The Ultimate Blog Podcast - 86. Tips for Success: Getting on an Ad Network with Heather Tullos from Mediavine

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

Are you a blogger who wants to learn more about getting on an ad network? This episode is just for you! In today's episode, we have Heather Tullos on from Mediavine. Heather is the Senior Vice President of Support and Customer Success at Mediavine. She is here to share her insight and wisdom behind ad networks. She is bringing all of the details of ad networks and how you can set yourself up for success to get on an ad network. We hope that you enjoy today's episode!Thanks for listening! Connect with us on Instagram: @sparkmediaconceptsJoin The Ultimate Blog Bootcamp, our online course and coaching that helps you build the blog that you have always dreamed of.Apply to the Ultimate Blog Membership! We would love to have you!Get 20% off of Keysearch Starter Plan using this link and code: KSDISCCheck out the show notes (link below) for more information including links and resources mentioned in today's episode!SHOW NOTES: www.sparkmediaconcepts.com/episode86

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast with Amy Reinecke and Jennifer Draper. We're on a mission to empower women who want to start or grow their own blog. This podcast is for women who want to learn blogging basics and who crave inspiration and encouragement. Whether you're just getting started or have been a blogger for years, we're excited to welcome you into this space where we are passionate about creating community over competition. We are bloggers who want to encourage you to believe in your potential, step outside the norm and step into a life where you create your own schedule, your own success and your own story. Join us for weekly episodes as we navigate blogging

and work from home life all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. Well, today's episode is one that is highly sought after with lots of questions surrounding ad networks. And we are so excited to bring it to you because we are going to talk about the nitty gritty things that we need to in regards to ad networks and what they are. And to do that, we brought on Heather Tullis. And she is the Senior Vice President of Support and Customer Success at Mediavine. She started her food blog, Sugar Dish Me in 2011. And she shares strategies that help turn content creation into a full-time business and giving other publishers the right tools to make data-driven decisions to find their own

success is the heart of the work she does. Heather lives in North Carolina with all the dogs she can manage, currently six and two cats. Oh my gosh, Heather, you and Jennifer could be besties. I'm game. I will collect all the dogs and all the dog people. Jennifer collects all the cats. Yeah, Dogs and cats, but mostly cats. I have two very patient cats. We had to push pause on that because not every dog is a cat lover. Yeah. Oh, I love that.

That's so fun. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me on. Yes. We are really excited to talk about this in our company. We are helping people get to this point that they get to be on an ad network to generate passive income in their blogging business. And we know that that is not something that happens overnight. And so really, that is the heart of why we brought you on the podcast today, is to hear directly from the source, directly from Mediavine, which is one of the ad networks

that we recommend. We just want to hear it straight from you and how people can do that. So first and foremost, before we dive into what people can do, can we start with the basics? And will you tell our community what an ad network is and what Mediavine is exactly? I would love to. So Mediavine specifically is a full service ad management for content creators. So what that means is we basically take care of all of the challenging pieces. Running ads is really hard. If you've ever looked at AdSense and been like, I don't know what any of this means. You're not alone. It's really challenging to figure all of it out, understand the terminology, know what it means,

know whether or not you're being paid what you're supposed to be paid. I mean, it's truly a full-time job, which is why we exist to take care of that for you. So we created the technology. So you just install Mediavine with... Or most ad managers have a plugin or a script or something. It's implemented in some way. For us, it's just one line of code. If you're on WordPress, it's installed with a WordPress plugin. And what that does is it takes all of these partners that we maintain relationships with.

