Or how I accidentally created a website that me a house, with only ten years of blood, sweat, tears and swearing at plugins.
Back in 2015, after my second baby was born, I started writing online mainly because I was tired, stuck at home, slightly lonely, and desperately needed something that belonged to me outside of nappies and CBeebies.
I didn’t have some grand entrepreneurial vision; I certainly wasn’t sitting there whispering things like multiple income streams while building a five-year business plan. I was mostly just trying to stay mentally alive.
At the time, blogging still had a bit of a reputation as a harmless mum hobby.
You wrote about your children, or your house, or recipes, or your hair. Whatever you liked. Maybe a few people read it, and maybe a brand sent you a candle once a year.
Nobody really expected it to become an actual career; least of all me, but slowly, over time, it stopped being a hobby and quietly became work.
Then eventually, somehow, enough income that I was able to buy my own house, which is still slightly surreal considering the whole thing started because I needed something to do during nap time.
At first it’s exciting. You buy a domain name, you spend six hours choosing fonts. Then eventually, after writing approximately 47 blog posts that nobody reads apart from your mum and one confused man in Canada, you discover the horrifying truth:
Getting traffic to a website is not very easy.
Just know that everyone online is lying
The internet is full of people claiming they earn £14,000 a month passively from a blog they apparently update twice a year between yoga retreats.
According to YouTube, all you need to do is, find a niche, create value, build an audience and scale your digital assets, whatever the heck that means.
Which sounds very achievable until you realise “building an audience” mostly involves screaming into the void while Google periodically destroys your self-esteem.
One minute your blog post is ranking beautifully, the next minute Google AI has decided a 14-year-old Reddit thread with three replies is somehow more helpful than the 4,000-word article you spent two days writing. It’s really demoralising and a far cry from the screenshots of affiliate dashboards and laptops near swimming pools that people pretend it is.
SEO and why it sucks
Most bloggers become obsessed with SEO because, in theory, it’s free traffic. You write helpful content, Google sends visitors, everybody wins.
Except Google is essentially a mysterious wizard living in a cave who occasionally changes the rules without explanation and its recent AI updates have absolutely destroyed many blogs; about half the people who I called colleagues have given up on the whole thing, and other bloggers and website owners are quietly starting to learn about PPC and Google Ads.
If you run a blog, niche website, affiliate site, Etsy shop, online course, or basically any kind of side hustle, understanding paid traffic can make a huge difference, particularly if you’re trying to monetise.
Sometimes your content is fine, your website is fine, your products are fine but none of this matters if nobody can FIND YOU.
Google Ads allow businesses to appear directly in front of people already searching for exactly what they offer, which is significantly more efficient than posting your latest blog link onto Facebook and watching your aunt react with a thumbs up emoji out of pity (genuinely happens).
PPC also helps you understand:
- Which blog titles people actually click
- Which keywords attract buyers instead of freeloaders
- Which products convert
- Which pages make money
- Whether your audience wants information or is actually ready to spend money
That kind of data is very useful for bloggers, because traffic alone means very little.
You can have 200,000 visitors reading free crochet patterns and still earn less than somebody with a smaller audience buying expensive products through affiliate links; commercial intent matters and sadly, people emotionally relating to your rant about the Manosphere does not always translate into revenue (although it should).
Bloggers: Accidental digital marketers
This is the part I find funniest. You start a harmless little blog because you enjoy writing and then, years later – quite by accident – you somehow know:
- Keyword research
- Pinterest strategy
- Email marketing
- Affiliate funnels
- Website speed optimisation
- Conversion rates
- Ad placements
- User intent
- Analytics
- Heatmaps
- RPMs
- Plugins, and why one has ruined your life.
And once you reach that point, understanding PPC genuinely starts making sense, especially if you’re trying to grow beyond relying entirely on Google’s whims.
You don’t need to know EVERYTHING yourself
I think one of the biggest mistakes bloggers make is assuming they need to become experts in absolutely everything; writing, SEO, web design, tech support, photography, social media, video editing, email marketing, advertising…
But you don’t. There are people out there who can do this stuff for you so you don’t waste your time, money and energy on things you don’t fully understand. If you’re exploring paid advertising for your blog, website, or online business, working with experienced professionals like Manchester-based Google Ads specialists can help you avoid the classic beginner mistake of accidentally spending £300 advertising a blog post to completely the wrong audience.
I do genuinely love blogging. I love that ordinary people can build websites, create communities, make money from weird niche interests, and carve out careers that didn’t really exist twenty years ago, but I also think we massively underestimate how much work goes into it.
By the time a blogger starts earning decent money, they’ve amassed enough skills to make themselves a three page CV, and we’re using them almost every day. No wonder we’re all tired.
Still, it is quite satisfying when your weird little website starts paying for things, even if the journey there does involve multiple breakdowns, fifteen abandoned business ideas, and an unhealthy emotional attachment to Google Search Console.