Cassie Scroggins experienced something a lot of moms go through: an identity crisis when her kids were born. But she didn't let it keep her down for long. She put her nose to the grindstone and built a blog from the ground up while giving birth to four boys. Anyone with kids knows that's quite the accomplishment.
It's been a bumpy road with a steep learning curve – from Pinterest updates that wiped out her traffic to testing out different strategies with more or less success. But today Cassie's blog is bringing in $5,000 per month.
Keep reading to learn more about:
- What motivated Cassie Scroggins to start her blog
- What she hopes to offer her readers and followers
- How much money she's making
- Her revenue breakdown
- How she uses Instagram and TikTok
- The exact steps she takes when creating content to rank
- How she grows her email list
- Her favorite tools at the moment
- Her greatest challenge to date
- The accomplishments she's most proud of
- Her advice for other entrepreneurs
Meet Cassie Scroggins
My name is Cassie, I’m 26 years old, I'm a mom of 4 boys and the creator and blogger behind the blog Cassie Scroggins.
I was married at 19 and became a mom a year later. That’s when my life turned on its head.
As a new stay-at-home mom, I felt an immediate identity crisis, like I had lost myself. I had no hobbies or interests and felt I had no control over my life anymore. I remember thinking:
“This is it; this is motherhood? Is this all I’m supposed to be for the rest of my life?”
I loved being a mom, but I also felt so stagnant and alone. All while my husband was out in the world progressing. I wanted more but didn’t want to sacrifice being home with my kids. I felt so stuck.
That’s when I stumbled on a blog post about how this stay-at-home mom made a full-time income from home by blogging. And I was convinced if she could do it, so could I.
Why She Created Her Website
I started my original blog, Life on Waller, in 2016 when my first son was only 3.5 months old. I was drawn to the idea that I could build a business, help provide for our family, and progress in something other than just motherhood. All while being able to stay home with my kids.
In 2018, I rebranded Life on Waller to Cassie Scroggins, and through the years, it’s morphed into what it is today.
Now my mission is to help other moms create a life they love without sacrificing motherhood. Taking the mom who feels stuck and helping her take her life back, get more fulfillment, and still be the mom she wants to be.
Whether that be by helping her start her own online business, find a daily schedule that allows her time to work on her personal goals, or simply a hair tutorial to help her feel more confident throughout her day.
Blogging changed my life.
It has allowed me to provide for my family while raising my kids from home, it’s given me confidence, and it’s empowered me as a woman and a mother. That’s what I want for every mom out there.
How Much Money Her Website Is Making
Right now, Cassie Scroggins makes about $60,000 a year, which comes out to about $5,000 a month.
As for my revenue breakdown, I make about 54% from ads, 23% from affiliates, 18% from sponsorships, and 5% from my own products.
Here’s a look at our revenue from 2021:
I currently only sell digital products on Etsy and my site, but I make most of my income via tripwires after signing up for my email list.
My products include a digital blog planner, a mom planner, a few sets of Pinterest pin templates, my Mom to Momtrepreneur ebook (which helps moms in their first 30 days of blogging), and digital wall art (sold exclusively via my Etsy shop. The digital wall art was one of the first products I did for the blog back in 2016, and they now live on Etsy now.
When it comes to sponsors, I do outreach, and I also let them reach out to me. If there’s a company or product I want to share with my readers, I’ll reach out first to see if they would like to sponsor some content. Or I’ll get sponsorship offers in my emails or DMs, and I'll look into it if it’s the right fit for my audience.
How Cassie Scroggins Has Grown Her Business
Investing in blogging education and training was the one thing that moved the needle the most in my business. I feel like so many bloggers aren’t willing to do this. Instead, they waste so much time spinning their wheels without making much progress.
There’s just so much information online, but there’s no surefire way to tell what information works and what doesn’t until you’ve already wasted months on implementation.
So, after a few months of trying to figure out the ins and outs of creating a successful blog myself, I knew I needed to invest in some form of blogging education to get the most out of my time.
I took some time, did as much research as possible on good blogging education, and landed on Elite Blog Academy. It was pricey, especially considering I hadn’t even seen a penny from my blog yet. I started my blog in September 2016 and bought the course that December.
After talking it over with my husband, I went for it. And it was the best thing I’ve ever done for my business. It taught me everything I needed to know to build a successful money-making blog.
From business strategies to the techy stuff to writing content that connects, it gave me the tools I needed along with a roadmap to turn my blog into what I wanted it to be.
Her Winning Marketing Strategies
My number one marketing strategy is creating quality content that targets my specific audience and gets them to sign up for my email list, make a purchase, or both!
