How We Hit 10K Email Subscribers And Started Making Income From Ads [Update]

Tarah Wolff

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Published: August 15th, 2022

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Tarah Wolff

Founder, Grandmas House DIY

$2K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Grandmas House DIY

grandmashousediy.com

from Menahga, MN, USA

started August 2015

$2,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Tarah recommends to grow your business!

Want more updates on Grandmas House DIY? Check out these stories:

1. How I Started A $2K/Month DIY And Renovations Blog (2021) ➜

This is a follow up story for Grandmas House DIY. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 3 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

My name is Tarah Wolff and I am the founder of the blog called Grandma's House DIY.We give inspiration and motivation for Do It Yourself projects outside and inside the home.

With total transparency on our failures and how we fix the places we “mess” up our readers seem to appreciate one of our favorite slogans, “Everything is fixable!” In a social media world of “perfect,” our candid blog is a breath of fresh air. Read our starter story here!

A lot of changes have been happening here at Grandma’s house just in the last year! Over the last 2021 summer, we hit our acreage hard, adding a stall to our garage and pouring an entire concrete driveway.

It was doubly hard with us hitting astonishingly hot temps here in northern MN. Hearing “record breaking” and “burning” was so common on the radio that year it was rough. With all of our outside work to do all I can say is our blog followers got a bit of complaining from me lol. We also put in new pea gravel lower deck too.

This year started with a very cold spring but Lodi and I looked forward to a lot fewer projects this year in light of our marriage! We DIYed a small ceremony for our closest friends and family out on a beautiful paddle boat. It was incredible and beyond our hopes, as the weather was even perfect (miracles happen lol) we were able to share a lot of our special day on our blog too!

Our readership expanded quite a bit just in these last few months - bringing in a lot more page views, especially from Pinterest. I believe it's because I become a little less rigid with what I blog about - fewer how-to tutorials and more pieces just about us and our life.

We’re making nearly $3,000 a month now about half from ad revenue and the other half from selling sponsored posts on our blog. Though I do limit the amount of sponsored posts to only a few months as I feel too much “illegitimate” content (no matter how good it may be) can bring a blog down.

In 2020 we hit over 500,000 visitors which must have been due to covid and so many people stuck at home in quarantine. That’s what seemed to have given our blog the boost that has brought our income up as those numbers never dropped but kept on slowly climbing.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

I started way back in 2015 hoping that someday I could retire from my day job if I could just make $2,000 a month on the blog. We’ve officially surpassed that and there are times when I feel like pinching myself because I can’t believe it.

A huge milestone for us this year was hitting $1,000 in strictly ad income in just one month. That’s totally passive and entirely based on viewership/readership alone.

With a blog, we are just selling ourselves so it can be a hard market with no actual products to sell so hitting that kind of milestone was incredible for us! And it proved that we are absolutely on the right track! (We partner with Mediavine)

Mediavine’s requirement is at least 25,000 sessions a month and is entirely exclusive meaning: that I can’t run ads from any other company on our website except for Mediavine. However, they customize, set up, and run the ads entirely so there was very little setup on my end which was pretty amazing to me.

Every other ad company I had worked with before required a lot of work on my end to incorporate them into the website. They also have great customer support besides tips and tricks and tutorials for bringing in new visitors etc.

Another step in the right direction was my decision to switch to a different newsletter tool called Creativemail. It works hand in hand with our Wordpress site and their Jetpack pro plugin which vastly improved my life getting the weekly newsletter ready every week and it also made it A LOT easier for people to sign up.

With all other newsletter tools I’ve used in the past I’ve had to use their signup forms. This meant coding them directly into the website instead of being able to use Wordpress’ (through the Jetpack plugin) own built-in signup forms.

I have a pretty solid grasp of HTML and CSS website code but was never able to customize them for the site as well as I wanted. (They ended up pretty ugly lol.)

I was also having to manually check the old sign-up forms to make sure they were even working. (It drives me crazy to think how many subscribers we lost one month when the signup form stopped working and I didn’t catch it right away.)

Besides all of that, I was also having to import any new followers who signed up through Wordpress into the newsletter email list on practically a daily basis.

Finally, with Creativemail working with Wordpress’s Jetpack plugin, I have all my eggs in one basket! One sign-up form. One email list. No more worries about losing subscribers! And also, because it's a part of Wordpress, I was able to seamlessly add it to our website design, putting it front and center, so anyone who wants to sign up can do so really easily.

Since then we’ve reached nearly 10,000 email subscribers! Another milestone that we are so excited about!

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

Our biggest challenge has been TIME. We both work full time besides the blog and with our wedding to plan for the first half of 2022 I thought I was going to just go crazy at some point lol.

I had to choose to cut back hours at my day job so the blog wouldn’t suffer and we were concerned about the loss of income. It did pay off though. Not having to cut back on the blog meant we saw even more growth, fully making up for any loss of income from my day job.

I made myself a schedule and I never missed a deadline. I spent just as much time and effort on our newsletter then when it was going out to only 100 people as I do now going out to nearly 10,000.

I am now back to work at my day job full time but I am also excited because I feel like one day not too far away I will be able to devote ALL of my working hours to the blog!

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

I bypassed more income for the blog as far as article and link insertions simply for lack of time. I had to keep reminding myself that this (for us) was not a typical year in any way. Planning our wedding, honeymoon and then a huge reception at our home later takes a ton of mental planning. Fatigue was a big one for both of us and there were a few times when we both were just at the end of our ropes.

Though I did take time off so the blog wouldn’t suffer I still had to bypass income opportunities because I may have had time to “maintain” however I did not have extra time to learn anything new or grow the blog in any kind of new direction. I have no regrets though, our marriage was once in a lifetime.

So I would say the lesson for me was simply this: Time with our families is the most important thing and sometimes that means choosing THEM.

Also, it's not always about literal TIME. There were moments in the past year when I had time - but just didn’t have it in me. Sometimes we need to show ourselves some grace.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

One certain thing: The blog will be able to make us enough income that I will be able to “retire” from my day job within just a couple of years! It's been my goal since I started on this crazy journey back in 2015 and I almost have to pinch myself knowing that we are right there, seeing it come to fruition.

Creatively, mentally and being able to give the blog so much more time I am thrilled at the possibilities. The hope was always to start a product line of some kind and that is definitely what we’re heading toward. Not to mention getting over my fear of doing videos!

What’s the best thing you read in the last year?

Lodi embraced Podcasts in the last year. He introduced me to an incredibly inspiring couple who started a podcast on a whim a few years back.

Now, they have millions of listeners and they BOTH had to quit their day jobs to keep up with their growing business. Check out the podcasts here.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

It is always about persistence when it comes to any kind of blogging. I started way back in 2015 hoping that someday I could retire from my day job if I could just make $2,000 a month on the blog. We’ve officially surpassed that and there are times when I feel like pinching myself because I can’t believe it.

But I never stopped working at this. I made myself a schedule and I never missed a deadline. I spent just as much time and effort on our newsletter then when it was going out to only 100 people as I do now going out to nearly 10,000.

I spent years blogging without ever seeing any kind of income. It was tough honestly and entirely “head to the plow” kind of mentality. But persistence is the reason we are making income like we are today.