Google would be a good example of an ad partner. And then there are other big players in the space. Index Exchange, there's the Trade Desk, there's probably 30 people that spend in the auction at any given time. So we force them into an auction via that one line of script. And then the ads are delivered on your website based on targeting that we handle on the backend. So it's pretty technical. You don't actually have to care about any of that. That's just the form and function of how it happens. And then we take all of that information and we provide reporting for you. So we manage the advertiser relationships. We manage the technology that delivers the ads. And then we

also manage the reporting for you and help you pull in the data from both the ad server and your analytics and use it to understand how to continue to do better. And that is our job. And I think we can both attest to how easy you make it for us as publishers to be onboarded into this process. And even when we have some random question about if it's working properly or not, you guys are always so helpful. Sometimes you're so helpful. It's not even a question you guys should have to answer, but you still help us with it. That's what I love about it. So if anybody hears all this and they're like, I still don't know what this means. It's okay, because they will help you with every single step of this process and make it so easy

when you are ready to get onboarded. I do have a really remarkable team of support specialists, support engineers, account managers. They make all the magic happen. They are very talented. Yeah. I think for people who listen to that and it felt like IT, like, I don't know, you just went right over my head. Let me bring it to layman's terms. It's the ads on your site that you get to make money on. Your readers just get to see it and you make money. Yeah. They literally just have to look at it with their eyes. Nobody has to interact with anything. Yep. Yeah. So when you go to a blog, you see ads on it. That's what

Mediavine does. And I think a really important part of our strategy, because I think whenever I tell anybody what I do for a living, and if you say you're the person that puts ads on websites, they're immediately mad at you. So I think a really important piece of what Mediavine does is we focus really heavily on user experience. We focus really heavily on site speed and all the things that make a website a nice place to be and stay. And we're members of things like the Coalition for Better Ads,

which means that there are rules and standards for how things can be served. We don't do anything that's going to drive somebody away from your site. There's not like popovers and pop-unders. And when you navigate to a webpage and you spend longer exiting out of things than you do consuming the content, that's not a good experience for anybody. And it turns out that actually does not monetize very well. So we take a really different approach and we keep your readers top of mind. I love that because you don't like getting those messages from your readers or from somebody who's trying to look at a recipe or whatever it is on your website. And they're like,

I'm sorry, but I left because you had too many ads. So it's really great that you guys focus on keeping that user experience because I know as bloggers, that's what we're really focusing on right now too, is just creating that really positive user experience. Yeah. And well, you'd spend so long creating content, right? Like it's your heart and soul and you pour everything you have into it. And you don't want to degrade that content or devalue it in any way. Because the way that you're monetizing it is detracting from everything that you put together.

Yeah, definitely a balancing act because you want to make as much as you possibly can. But in the long run, you'll probably make more by making sure that people are coming back again and again, because you have such a great site. So one of the things that we do is we offer settings, but also lots of advice and email support. So we really sort of take the guesswork out of that for you. You don't have to... If you're using a product like AdSense and you're have to, you know, if you're if you're using a product like

AdSense, and you're trying to manage your own ads, you're truly just guessing. It's a challenge to navigate, it's a challenge to understand the analytics. And then you're kind of like, I don't know, I guess that was a good place to put it. And we offer, you know, publisher facing controls, so you can determine your own destiny. But then we also can offer advice on how to dial it in and go one direction or the other based on your personal goals for your blog. Yeah. So can we talk a little bit about how publishers actually make money from these ads on their site?

How do they get paid? How does that work? And what do they have to do in order to join your ad network? Okay. I'll start with how the money part works. I'm going to math you really quick. Apologies in advance. But I think a lot of times when people sort of venture down to the different paths of monetization for your blog. They don't totally know where the money comes from. And with advertising, it can be a little bit obscure if you haven't read 4,000 articles in our help center first. So your revenue from display ads is just CPM, which is how much

advertisers are spending per 1,000 impressions. That's usually like a smaller number. It'll be like $2 or $3 or $4 or something like that. So it's CPM times impressions. And that's how many actual ad impressions were served. CPM times impressions divide by 1000. And that's where your money comes from. And so our job is to make sure that advertisers are spending as much as they possibly can.

So that's the CPM part. And that's where the relationship part comes from and how we work with all those partners and make sure that they know that we work with publishers at really high quality content, etc, etc. And then impressions is about the things that we were just talking about a minute ago, which is the placements on your website, where the ads are, making sure that ads are where your readers are, putting ads in places that people don't see them. If you're an advertiser, that's not a good return on your investment. You would like to spend money on advertising that people actually see, especially since they don't have to interact with it.