One unique approach I’m using is Instagram Reels and TikTok. With Pinterest not exactly what it used to be, I’ve found that using Instagram Reels and Tiktok has been a great way to get people over to my blog and onto my email list.
Pinterest was and still is my primary source of traffic! However, in the past, I was reeling in over 100,000 sessions just from Pinterest, whereas now I only get about 30,000 sessions from them.
Since they’ve gone public, they are much more focused on keeping people on the platform since that's how they make more money from their ads and pay shareholders. So they’ve been more creative about helping their audience find what they want without redirecting that traffic elsewhere, like my blog, for example.
It’s also become much more focused on becoming a shopping platform. And where my main goal isn’t selling products, my pins no longer get as much attention as they used to.
My target audience (moms aged 20-35) hangs out on Instagram and TikTok. So back at the end of 2020, I started showing up on Instagram reels and making TikToks. After consistently posting, I went from 5,000 followers to 15,000 followers on Instagram, 0 followers to 5,000 followers on TikTok, and I grew my email list by over 6,000 subscribers.
This is my analytics from ActiveCampaign, my email list platform.
SEO
SEO is essential for my business. I learned hard not to put all my eggs into the social media basket and paid for it. So now SEO has been my main focus for gaining traffic and making affiliate sales.
When I realized I needed to get serious about SEO, I invested in the course Stupid Simple SEO and have seen great results so far, and I’m only halfway through.
Link Building
Honestly, I’ve been horrible at link building; I haven’t focused on it at all. However, I plan to make it a part of my strategy in the future.
Keyword Research
To do keyword research, I use the Moz Chrome extension, Keywords Anywhere, and Keyword Surfer extensions to help me find long-tail keywords with decent traffic for which my site can rank.
I’ll usually start with an idea for a post and look at similar keywords until I find the perfect ones, or I’ll look at what my competition ranks for and go after those. Once I have a list of keywords I want to go after, I’ll start planning my content.
Her Complete Content Creation Process
I currently have 226 published posts at the moment.
My content creation process goes like this.
1. Keyword ResearcH
It starts with keyword research. I'll spend a day researching keywords to create a list of keywords to go after.
2. Brainstorm Post Ideas
After I have my list of keywords and have analyzed the current ranking posts, I brainstorm post ideas. That usually means looking at how I can make my piece of content better than the posts currently ranking.
3. Identify the Purpose of the post
This is also when I identify the purpose of my post. The purpose is always #1 to serve my target audience, but after that, what do I want the outcome of this post to be? Email sign-ups? Make an affiliate sale? Gain a lot of traffic and boost ad revenue? Boost SEO? Or sell a product?
After that, I’ll fill in my content calendar with the post ideas for that month (I post one blog post a week) and move on to outlining and writing.
4. Write the Blog Post
There’s no hard and fast rule for me here when it comes to length, but I’ll usually look at the top ranking posts for my target keyword and go a little longer than them, or at least aim for around the same length to make sure I’m adding as much or more value.
Jasper AI & Surfer SEO
Recently, I’ve been using Jasper AI along with Surfer SEO to write super SEO-optimized posts super fast. Using these tools has been a gamechanger when it comes to saving time without compromising quality. And I’ve already noticed a difference in my rankings.
Jasper can write the post for you, but I find that the success I’ve had so far has a lot to do with me being me and sharing my own advice and opinions. Because of this, I don’t let it write the post all by itself.
I’ll typically start with an intro and let Jasper continue with where I’ve started and then tweak it as I go. When I sit down to write a post, I know what I want to say and the direction I want the post to go in, and Jasper just helps me to get the words out better. It's like a helpful assistant that I can riff off.
It throws out what it thinks the next paragraph should say, and I adjust it so it’s perfect. It helps me get my words from my brain to the page much faster than simply staring at a blinking cursor.
To ensure the post is optimized, the Jasper AI software connects directly with Surfer SEO and gives you a score of 0-100 for that article on how optimized it is for your specific keywords.
In the past, getting out a really great, in-depth piece of SEO content took me a long time.
Now I can get 3 posts done in the time it took me to do one!
5. Create All Promotional Graphics
I do it all myself at the moment as I really love making the graphics! Every post gets Pinterest graphics and featured images, but not all get Instagram graphics. I’ll usually just share the featured image on Facebook so that graphic works for both.
Once the post is done, I add images and links and make sure I have an email opt-in on the page. Then I use Canva to create my promotional graphics like Pinterest Pins, Instagram Images, and Facebook/Twitter images and schedule my post.
