New Mom Uses Pinterest to Launch Parenting Blog

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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In today's story, a new mom starts a blog providing answers to common questions. Speaking of new, this is one of our new side hustle stories, meaning that it just got off the ground a couple months ago. In fact, two months ago, it did $500. Last month, it did $1,500. Interestingly, this new mom almost gave it up right after starting, feeling burned out around the holidays.

But fortunately she kept going and began to see the results she hoped for. So let it be a reminder, if at first you don't succeed, the response or outcome you're hoping for might be right around the corner. Some exceptions include skydiving, bungee jumping, and other adventure sports. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

These kinds of projects, like the one I'm gonna tell you about today, have potential to create passive income. Now I say potential, there are a couple of caveats. Caveat number one, you usually have to work for quite a while before you get to that point. So in other words, you spend a lot of active energy before you get that passive income. And number two, nothing gold can stay.

It usually won't keep coming forever using this kind of model. So if you do want it to keep coming forever, if you do want to stick with this kind of thing and have this be your primary side hustle or maybe your main thing at one point, you definitely wanna keep going with it. You don't wanna start it and then abandon it. Or alternatively, you could just kind of let it run its course and then plan ahead for your next project. So we'll look at how she's done it, this new mom who uses Pinterest to launch a parenting blog.

Right after this shout out to our sponsor. [Music]

Ashley Bryant is a type A planner. She likes to research, be fully prepared and have everything under control. So when she became pregnant with her first child, she couldn't stop reading. Reading about pregnancy and motherhood, however, was not like other topics she'd encountered.

Most resources she could find were just message boards full of personal stories, not well-written, thoughtfully organized articles backed by science. She had to visit 10 blogs to get the information she thought she'd be able to find on one. It was exhausting and it wasn't just her. Ashley had plenty of conversations with other new and expectant mothers about how hard it is to find entertaining, yet detailed articles that aren't just based on intuition or a single story or two. Somewhere along the way, an idea was formed.

Why not blog about this? Yes, that's right, it's 2019 and people still blog. Or actually it was 2018 when she started, but still. And some of them even make money doing it, which is of course what we talk about here on the show. Ashley wasn't totally new to blogging.

She works full time for a real estate company and is responsible for creating content for their website. However, while she understood writing basics, like how to keep someone's attention, how to organize the content in a way that feels natural, she wasn't very familiar with the business side of starting a blog. Buying a domain, setting up a security certificate, search engine optimization, she knew she needed to learn these things, so she studied up. She used WordPress, got a domain name, web hosting, a couple of plugins. Altogether, her startup fees, including two courses that accelerated her knowledge, came out to around $1,200.

Then it was time to start planning and writing for her new website, momlikeumainit.com. She also began paying close attention to Pinterest. It was easy to stay caught up on trendy topics in motherhood from the popular pins, but just as Ashley suspected, many of those pins directed readers to fluffy content that wasn't very practical. Her plan was different. She'd take her own experiences of pregnancy and early motherhood, enhance them with really detailed research, and create long, engaging articles that could be the only article someone would have to read to gain some real understanding of the topic.

Once she had a few posts in the pipeline, she officially launched Mom Like You Mean It. Because she'd been engaging with the motherhood community on Pinterest, largely while she was learning what kinds of content did well on the platform, she already had a small following. She started pinning her own posts, and visitors began to arrive on her site, slowly. A couple articles seemed to do particularly well, and before long, Mom Like You Mean It had its first 1,000 visitor month. And then the Amazon affiliate links, embedded in some of her articles, started leading to sales, at least a few.

In November 2018, Ashley generated $100 from her blog. While that was a good sign in some ways, she was struggling. She had put dozens of hours into the website, was really expecting to be making more by that point. The market is already saturated, she thought. There's no way I can really make it.

She even tried to quit the next month, feeling burned out. Thankfully, her husband told her to keep going, keep writing, and keep pinning articles. And it's a good thing she did. In January 2019, fresh from a couple weeks off of the holidays, Ashley dove back into her blog, and ended up having her first $500 month. February was even better, $1,500, all from advertising, Amazon links, and a couple of affiliate commissions.

From the very beginning, Ashley has been driven by the concerns and questions of new and expectant moms. She's not looking for her own creative outlet, or a place to tell stories, she's blogging to help her readers solve problems. And because of this listen, then write approach, Ashley found an area where she could really shine, pre and postpartum fitness and nutrition. More than any others, her early articles on these topics were thriving, and earning. She's now working on her first product she hopes to release later this year.

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All right, let's talk about momlikeimmunet.com. I was taking a look at the website, and I have a couple of constructive critiques. First of all, I am a big fan of the information approach of providing really detailed articles. There's so much short form content out there these days with all the different social networks and everywhere else. I really think if you're gonna do a blog well, then you should have a lot of detailed information.

You should really tell people what they need to know about a certain topic, and when it comes to a topic like pregnancy, early motherhood, et cetera, there's a lot to know, right? So it shouldn't be a short article. So I really do like this approach. In fact, I think they could actually be longer than they are. I mean, they're pretty long, but I think you could actually go on and on with a lot more, even more helpful info.

A couple of things I might do, she's not getting a lot of comments on her posts, which is not unusual in this day and age. The blogosphere in 2019 isn't nearly as comment-based or comment-focused as it once was. And so if you're not getting a lot of comments, like on her site, she has a lot of posts that say, you know, leave a comment, and then you scroll to the bottom, there's actually not any comments there at all. I would just say turn them off. I don't even have that feature there.

If people aren't really using it, no need to draw attention to the fact that, you know, it's pretty much an unused feature. So I would suggest that. And then also there are a lot of ads on this site. And as you scroll through the articles, obviously I'm not opposed to all advertising or sponsorship. You know, that's the model that we have here on the show.

However, I do think there's a trade-off between visitor experience and ads in the sense that, you know, the more ads you put on your blog, maybe the short-term benefit is there in the sense that you get more clicks. But I do think once you start adding so many ads, it creates this negative visitor experience. So if your whole strategy is just to create content pages where people come to once, you know, and then they never come back to your site, then maybe it makes sense to have an ad every couple of paragraphs, you know, lots of banners, lots of images, et cetera, because, you know, you don't care about the visitors. But of course, I think Ashley does care about her visitors. So maybe just ease up a little bit.

Or one way to do it is to look and see, okay, which of these ads are actually effective? You can probably actually study and look at the analytics and understand, you know, which of these ads are effective and which placements are they effective? And then let's get rid of all the places where they're not effective, just to give a better experience and to make it a little bit less cluttered. That's just my two cents. Of course, Ashley, take it or leave it.

As you see fit, it's a wonderful project, and I hope you keep writing. Keep writing, keep sharing. You can still make money with blogging in 2019. So hopefully she will continue to do so, maybe even increase that monthly income. Maybe some of our listeners will be inspired as well.

Listeners, if you like writing, if you're interested in a specific topic, like pregnancy, like whatever it could be, this could work for you as long as you have a long-term perspective. So with that, I will sign off. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. If you wanna find the show notes, including links to everything I mentioned, mom like you mean it, et cetera, go to sidehustleschool.com/846. That is episode 846.

Thanks so much, my friends. I'll be back again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the Onward Project.