We help with that. That's where the money comes from when you earn a paycheck from display ads. As far as how to qualify for Mediavine, that was the second part of your question. Yeah. Yes. Or what are the qualifications to be able to apply? So we're looking for quality original content. Original content is really important. Can't monetize content that is not your own.

So start there. And you don't have to be a photographer, you don't have to be a magical person with a writing degree and a PhD in a subject to be an expert on a topic, right? You just need to be your version of expert on whatever it is. And that looks a little bit different for everybody. So we're really looking for authentic, original quality content. We're looking for a well-structured website. So navigation needs to be easy to use. People need to be able to figure out how to get to your content when they land on your homepage. And then we also have a minimum of 50,000 sessions per month. So I feel like that's the metric a lot of people are trying to grow towards. And if you circle back to where the money comes from, 50,000 sessions is the sweet spot

for having enough traffic and enough of established readership to be able to get a paycheck that's worth it. Because when you're basing everything on very small dollar amounts, and impressions, if you have very small traffic, it's almost not enough for advertisers to understand how to spend on your content. It's not really enough for them to go on. And so having a volume of traffic, having domain history really matters a lot. So if you just start a website yesterday, and then you put ads in it today, nobody is going to spend money on that website. You need a little bit of established reader history

and a good pattern of users in order to make money from display ads. Yeah. I like that you said that it's not something that happens overnight. Yeah. I mean, I like that you shared that. I know that's not fun to hear. I'm sure for somebody who just started their blog. But I think the important thing to remember that is that this is something that you do have to work towards.

And there's different things that you can do in order to set yourself up for success there. Because of the domain history and all of that. I think that's just important to note because I know that getting to that 50,000 sessions can feel like this kind of daunting thing for a lot of people. Like, oh my gosh, I'm trying, trying, trying to create all this content and get there. But like you just said, when you get there, your paycheck is going to be 100% worth it. You're closer to a place of having an actually sustainable source of revenue when you reach that traffic level. But also,

there are some other pieces to that. You want to build a relationship with your readers. The readers that you find really early on... I started in 2011. So what, 12 years later, I still have people that are reading my blog. Yeah. And they show up when I publish new content, or they circle back to the same recipes, that are seasonal every year, etc. So those are kind of your most loyal users. Small traffic usually has really high engagement. So there are other ways that you can approach monetization before you get to that sort of display ad territory that might be a better fit for a small, really engaged audience that cares about every single thing that you say. Because the bigger your audience gets, the less people you have that are so invested on a personal level. So the people

that you gather in those first couple of years are really like those are your people. Oh, I love that you said that because that is so true. I've been blogging since 2017. Jennifer has since 2013. And I can totally relate to that. That's so true. And we often say like, yes, in order to qualify for Mediavine, you have to have 50,000 sessions. But when you're starting to create content in the beginning, pretend like you're already talking to those 50,000 people. Because at some point, you will be talking to that amount of people. If you keep publishing quality content, and you're engaging with your audience, and just

formulating that community, that authentic community, I mean, you're going to end up there someday, you know, and that's the goal. I do have sort of like an interesting informal, like timetable statistic if you're interested. I'd love it. Yeah. There was an informal sort of poll happening in our publisher Facebook group pretty recently,

but I exported some data that we have in our publisher Facebook group pretty recently. But I exported some data that we have in our end to back it up. And I think for most people that were really just cranking out content and focused on growing and had a very specific path forward, it took about 13 months for them to get to 50,000 sessions from start to finish, from the day they set the website live. Okay. That's good to know. I love that you're able to share that. Do you know by chance about how much content they were publishing per week or per month? I think that it will probably depend on the kind of content they're creating. it will probably depend on the kind of content they're creating. You know, DIY and travel content takes so much longer to create, not to undermine my fellow, you know, food bloggers,