I’m not active on Twitter or Facebook, but I create a graphic so that when my post is shared to that platform, it includes the right size image for that platform.
6. Split the Post into Mini Content (Idea Pins on Pinterest, Instagram Reels, and TikToks)
Once the big piece of content, the blog post, is done, I repurpose it to create mini pieces of content like Pinterest Idea pins, Instagram Reels, and TikToks to grow further and serve my audience.
I will usually batch my content. So the first 2 weeks of the month are for writing the blog posts for the next month (usually 4-5 posts). Then I take two days to create all the Pinterest graphics for the posts (3 pins per post + at least one Idea pin per post).
I then take a week to create all Instagram and TikTok content (usually, I can do about 10-15 Reels/TikToks in this time, including captions and cover images for IG). Then for the rest of the month, I batch my emails, work through blogging/marketing training (always gotta be learning in this industry!), and the other odds and ends of my business.
This makes my content creation process so much easier because I don’t have to develop multiple content ideas for each platform. Instead, I use one big idea to create a bunch of other content for all my platforms.
7. Write My Weekly Email to Include a Link to the Post
Promote, Promote, Promote!
In the future, I plan to reach out to get backlinks or things like that, but my current promotion process is heavily focused on social media. I schedule new Pinterest pins for each post to go out every other day for about two months.
Then I also schedule other social media posts to be republished throughout the year using Buffer to places like Facebook and Instagram stories. I want to ensure my posts don’t just die on social media after the first week.
I try to continue to bring up old posts throughout the year. I’ll also look through my older posts to see where I can interlink new posts so people stay on my site longer, going from post to post.
Here’s an example of the finished process:
My blog post: The 1 Simple Thing That Finally Worked to Lose 70 lbs After Failing for Years
3 Pinterest pins, which are also shared at the bottom of my post:
Instagram image:
Facebook and Twitter-sized image:
Instagram Reels and TikToks:
How Cassie Scroggins Grows Her Email List
I currently have an email list of over 24,000 subscribers, and I focus each month on growing it.
Right now, I have quite a few separate opt-ins, but I have one main opt-in: my Free Printable 15-Page Mom Planner.
I update my main opt-in and add new opt-ins regularly to keep growing my email list. Recently, I updated my Free Mom Planner this year, adding new pages and a new design to increase the value for my current subscribers and attract new ones.
I designed everything and made it all in Canva, which I use for everything! Creating freebies and free printables is one of my favorite things to do for my blog.
I discovered this early in my blogging journey, and I’m a planner! I plan everything, and I need paper and pen to do it. That’s when I came up with the idea for a mom planner for myself that had exactly the pages I knew I wanted as a mom. I then decided it was so good I needed to offer it to my audience!
Right now, I add about 650 new subscribers to my email list every month, and I do that by having opt-ins on every page, whether that’s embedded in a post or via a pop-up form.
I am also constantly sharing my opt-ins with my audience on social media to push them there.
I use ActiveCampaign to manage my list, which is their analytics/reports page.
Achieving Current Revenue
How long did it take? This is a favorite question so let’s break it down to milestones.
- It took me 5 months until any money hit my bank account ($12!)
- It took me 9 months until I was consistently making $100 a month from my blog
- Just under 2 years (21 months) for me to be making $1,000 a month from my blog
- 3 years to make what I consider a full-time income (at least $2,500 a month) from my blog
- And 4 years to hit $5,000+ a month from my blog
Cassie Scroggins' Traffic Stats
Currently, my blog gets about 95,000 pageviews a month and is growing.
Her 3 Favorite Tools
The most valuable tools I use in my business are:
Canva Pro – I do everything on Canva. From making my in-post images to my promotional content to creating all my opt-ins and digital products. I literally use Canva every day. And the paid pro version is pretty cheap and worth every penny!
Jasper AI – I just discovered this software a few months ago, but it has been a literal game-changer for my business. I’ve been meaning to hire writers for my blog but still struggle with handing over the reins. Jasper AI has allowed me to create 3x the content I normally do and maintain great quality!
Jasper was actually the first AI tool I tried. I discovered it when I was searching for some writers for my blog. I kept seeing writers advertising they could do SEO-rich articles with Jasper AI, and I wondered, what the heck is this thing? After discovering it, I no longer needed to hire a writer as it saved me so much time!
Surfer SEO – I’ve been using Surfer SEO along with Jasper AI and now, I am creating content much faster, but it’s good content that ranks on Google. It’s been essential to my business since Pinterest hasn’t been the same.
Her Greatest Challenge
The biggest challenge I’ve faced as I’ve grown my business is staying consistent with it. Throughout the years, I seem to find myself burnt out and would take a few months off. All out of nowhere, without any notice.
