The Country Chic Cottage

After a company-wide hours reduction during the 2008 financial crisis, Angie Holden, who worked as an engineering program manager, found herself with an extra day off each week. "I decided to really pour that time into DIY projects at home" she says, "and started putting it into a blog to help hold me accountable."

As she spent more time working on projects and posting them to her site, The Country Chic Cottage, Angie began to see some traction and stayed focus on those efforts. "I was really liking the blogging component and seeing traffic on my site," she recalls, "so I got involved in a group to get to know some other bloggers, and a few of them gave me some advice to start getting set up with Google Analytics and Google AdSense."

Angie started using Google Analytics to learn more about her audience interests. "I started digging into Analytics and seeing the types of projects people liked most," she says, "and I used that to help find my niche, which is Cricut crafts. The site has really blossomed from there.'' With her newfound niche and an engaged audience visiting the site regularly, Angie started to see growth in her ad revenue. "Ever since I hit that $100 threshold on AdSense for getting paid I was astounded - I couldn't believe what was happening. I was pouring my heart into this, and people saw my posts, and saw the ads, and all of sudden I was making money."

As the site grew, Angie and some of her friends in her blogger group started focusing on increasing their ad revenue. "Some of us were getting started using more complicated ad serving tools like Google Ad Manager," she says, "but just didn't have the time or expertise to focus on it." So one of the women's husbands decided to try to manage the group's ad businesses for them. "It was amazing," Angie recalls; "my income increased 6x within the first few months. Eventually, he launched a business called AdThrive, a Google Certified Publishing Partner, whom I've been with ever since."

Ten years later, Angie still has a thriving business on her site and stays motivated by hearing from her readers. "I'll get emails from grandparents sharing how they're making their grandchildren all these crafts now," she says. "I'm in tears sometimes, it makes me so happy to see people using this site." And Angie likes to pay it back. "I get tons of questions from people who are inspired to start their own small business as well, whether selling the things they make or wanting to be a blogger. And I love helping those people as much as possible - now that my business has grown I want to give back to the community."