recipe creators, but, you know, I can put together and, you know, fully test, you know, something in a day or two. And I think when my website personally grew the most, I was cranking out like four or five posts a week. I just had a really good system and I was motivated to go forward. So publishing as often as you can manage, being consistent about it is really the fastest path to growth. And then just keeping that quality piece in mind, because you don't want to just publish a piece of content for the sake of publishing a piece of content. So I think setting number goals for the amount of content that you want on your site, it does a couple of things. It gives the opportunity to diversify your traffic sources,

because you've got more keywords to pull from. And it also gets you into that routine where you're like, okay, I need to get to 100 or whatever your number is. You're going to put together a strategy to get to 100, if that's your goal, instead of just not having a goal in mind at all, and you might move a little more slowly. I think that is helpful, because I think a lot of times we're just like, okay, I'm just gonna do I'm just gonna keep doing and doing and doing, I'm just gonna work my very, very hardest to get there. But I think if you put a goal like that in mind, you sort of break it down and say, Okay, if in 13 months, I want to be able to have this much traffic, here's how much I want to be able to have this much traffic,

here's how much I want to publish per week. It makes it much more manageable and doable. And you don't burn yourself out as quickly because you're not just trying to go, go, go. Yeah. I'm personally very goal-oriented, but I also love the way that it feels when I've knocked something off my list. So I think taking your sort of high level goal and figuring out how to break it into manageable pieces, it helps keep you on track. But it also, you know, when you've sort of been going full speed ahead all day and get to the end of it,

and you're like, I don't even know what I did today. Yes. You can't really quantify your own work. If you've got your goals structured into those smaller pieces, often when you look back on your day or your week or whatever, and you feel like you were spinning your wheels, you realize that you actually made progress towards whatever you were working towards at a higher level. Yeah. Sometimes when that goal is so big,

it does feel like you're just... It's like a stone that you're just chipping off little pieces of. And it takes a long time to do that. But to know that there's all different ways to generate that traffic, I think, is helpful too. So can we talk about that a little bit? And I know Jennifer and I have some ideas there too. But what can a blogger do to start generating more traffic? What are some good practices that they can do besides keyword research and SEO that we've already touched on a little bit? What are some other things that they can do to generate traffic to their sites to get to that threshold? Diversified traffic sources are really important. That's probably one of the key takeaways is making sure that you don't have all your eggs in any one basket. As far as your traffic is concerned,

it's always going to keep you on a little bit more fair footing. One of the things that I would always recommend is start collecting emails as soon as possible. Set your website live. Or if you're not collecting emails yet, start today. I would start from the very beginning. Because again, when you think about smaller blog traffic, and newer websites, these are your most engaged readers, they're going to

stay with you forever, they're going to open your emails, they want to keep hearing from you. And in the future, they will probably buy anything that you have to sell them, whether it's a product, or it's just future content. There are a lot of pieces to that. So email traffic is a very important source. It's also a really valuable source. When you get to the monetization part of things, email traffic monetizes really well. Okay. I just heard that at a conference and I did not know that. And I've been on Mediavine since I think 2018. So they said that you earn more from the clicks coming from your email provider versus anywhere else. Is that true?

Yeah. Yeah. It can depend on the specifics of your users. If you have, for some reason, I guess I would only see this maybe on really technical websites. But if they have a lot of resources that are in a very privacy-centric browser, that might look a little different. But by and large, your email traffic is going to monetize at a higher rate because you have information about that person, right? So currently, advertiser spend is based on the details that you have about a reader. That's why we talk about cookies. That information lives in the browser. They're coming from their email address.

They're a verified source. You've collected their email address. In the future, when third-party cookies don't exist anymore, which is a whole other topic we don't need to get into, but having a reader come from your email is actually first party data, which means that you collected it, it's yours. And that is something that advertisers pay a lot of money for. So that's why it monetizes at a higher rate. It's also a more engaged reader, right? Like they click through because they know what they're getting. It's not like a reader that you get from search results where they're kind of playing guess and check, where they would check a search result and be like, that's not really the answer I wanted and go back and try another one. Yeah. Okay. That is... I mean, that just is kind of mind-blowing. When you explain it, it makes complete and total sense.

