Backyard Assist

To fund their content, Kelly and Scott use Google AdSense. “Our revenue has grown from non-existent to meaningful,” says Kelly. “Ad revenue provides us the opportunity to produce different kinds of content across topics.”

In this industry, most content isn’t directly monetizable, so ads help the site still stay afloat. “A lot of our content is just sharing helpful information that doesn’t lead to the sale of anything,” Kelly explains. “With ads, we can earn money by just being helpful.” The two chose AdSense for its ease of use. “Within 48 hours of signing up for AdSense we had ads on our site,” says Kelly. “And it’s super easy to operate and set up, we can see how we’re performing and how much we made the day before.” Besides a business model, AdSense has given Kelly and Scott a motivation to continue making content. “Starting to earn money has just given us so much hope that we can build this business,” Kelly explains. “We already can pay for our Wordpress license and we just sent Scott to a conference, we’re already funding parts of the business.”

It was important for them to keep content free for their audience of homeowners. “Scott and I didn’t want to sell out and rely on product commissions to make money,” Kelly says. “We see that as a slippery slope. While we do recommend certain products that we love, ad revenue is 75% of our total website income. That enables us to never have to try to push a homeowner to purchase something just so we can be successful.”

Luckily, there’s an abundance of content for them to share. “In the beginning I remember asking Kelly ‘what if we run out of things to write about?’ Now I see why that’s ridiculous,” says Scott. They’ve covered everything from retaining walls and fire pits to answering questions like “will vodka clean a swimming pool?” (the answer is no).