Unfortunately, my income has greatly suffered compared to previous years!
In March 2024, several of my sites experienced another significant drop in traffic following Google’s Core Update. I knew it was the beginning of the end of “easy” blogging money.
Around that time, I became serious about building additional traffic sources and income streams, such as my newsletter and Pinterest.
Later in the summer, I began growing one of my Facebook pages.
I still haven’t cracked the Facebook code, but I did stumble across a way to automate most of my work thanks to browsing YouTube.
No-code automation tools like Make and n8n are powerful software products that can do much of the busy work behind blogging automatically for you. I’m having lots of fun exploring these tools and building systems and workflows that speed up my work greatly.
Income
Here is a graph showing my monthly income for the year.
Below, find the different companies which I worked with in 2024. Mediavine and LTK are by far where the bulk of my revenue comes from!
These are the different types of income my blog generated. Most of my revenue came from display ads, and I think this will remain the case in 2025, too!
Expenses
As usual, my expenses were low this year.
- Namecheap and Cloudflare Domain Renewals: $300
- DigitalOcean Hosting: $400
- RunCloud Server Management: $160
Plans for the Future
As you can see, my blogging income (most of which came from a single home decorating blog) is seriously taking a slow but steady nosedive.
This trend has continued during 2025, so at the beginning of the year, I started making a major, serious shift in my business strategy.
I do this full-time and it’s my only source of income, so I need to make it work again if I don’t want to go back to an office.
I decided that I see three big opportunities for the future right now: Pinterest, Faceless YouTube Channels, and TikTok Shop Affiliates.
It takes time to learn a new strategy, so I haven’t gotten as far along in developing each of these income streams as extensively as I would have liked, but here’s what I’m currently working on!
I plan to create many AI blogs and generate traffic to them via Pinterest.
I’ve created 30 different niche-specific Pinterest accounts, most of which I created in the last year. They are all related to the most popular Pinterest topics, and are designed to reach a primarily female audience.
Think food, fashion, home decor, traveling, and gardening.
I dug into my old emails to unearth my very old Pinterest accounts and re-branded them into mini brands for these popular niche topics. So far, I’ve created actual WordPress websites for around half of them.
I’m using n8n automations and AI to create content for all of them. This is a slow but steady process. So far, only 1 of them is monetized on Google AdSense and gets more than 10,000 page views per month.
Faceless YouTube
I haven’t yet gotten started on this one, but I plan to launch faceless informational or entertainment-focused YouTube Channels and attempt to monetize them.
YouTube is still a very creator-friendly platform. I’ve tested posting videos on here, and they get thousands of views quickly, whereas Instagram will only show them to around 50 people.
TikTok Shop Affiliate
This is my least promising opportunity, but I plan to see what I can do here anyway. I don’t like the idea of manually creating content, which is how the majority of TikTok affiliates make money.
My golden rule is: If it can’t be automated, I’m not interested.
So I need to figure out a way to automate the TikTok creation and posting aspect of this opportunity.
There are definitely people making serious cash on this relatively new social media platform in America.
Another opportunity I see many people jumping on in Facebook, however, I personally remain skeptical. The platform is too big to monetize, in my opinion, but I plan to share the same videos from YouTube onto Facebook as well. I just won’t have a dedicated strategy for Facebook as I will for YouTube. So this one is last priority, but we’ll see.
And that’s it for now!
As you can imagine, this year was very stressful. Watching my income fall has not been fun, but I try to remind myself that as long as I have my health (which, thank God I do!), I can do anything I set my mind to.
Cheers to new beginnings in 2025 and beyond!