I think that that is really, really encouraging for a couple of reasons. One, it proves our point that email marketing is so crucial and so important. And we always say, don't create your content on rented land and that your email subscribers are just so, so important. So it's encouraging them to start that from the get-go. But two, it's also like we're creating all of this content and there is something to be said about new content. And I totally understand

that. But there's no reason that you can't be repurposing the content that you've already created in your email list and get eyes from those engaged readers back on content that you might have created 1, 2, 3, 4 years ago and keep that content fresh in their mind. Because you're always gaining new email subscribers. So knowing that they're going to see different new content that they might not have seen before. And honestly, we have so much input coming at us that somebody is likely not going to remember that they might have seen that. Unless it's like a recipe or something that they look at often. They're not going to remember that you've shared it before.

In most cases, it is new for the readers. Nobody knows your website the way that you know your website. And it can be a little bit hard to shift your perspective to think about a website as a reader, especially when you spend your entire day on that website. But yeah, most of your readers, they don't know what else you have to offer. They don't have any context. But if you're able to give it to them in little bits and pieces, and you're able to serve them things that other people have really enjoyed, it's just a really good way to keep them coming back, keep them engaged. And then again, it's a reader that's really beneficial to you.

It also gives you the opportunity to connect with them a little bit more. I think no matter what happens, if you own your domain and you have an email list, those two things are yours. That is the core of your business. And you can shift and change and go down different paths. And those two things will always be yours. Not everybody will go with you, but a lot of them will. So building that from the beginning is a really good way to diversify traffic and just build your own personal insurance policy for what you're doing. Are you a blogger and looking for a community of bloggers to network and learn from? We are so excited to share with you that we have created a space for people just like you to learn, connect, and grow in our blogging business. It's called The Ultimate Blog Membership,

and we would love to have you join us. The Ultimate Blog Membership is a monthly membership that includes two coaching calls each month and a forum to ask questions and get answers from both of us and others in the community. Each month, we have a coaching call that will help you learn how to grow and improve your blog by bringing in guest experts and coaching ourselves on topics that will help your business thrive. The other live call each month is a Q&A call where you can hop on and connect with other members and discuss live questions that you have or troubleshoot any areas that need assistance. This community has been incredibly encouraging and motivating since we created it in January of 2022. And we are

excited for you to apply to join us. If you are interested in joining us, click the link in our show notes for more information and the application to become part of the group. We want to make sure that we can support you the best. So we have just a few questions that we need you to answer to make sure we'd be a good fit. We are so excited to connect with you even more

in the Ultimate Vlog Membership. Check the show notes to apply today. So once you've built up that traffic and you've gotten to that point, like how soon should you apply? Do you have to wait and be at that traffic level for a certain amount of time? Or can you apply right away? In most cases, I would say apply right away. As soon as you hit the number, there are a couple of variables that you'll want to keep in mind. So if it is not sustained traffic, so let's say you just, I think one of our engineers, we have a blogging channel for internal employees. And one of our engineers had a web story hit really hard over

the weekend. And he had like 42,000 sessions in a day. But it goes up and then it comes straight back down. Because you can't predict, I don't think Google has that algorithm dialed in. And it's not predictable. So if he applied based on, you know, having 8000 sessions in a month, and then 42,000 sessions in a day, we would not accept that application. Because it's not sustainable. You know, the same thing can happen when you have something kind of pop off a little bit surrounding a holiday, for example, if it is evergreen content, great. But if it is something, if it's a father's day craft and father's day was this past Sunday, and you don't have a history of having, you know, for the July crafts, because that's the

next thing coming up, you know, those we would maybe put a pause and say, okay, maybe give me three months of analytics that we can look at the broader history here, or check back in a month, and we'll see where we're at. So we do want to make sure that it's not, you know, a one off. But if you've been steadily growing and steadily building and you finally got to there, apply. Apply as soon as you hit the number. So along those same lines, once you have applied and you're accepted, and let's say you've been on Mediavine for a year, and you get nailed with Google algorithm, or you lose a bunch of email subscribers, and your traffic dips below the 50,000 sessions in the 30-day period, then what?

