lifestyle, and I wanted that to be authentic and for them to have that knowledge and expertise to be writing on my side.
I'm not just hiring random people to write these articles. It's important to me that they know what they're doing, but that was a huge part of scaling my site and I think moving forward in 2023, I'm going to try to get even more. So I can put more content on the wayward home so I can focus on other things like course creation, creating products and other things that will benefit my audience that I'm really excited about.
So the wayward home first hit six figures in 2019, which was a huge milestone for me. Uh, take this from someone who knew nothing about blogging and nothing about online business. And I was basically just living, uh, paycheck to paycheck on those, um, unemployment checks that would come into me every week or so.
And I. Destitute and broke. At the time, I had lost my job, but now, five years later, um, I continue to make a six figure income and I continue to do really well with my site and it, it bought me the current van that I have, which is a 2021 Sprinter van, four by four. And so I just feel this sense of relief and accomplishment and.
I'm just so happy to have made it this far, and I think that anybody can do this. I think anybody can create a blog or niche website as long as you know how to choose a niche and how to find keywords. This kind of story is available for so many people. I mean, I know some people that make way more than me on my site as Michelle Schorer Gardner, of making sense of sense with her personal.
Finance website I told you about in the beginning, making 100,000 a month. I mean, that's huge. That's way more than I make. But it's fun for me to hear these stories because it helps me create goals in my mind. What can I do to reach a hundred thousand dollars per month? Is that even possible? But I'm really motivated.
I love learning new things and I, I love teaching things too. I wanna help you also have a profitable niche site, if that's what you're interested. So if you're interested in starting a niche site or blog like me, I wanna tell you a little bit about the pros and cons because it's not all amazing. There's a lot of struggling involved as well.
But first, let's start with the pros to stay positive. The pros are you could actually develop a niche site, um, about anything, any of your hobbies or interests. Let's say you love. Cycling, or let's say you love cloth diapering, or let's say you love hiking. You can create a site just based on that one topic.
If you bring your site up to a thousand dollars a month of revenue, for example, you can sell that website for 35 or 40 times. Its income. So if you build and develop a site and it does really well, you can turn around and sell it. This is called website flipping, and a lot of people do this. I haven't personally done this yet, but it's something I wanna dabble in later on because I think it'd be kind of fun to, to.
So that's one reason that it's good to start a niche site. Another reason is you can keep it for passive income. If you're traveling full-time like me, it really is the best way to make money online because I can go off grid, I can go on my sailboat for days and not turn on the internet, and I know I'm going to be bringing in a consistent ad revenue each time I look at my ad revenue for those days, it's exactly the same.
It really hasn't wavered all year, and I'm really thankful for that. And that's true. Passive income, the ad revenue. Affiliate marketing is, affiliate marketing is when someone clicks on a link, um, when you're recommending a product and they purchase something and you get a small percentage. For example, if someone purchased something from Amazon through my link, I might get 3% of that purchase.
That's called affiliate marketing. That's also passive income, which is really important if you're traveling full-time. Another thing that's, uh, a pro is that this is a pretty cheap business to start. Um, you. Start a blog for like $10. I mean, all you have to do is buy a domain name and buy hosting. I mean, I would, I would recommend spending more and spending money on courses unless you already know everything about um, niche site selection, keyword selection.
I would highly recommend investing in courses. That's what skyrocketed me to the level I'm at today. I seriously believe in investing, um, in your education, in the blogging or niche site world. So those are some of the pros. Some of the cons of developing a website like mine is that it can take tons of work up front.
You're probably writing all your own articles if you don't have the capital to hire writers. I know I didn't, so I wrote everything in the beginning. That can be super. Consuming and labor intensive if you're writing everything. Um, if I could do it all over again, I would have a huge savings account and hire all my writers, but that , that didn't happen.
So I did all my own writing. Another thing is it can take Google a long time to rank your site six to nine months. I mentioned that before. It can feel like a really long waiting period where you're not making any money. A lot of bloggers get really frustrated and they quit and they give up. But I'm saying just stick it.
Eventually, if you're doing the keyword research correctly, um, Google will start ranking you and then you can apply to Media Vine once you've reached 50,000 sessions a month. And there's other ways to monetize with different ad networks like Ezoic, which don't require quite as many monthly page views, but it can take a lot of work time, effort, patients, a willingness to keep pushing through in the beginning, which is really hard for some people.
And also, um, you're at the mercy of Google and Google updates. That's something I didn't mention before. But if Google does a lot of algorithms in its search, uh, function, and sometimes your site can be demolished by those algorithms, I did lose a lot of traffic at the end of 2019. In one of these algorithms, I can look at a chart of my Google analytics.
See the drop on there and it's pretty depressing. But I kept working on my site. I kept putting out good articles and my traffic recovered, and it surpassed the traffic it was at before. But I have heard of some people's sites getting completely destroyed and demolished by Google updates, and that can be really disheartening and frustrating, and that is a risk of having a website.
So I just wanted you to know the pros and cons in case you are thinking of starting a site. All right, so you can probably tell from this podcast episode that I'm super passionate about blogging and niche sites. It's really changed my life. Um, I can't say many more good things about it other than that it's allowed me to travel full time in my van and my sailboat.
And in February of 2020, Tom and I left the San Francisco Bay area on our sailboat and sailed it down to Mexico. And part of the reason we did that is we knew that my website was making a good enough income that, um, that. Would suit us anywhere in our travels, and I knew I could work on it anywhere I went.
So we cut ties to the Bay area, started our life of full-time travel, and it's been just incredible. Um, I work what I want on my own schedule where I want. Um, right now I'm in the, the beautiful Arizona desert looking outside and, and seeing the creso bushes and the Palo Verde trees and the mountains and the distance, and it's sunny out and I'm sitting here working and recording my podcast episode and I'm just so thankful to be here and I'm thankful for the wayward.
All its amazing readers for helping get me, getting me to where I am today. So I'm not gonna talk about blogging anymore cause I could literally go on for hours about it. So, but I wanted to let you know that I do have a free email course about blogging if you wanna sign up for that. The course goes for five days and we go over choosing a niche and getting traffic to your side and keyword research and you can, um, sign up for that as a way to get in touch with me as well.
I'll put a link to. Start a blog free email course in the show notes below, and I hope to see you over there. It's really exciting. Thanks for listening to me drone on and on about blogging. I hope you found it inspirational and I hope that maybe it's something you're considering doing too. If, if you're not tech savvy or if you have no idea how to build or design a website, it's okay.
I had no idea either. I built my own website from scratch and. Crap. I, I tell you, it was bad. It was really embarrassing, but it did the job. It worked. So don't let that hold you back from starting your own website Later. When you make money, you can hire a designer. That's what I did anyway, so I hope this inspires you to either create a website or to go think outside the box and maybe create your own online business.
That allows you to travel full time and be your own boss. It can't be beat. There's nothing like just working on your own and not having to show up for meetings or be on someone else's clock. Um, I highly recommend it, and I really hope that you find the best business on the road or on the water as well.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Wayward Home Podcast. I'll see you next time.