Last updated: Monday 21 September 2026
After quitting university, my blog had consumed my whole life. I would work every day on my blog. Until I couldn’t anymore.
I started to notice how much work running a successful blog actually is.
I’ve worked a lot on my blog for 4 years now, and I’m not where I thought I would be. I’m so far behind. But hey, everything takes more time and more effort than you expect, right?
The past 30 days I’ve made 790 dollars from my blog and 35k people have visited my blog. Honestly, I still can’t believe I made something from nothing and it’s making me money every month! But it’s not like I’m earning a living. That’s still pretty far off. It took me 4 years to get here. How many more years would it take for me to earn a full-time income?
Recently, I wanted to have more time for myself and my experiments. I already shaved my blog work down to 4 days a week, but now I changed it to 3 days. I now work one day on creating a blog post, one day on updating old blog posts, and one day on creating pins for Pinterest. This leaves me with four days to do other things I want to do like my car drawing experiment.
Thursday 24 September 2026
When I had quit uni for the second time and started working full time on my blog, I broke the timeline up into phases. Phase one was growing my blog to 10k visitors a month without worrying about monetizing. Once I would hit 10k visitors a month, I would install Google Ads on my website and sign up for Amazon Associates. Then, when I would hit 50k monthly visitors, I would sign up for a better ad network, Mediavine to be precise.
Here’s how that went.
Phase 1:
I started working more or less full time on my blog in August 2022. 4 years ago now. I first wrote about everything I knew about colored pencils. Then, I focused my attention on writing posts about alcohol markers.
Let’s say my first posts aren’t that great. I used to hate writing in school, and now I chose to do it for my work? Yeah, it was very difficult and you could probably tell I was new to this. But I learned and kept writing.
One year later, at the end of August 2023, I had almost 1000 monthly visitors! That was already huge for me. And unknown to me, it kept steadily growing.
During this time, I was also still actively posting my car drawings on Instagram. I got several DMs from people asking for tips, so I made a post with car drawing tips.
I also ran out of things to write about colored pencils and alcohol markers, so I tried a few new things. One of these things was creating step-by-step guides on how to draw certain cars, starting with a Lamborghini race car. This post did really well for me. It got 200 pageviews a month! Which is huge compared to my total count.
I started creating more and more car drawing guides. People loved them. By the end of March 2024 I had crossed 10k monthly visitors!
Phase 2:
I applied for Amazon Associates. I didn’t want to do this sooner as you need 3 qualifying sales in the first 60 days to get accepted. I actually signed up before but I didn’t reach the quota. But I thought, if I hit 10k monthly visitors I’ll surely refer 2 people who will buy something, right?
I got accepted within a week or so. Maybe I waited a little too long. But hey, focusing on growth on the beginning is a good thing I think.