Are you kicked off Mediavine? That's a good question. No, we don't. We don't make a habit out of kicking people off of Mediavine. So if I have a site that is consistently underperforming, and when I say underperforming, you've just been if you, if you are affected by an algorithm, especially with Google, it takes time to adjust your strategy, find new keywords, build that traffic back. Sometimes it shifts with the next algorithm. Sometimes it takes longer than that. And you have to figure out where else you can capture readers. And that's not something that happens overnight. So any sites that we

discontinue work with, it is because it just doesn't make sense to monetize that site anymore. Got it. Which is, you know, it's not anywhere near 50,000. It's not even anywhere near 25. Mostly not even any, you know, it just people are affected in different ways by different things. And I think it's, we have a lot of information on our end to help people either get back to where they were trying to be, or evaluate the situation and put together a plan, which is usually our approach. Yeah. I think that's encouraging. Yeah, there's no reason to panic. Yeah, I was gonna gonna say so it sounds like the lesson there is

yeah don't panic and just reach out figure out your plan and keep working at it as long as you're not just completely neglecting your blog and like you know i don't know like selling out or something essentially and letting it fall to pieces then sounds like you guys are really willing to help and work with bloggers so they don't have to stress or panic. Yeah. Yeah. The goal is obviously always growth. We want everybody to keep moving forward. We would love everybody to work to a place that they're able to generate a full-time income from their website. Supporting people, particularly women in creative careers, is one of the things that really feeds my soul. It's my favorite part of this job and all the ways that people have found their passion and independence and freedom.

And the emails that we get about people renovating their kitchen or paying for their kid's college or paying off their car. It impacts people's lives in a lot of ways. And so our goal is to help with that. It's not to approach things from a punitive point of view. And I will say that historically and also statistically, the websites that don't grow are the websites that people got bored with and didn't pay attention to anymore. Or it is the people that got maybe a little bit too overzealous. And they were like, creating websites is amazing. I will make four. It's really hard to maintain any kind of growth on four websites. It's hard to do it on one.

And when you spread yourself too thin, you can really only grow one piece at a time, and the other ones fall by the wayside. So that's usually the pattern that happens there. That makes sense. Implementing keyword research and competition analysis into your content strategy is a surefire way to improve your chances of people finding your content. And we love how simple key search makes it to find keywords we actually want to use in our posts. Key search is a powerful keyword research tool that makes finding relevant, low competition keywords for your blog simple and easy. If you think optimizing your blog and doing keyword research has to be hard, think again. Give this powerhouse tool a try and see how much easier it will be to create content

for your blog. Not only is it reasonably priced even for beginning bloggers, but you can use our code for 20% off your subscription. Click the link in our show notes to learn more. let's talk just a little bit more about the technical piece of setting up your website so that it will be able to have ads on it in the future so if somebody's at the very beginning of this process are there any recommendations you would make for them in terms of how they should go about setting up their website to give themselves the best chance, not only of driving the traffic that's going to be required, but being able to technically place all the ads on their site? Yeah. So the way that we target ads on your site is just, it's based on the HTML of your website. So if you ever

ventured into the text editor, that's what we're targeting. And best bones for us to be able to properly target ads are definitely found on WordPress. It is the most consistent. It's the most available. It is the most customizable. And it will grow with you. And that is not to say that you can't use other platforms. We do work with other platforms. We do work with things like Squarespace. And there are a couple that we can't

work with, but I don't want to rattle off the wrong ones. I'm going to refrain from naming any. But it's because we can't implement a specific kind of file that is required by advertisers. But by and large, we can work with most platforms. But I have found that most of the time, publishers outgrow those other platforms, you kind of hit a wall with it. And then you're faced with the decision to have to make a really drastic change. For me, I started on WordPress.com instead of WordPress.org. So.org is self-hosted and.com is through the WordPress platform and they host your website. And you can pay to own your domain there. Just like you can pay to own your domain with something like Blogger or Squarespace, etc.

