Journey To $15/Day — Blogging + Adsense

Hello guys!

Introduction
I am a economics student but I always have a passion about design. Back in 2010, I created a small blog without any kind of knowledge about that subject and after three months I got direct advertising and I was able to make $1200 in a month! Sounds a little bit ridiculous but that happened. The blog was really poor and all the content was ripped by other websites but every week print companies reach me talking about advertising and sponsored articles.

After that, I decided to learn more about blogging, how to monetize websites, get traffic, etc. and all I know now I learned alone (hum... I mean, with the help of my virtual friends, in particular Google) but mostly I learned more about my niche: design.

So I created another blog on 2012, with a better template, nice domain name and better content: I focus mainly on design inspiration and I think content is king. In this niche, people has a high aesthetic sense and is always attentive to detail so I only post the best stuff, beautiful works with high resolution images. In 2013 I was able to make about $200/300 just with adsense, per month. I'm not satisfied. Last year I sold that blog for $2500 because I was demotivated and stopped post on a regular basis. My income fell, a guy made me an offer to purchase and decided to sell my baby.

What I Have Been Doing?
I tested other niches and at the moment I have 4 others small blogs but I'm not doing so much on them. I'm thinking on sell them too.
The question here is I'm not doing money online... but I should!

My Journey
I created a new blog page with a new domain on the design niche. The design is really clean and beautiful. I will share content like design and art, photography, illustration and architecture. I will focus on the best content only.

I will try to monetize it with Adsense (I'm open to suggestions in this area). One of my mistakes in the past was not having created an email list from the start... yeah, I know... I had more than 2 millions visitors on my last blog niche and only collected 250 emails. So, I'm a newbie and I always try to learn with my mistakes.

What I Have Right Now:
- Domain
- Template ready
- 19 articles
- Social Accounts (I can use some old accounts on this niche, I already have about 25000 followers)
- Time (The next three months will be hard: I was diagnosed with cancer and will begin chemotherapy next week. But I'll have fun!)

Objectives For The First Month:
- At least 15000 visitors
- Make at least $20 on adsense
- Start collected some emails
- Post every day a new article

The website goes online on May 1.
I will try to post updates here so I can show you I the journey is going and keep me motivated.
Hope to learn something here too. You know better than me what works and not. I will love if you can help me and send me suggestions on how to grow my traffic, increase my revenues, etc.

Thanks!

Good luck with this it looks like a well planned detailed journey. I will be following.

Cool, keep posting about your sucess...lets see how it goes..

I want to launch a new Facebook page. What's the best way to get some likes, without paying? I never used sites like addmefast or similar, so I appreciate any help. I want to get some likes before proceed with advertising because people follow pages with more likes (maybe a physiologic thing ).

Good luck for your Journey

Bet the disign niche is a tough one to succeed in. Good luck on your goals.

Hey!

Last week of the month and this is my actual stats:

Website
- 2600 UV, 5800 pageviews
- 4,5? on Adsense

Social
- Facebook: 700 likes (opened May 1)
- Instagram: 140 followers (I'm new on it, need to understand the best way to get followers. My content is really curated, I pick everything manually, only the best. What can I do to get more followers?)
- Tumblr: 16800 followers (1900 new followers this month)

I'm very far from my goals to this month because I already started my treatment and I'm not posting every day, like I said. I'm still testing some ways to spread the content. I already start getting some clicks from search engines but that's not my first goal. I don't care if I receive traffic from there, I just want to get it. I'm working on page SEO, of course, but as I said I don't look search engines can be my first source of traffic (too many competition).

What I'm doing:
- Research even more sites for inspiration and select only the best content and artists to share on mine. I'm using Feedly, it's good to see all the fresh articles.
- Share a HQ picture on the Facebook page with a nice description and bit.ly link. Using bit.ly on Facebook is ok? I mean, I'm not penalized on reach?
- Pin one/two images for my Pinterest account, per post (2000 followers, +250 this month)
- I also share some photos on dsgnspiration.net, it's good to get some clicks!

Maybe I will not reach my goals but that's ok, they were ambitious goals for the first month, eheh.
I will try to keep this updated more frequently!

Have a nice week.

Good luck on your journey and may you be free from cancer

Good idea! thanks for share

How is your blog coming? It's 2019..