The nice thing is how my blog is set up; it basically ran itself while I was away, and I just collected a check. I mean, talk about a dream!
Still, going and stopping wasn’t going to allow me to grow the way I wanted to. Then, I had 3 kids in 3 years and ended up taking almost an entire year and a half off. That plus a couple of Pinterest updates, and suddenly in another 6 to 12 months my blog would have been dead.
So, in November of 2021, I got back to work on my blog with a new focus on creating a plan to stay consistent. I’ve seen through my efforts in the past that staying consistent is what will really moves the needle when it comes to blogging. And while my blog could maintain itself for a few months each year, the goal is growth, not just maintenance!
I’m happy to report that with a new process and plan to stay consistent, we’re 5 months in and there’s no burnout in sight.
Cassie's Most Important Accomplishment
I’m very proud of the accomplishments I’ve had in my business. Building my blog to a full-time income and being the sole provider for my family for many years, to name a few.
But I’d say my biggest accomplishment is my confidence in myself. Being able to provide for my family and stay home with my kids gave me a greater sense of purpose and fulfillment and helped me gain confidence in my abilities all around.
In fact, in the year I grew the blog to a full-time income, I also had a baby, lost 70lbs, and paid off all $20k of our credit card debt. Blogging has been life-changing for me.
I went from a dissatisfied mother full of guilt for wanting anything more than just being a mom to a confident, fulfilled, present mother who gets to enjoy life and motherhood to the fullest. And that’s better than anything else I’ve accomplished.
What She Wishes She Knew When She Started
You need to stop looking for perfection. When I first started my blog, I fell into the trap that I see many others struggle with too, trying to be perfect all the time.
Instead of just trying a bunch of stuff, publishing blog posts, sending emails, posting on social media, we wonder if that is the right thing to say, the right colors to use, the right niche to be in, etc. We get into a state of analysis paralysis and end up not doing anything at all.
I would spend hours on my website design, logo, or colors, and the next month see something new and question my whole site again and again. Instead of creating content, I’d be designing my 15th logo. Instead of recording a YouTube video, I’d convince myself I needed a fancy camera first.
The further along I got into my blogging career, the more I realized that good and done is way better than perfect and never published.
Cassie Scroggins' Biggest Mistake
By far, the biggest mistake I’ve made in my journey was putting all my eggs into one basket. Not to mention a basket I didn’t own or have any control over: social media.
Towards the end of 2020, I had $7,000 to $8,000 months. You can see my income report here.
The goal was to hit six figures in 2021 and we were on track! Then, my blog was hit with two Pinterest updates that cut my traffic in half.
Before my traffic crash, Pinterest made up 85% of my traffic, and the majority of my income came from display ads on my site. This means that when my traffic was cut in half, so was my income.
At the time, I made about 59% of my income from ads, 32% from affiliates, 0% from sponsorships, and 9% from my own products.
Also, this was during the time when I took that big break with my blog. My husband had started working full time, I was now the sole at-home parent with 3 kids (something I hadn’t done since we only had one kid), and I was pregnant with my 4th.
I had taken a break and it took its toll! People always told me not to put the fate of my business in something I had no control over, but those sad stories would never be me, right? After all, Pinterest had always worked for me, and since my Pinterest traffic = ad $$ revenue model was working, I just stuck with it.
A new Approach
Now, I have been back at the blog full-time since November 2021, and I don’t ever plan to take a break again. Instead, I’m working ahead, so when I need a break, I’ve got content rolling out instead of disappearing cold turkey!
Since those drops, I’ve been heavily focused on getting sponsorships to supplement my income (which was the only way I stayed at a full-time income!). And I’m focused on SEO and gaining Google traffic, which is much more reliable than social media. But my biggest change was shifting my main focus to my email list, the one thing I DO control.
Now my main goal is to get my audience to my email list and have funnels set up so that my business no longer relies on anything I don’t have complete control over.
Luckily, I’m seeing my traffic heading back up (almost back to 100,000 pageviews now!) and my revenue is slowly climbing too!
Her Advice for Other Entrepreneurs
The best advice I can give to anyone who is building their own online business is to invest in yourself. Investing in my blogging education was really the difference between whether I was making a full-time income now or still just spinning my wheels.
Time is money, and if you can invest in really good training or education to get you to where you want to be faster, then that can be the difference between a successful business or one you give up on.
There’s a lot of education out there from people who claim to be experts, so be sure to do the research to find the diamond in the rough. Research, research, research, then go all in! It will be worth it!
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