And then they take care of the hosting for you. So if you're just getting started, that can feel like an easy solution. But undoing that decision was one of the biggest challenges I have ever faced. 1000% do not recommend. I love you have a personal testimony here. Yeah. I don't love it for you. It was really hard to untangle it. Yeah.

I remember Googling everything under the sun and I got halfway in on my own and I felt like my eyes were bleeding from staring at my computer screen. And I ended up having to figure out who to hire and pay somebody. And then you're left with a whole other set of challenges, which is like, who do I trust? Are they going to do it right? Am I going to have what I want at the end? So yeah, I think for me, the advice I would have given myself is to start as I intend to go forward,

which is the easiest solution is self-hosted WordPress. You can always change your host. You can find a host that's a better fit for you. That's not a hard thing to do. But in order to monetize, you do need to own your domain. That's important. That's the important piece. You can't monetize something that does not belong to

you. I think that's great encouragement. I love that you said start with... What does it start with? Where you intend to go? Yes. Start as you intend to go forward. Yes. I love that because I think that's something that we share all the time is take yourself seriously from the start. So know your why from the start, know what you're working towards. And obviously, I want to give space to the people who are like, I don't know. I just think I want to have a hobby blog. I mean, that's fine. That's totally fine to have a hobby blog. But if you're wanting to build a blogging business, then setting yourself up as a business on that right foot forward as you begin,

I think is only going to save you time and energy down the line. We are in alignment. We really do encourage anybody who's starting to start on a self-hosted WordPress site as well. It's a hard thing to untangle if you start in a space that felt really easy and then you do outgrow it. Those platforms can be great for if you have a different kind of business. If you need a website for an existing business, there are great solutions for that, which I think is why you hear them advertised on every other podcast that I listen to. But if your goal is content creation, your goal is for your blog to be your business. You really want to approach it from a place of ownership and know what your goals are in the future.

And if one of them is making money, you'll be glad that that's where you started. Yeah. We had Grayson Bell on the podcast. That's episode 69 that he talks more in depth about this from the technical side as a WordPress developer. And so we highly recommend going back and listening to that episode. He's just reiterating everything that Heather is saying. And I think it is very easy in the beginning for someone just to be like, I just want my website up and running. I'm just going to go ahead and do Squarespace or whatever to phone it in. Because WordPress is complicated. That is why we created the ultimate blog bootcamp. It is because it is complicated. And a lot of times you do need a little bit of handholding in that, especially if you're not

a technical person. That's why we created the course that we did and created the community that we did is because we know the importance of starting out on the right foot and being able to help people do that because we don't want them to have the mess later on because we have had students who have done that. They've started on another platform and then come to us and been like, okay, I need a switch. And it is kind of a nightmare to do. It is so challenging. Yeah. And so we just want to save that headache truly for people because our goal is growth. Our goal is to help people create a blog that they're proud of with income that they're in control of. And Mediavine is such an amazing partner in that. And thank you for sharing all of this today. This has been so

insightful. And I think it's going to help a lot of people in the blogging space. I am glad. I love that you all have centered yourself around helping other people. You've put together solutions for challenges that I definitely faced 13 years ago and there were no solutions for me. And Google was a sad state of affairs. Thanks for paving the way for us, Heather. You paved the way for all of us, though.

Thank you very much. Yeah. If you can please let people know how they can connect with you. And we will make sure to put links for Mediavine. But I know people are going to want to check out your blog as well. Yeah, absolutely. You can find me at sheperdishme.com. My Instagram is actually telusastory.

So it's my last name, Astory. Oh my gosh. That's so creative. Yeah. I love it. And not as creative as my brother who is Telesaurus, but yeah. You can also find me on LinkedIn. I'm Heather Teles. Awesome. Thanks so much, Heather. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you'd like to continue the conversation about blogging with us,

please find us on Instagram at spark media concepts. You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter where we share blogging tips and inspiration. You can sign up by finding the link in the show notes. For those of you who are ready for the next step and want to start your own blog, join the waitlist for the ultimate blog bootcamp. The link to join the waitlist is also in the show notes. Go out and make today a great day.