My Crochet Blog Journey + My First Income Reports

I thought that it would be a fun thing to go way back to when I started my crochet blog journey in April 2018, so you can see exactly where I started from and how I’ve turned my crocheting hobby into a full time income.

I wanted to start at the beginning of my journey and share some of my own struggles and victories to help inspire someone else that you CAN make money doing something that you love.

Nothing super exciting happened to my blog, like a post going viral (at least yet) or being picked up by a big brand name, I’m just an ordinary person that put the time and effort in and it grew.

But before I go any farther, let me introduce myself.

If you were to ask me, I’d definitely tell you that my blog has been one of the biggest blessings in my life! It has allowed me to be able to work from home and make a full time income, all while doing something that I love. I thank the Lord daily for blessing me with it.

It has given me freedom to do what I love everyday and not have to work an 8-5 job that I don’t enjoy.

I mentioned about sharing some of the details about how I started my blog on my Instagram and I had a lot of individuals that wanted to know more, so here we are.

If you want to skip all my jabber and jump straight to starting your own blog, then check out THIS POST! But, if you want to stick around and read more about my starting years, keep scrolling.

My Beginning Entrepreneur Years

Before I jump straight into starting my blog, I want to start a little bit earlier to give you a little background info.

I knew when I graduated high school that I didn’t want to go to college, I wanted to do something different, but at that point in my life I didn’t know what. It took me about 3 years to figure it out and I started my blog at age 21.

But, before I started my blog, I had done a few different things through the years.

I have always been an entrepreneur at heart. By that I mean, I had always wanted to find ways to make money all by being my own boss.

A few years later my family started a little farm with different animals and that included goats. So, we tried our hand at making goat milk soaps and lotions and sold those for a few years.

We also had chickens, rabbits, LGD’s and cats at one point or another.

I had originally learned to knit when I was 13 and crochet around 15 or 16.

When I was 18, I opened my Etsy shop and started selling handmade jewelry and finished crocheted items. I did that for about 2-3 years, but, I’m the type of person that doesn’t like to crochet the same thing over and over again.

If you sell finished items, sometimes that means you spend time crocheting the same thing, one after another (even when you are bored of it) and I just am not a fan of that.

Oh, and did I mention that my family also had a food trailer from 2020 – 2022? I’m seriously not kidding when I say that I’m an entrepreneur at heart.

If we were set up and it was slow, I would sit and crochet….imagine that.

How my Blog Started in 2018

To help sell my crochet pieces I had joined Instagram because, you know, that’s what everyone said to do. But, I did start finding people from the crochet community and that led me to finding out about crochet blogging.

There was a lady on Instagram (if you are part of the crochet community you probably know her by Sewrella) that caught my eye when she said that she made money by being a ‘Crochet Blogger’ instead of selling finished items. I was like, “tell me more!”

She said, ”Why spend a day making 2 or 3 hats that you could sell for $20 apiece when you could create a hat pattern and sell the pattern countless times?”

So, look at it this way, I could make $60 a day (or however many things that I can crochet in 1 day) and make a limited amount of money OR I could put a pattern on my blog for FREE and make an amount that has no limit just by people visiting my blog? That quickly convinced me to look into blogging.

I Googled and read countless blog posts and articles about ‘how to start your own blog’. I spent so much time researching all the ins and outs of the blogging world and finally jumped in and I have never looked back since.

And I will tell you, I knew absolutely nothing about how to blog, write a post or anything. Google was my best friend and any time that a question popped up, I would research it and learn.

I will admit, as I look back at the beginning of my blogging journey, I’m amazed some days that I kept going and didn’t quit. When the income was minimal or none, I just put my head down and kept pushing.

I’ll be honest, looking back at my first posts and patterns, they were very rough and poorly put together, but I had to start somewhere. If you want to get to the end of the finish line, you have to start. Even if it’s not good at first, I promise you, with practice and learning like anything else, it will improve.

But, I didn’t quit. And it has grew and turned into a huge blessing in my life. It has opened doors to great things in my life that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.

For example, just this year in April 2023, I was able to purchase a BRAND NEW 2023 Ford Bronco sport….All because of my blog earnings.

This is just one of the many things that has been possible because of my blog.

My Beginning Income Reports

I wish that I had started sharing my income reports earlier on in my journey, but I’m going to try to go over some of the first few years below.

I started sharing full income and traffic reports just here recently. See all my INCOME REPORTS from January 2023 and forward. Scroll on down for my first few yearrs income.

I feel like sometimes you see people that are like, “I made $8,000 in my 6th month of blogging” and when we don’t see that happen to us we get discouraged thinking it’s not possible. While I’m not saying that it can’t happen, sometimes it takes longer.

I’m happy for those people that were making 5 figures by their 1 year anniversary of blogging, but I’m going to be completely honest with you, It took me about 19 months before I started making monthly income from blog. Those first 19 months, I made very little.

Especially for 2018 and 2019, I didn’t make nearly as many posts as I should or could have. But when I look back, if I had tried to push myself I probably would have just overwhelmed myself. And, I might have quit then.

By not making as much content as I could have, it meant less posts on my blog. So, that means less of a chance for people to have found my site giving me a smaller number of visitors.

I don’t know about you, but money does help motivate me a bit, LOL. When I finally started making some monthly income, I started working more.

In 2020, I left Google Adsense and switched over to a different ad company called Mediavine. It was like a night and day difference!

After the income started going up, I started putting more time into my blog.

So, how much did I actually make in the beginning?

I was looking through my desk the other day and I found where I had written down exactly what I made since I very 1st joined Google Adsense in August of 2018. I started my blog in April of 2018.

2018 Income

Here’s what I made in 2018 from blogging

• August 2018 – $6.73
• September 2018 – $5.37
• October 2018 – $8.57
• November – $26.06
• December – $35.88

Let’s just say that it was very slim at the beginning but, I did still sell some finished items on Etsy then so I would have had some income coming in from that thankfully.

2019 Income

All of 2019 I stayed with Google Adsense because I had to get my page views up before I could switch over to Mediavine.

Here’s what I made in 2019 from blogging

• January 2019 – $33.37
• February 2019 – $46.81
• March 2019 – $53.94
• April 2019 – $28.70
• May 2019 – $29.48
• June 2019 – $35.78
• July 2019 – $30.80
• August 2019 – $33.17
• September 2019 – $51.81
• October 2019 – $64.40
• November 2019 – $108.96
• December 2019 – $132.97

In 2019 my income was slightly improving and in December 2019, I had reached the number of views that I needed to apply to Mediavine.

2020 Income

I was accepted into Mediavine and starting using them as my ad partner right toward the beginning of January 2020. If I remember correctly, I stared running their ads on my site on January 2nd.

Little did I know that it would be the beginning of something that has turned into a major blessing in my life.

Here’s what I made from Mediavine in January 2020

January 2020 – $249.45

I know that it may seem small, but compared to what I had been making, I was so excited!

My views for my blog were growing and so was my income. It might have been baby steps, but I was still sticking with it.

Here’s what the rest of my ad income looked like in 2020

• February 2020 – $278.53
• March 2020 – $659.49
• April 2020 – $2,095.55
• May 2020 – $562.45
• June 2020 – $447.86
• July 2020 – $478.65
• August 2020 – $503.97
• September 2020 – $775.65
• October 2020 – $1,039.58
• November 2020 – $1,568.26
• December 2020 – $2,155.71

I also sold my PDF’s on Etsy and made a total of $3,996.43 for the year 2020

The reason for the spike in April was because, well, 2020 happened. We all know what happened around that time, and I figured that was what caused the spike for that month.

You can see how it was consistently growing and I couldn’t have been happier! I mean compared to 2019’s total, 2020 was AMAZING!

I really started working more consistently in 2020 and published more posts that year than I had either of the previous 2 years before that. And, you can tell that it started paying off.

How it has been going the past couple of years

That will give you a good overview of how my income started out.

It’s a lot of work digging for numbers from a few years back, so I won’t be sharing 2021 or 2022’s income. But, I will tell you this, my income has steadily been increasing from year to year.

Of course, like all other bloggers, some months are more and some months are less depending on the season your in or your niche. Like for crocheters, September – February or March are our best months. May – August are always my slower months, which also means the income drops a bit in those months.

But when I compare my numbers to the same month as the year previously, it’s a good increase!

I’ll tell you this, so far as writing this post in August 2023, my biggest month for earning was in December 2022 and I made right over $8,894.00. If you wonder if there is money in crochet blogging, then just let that tell you. And, by everything that I’m looking at right now, I’m expecting an even bigger December this year!

If you want to check out my most recent Income Reports to see how it’s going.

Maybe you have read through this post and are thinking, “I really think that I could do this!” and you want to give it a try. Then you will want to start with THIS POST and get your blog set up and going!

I really hope that this post has helped to inspire you and help you to see that I’m just an ordinary person that is making a full time income (finally 😁) by doing something that they love! And, just think, YOU could be doing it too!