Background

First, a bit of background. Adrienne lived most of her life in Vancouver, British Columbia before moving to Washington State 15 years ago with her husband. They moved to her husband’s family farm, which is home not just to Adrienne, her husband, and their daughter but farmyard animals such as goats and alpacas too!

However, it was not all fun on the farm for Adrienne. Following her move to Washington she found herself in ‘dead-end’ jobs that she wasn’t really enjoying, and discovered that she would really rather work for herself. 

So in 2011 she took a leap of faith and set up craftylittlegnome.com, a personal blog that chronicled her recent move, and what renovations she and her husband were making to their home, and it just evolved from there!

 

How Did You Get Into Niche Websites?

Adrienne knew that, in order for her personal blog to have legs, it would need to hone in on a specific niche. She explains, “People were sharing their life and their journey and their story, and then in order to be successful with their website they had to really niche down in order to keep growing.”

In October 2022, Adrienne purchased the website lockdownloo.com with the help of Make Lemonade. The site was an expired domain, and Make Lemonade helped Adrienne build the site and publish the first batch of articles. Adrienne is looking forward to continued growth for the site!

 

Tell Us About The Site That You Have Built – When Did You Start?

Adrienne reveals she heard of lockdownloo.com through an email from Make Lemonade. She had joined Make Lemonade’s email list and was keeping an eye on her emails for any domains that seemed promising. 

Lockdownloo.com stood out to Adrienne because of its strong back-links, and since Adrienne had watched a Make Lemonade tutorial about back-links, she knew how important quality back-links were. 

Lockdownloo.com also fit in perfectly with the niche of craftylittlegnome.com – a website in the DIY niche – and lockdownloo.com honed in on bathrooms and toilets in particular. Plus, the keywords had great potential! It was a match made in heaven, and Adrienne described it as a natural progression.

Goals

What Problems Were You Looking To Solve?

Initially, Adrienne was having issues with finding content that was of a consistently high quality. She also wanted to find ways to make her job easier and to take the pressure off a bit. 

“When you’re an entrepreneur of any kind, you have so much to do and there’s so little time. So anything you can do to buy back your time is really valuable,” she reveals. “It seem(ed) natural to hire somebody who is maybe better at these things than I am, just to save myself time and money.”

How Has Make Lemonade Helped You To Reach Your Goals?

Adrienne wants to make sure her sites are as valuable as possible so when the time comes to eventually sell them they will be worth the investment. Aiding with the purchase of an aged domain, and Make Lemonade taking care of things like link-building, back-linking and content has helped to drive up the value of Adrienne’s website.

Make Lemonade has also helped Adrienne manage her time and to achieve a work-life balance. “I didn’t even realise how much I needed [Make Lemonade] until I started using it,” she admits.

When she has errands to run she can breathe easy knowing “things behind the scenes are taken care of.”

Strategy

How Has Link Building Been Implemented In The Process?

Link building is something Adrienne wants to do more of now that the main framework for lockdownloo.com is done. The fact that lockdownloo.com was an expired domain was really helpful in getting that framework set up: “There’s already those links that automatically go in that you guys had redirected for me, so that helps you get started.”

Monetization

How Is Your Site Monetised?

Craftylittlegnome.com has been monetized for years via MediaVine, and Adrienne has now been working with them long enough that she can now graduate to AdThrive due to how many views her site has gotten. She hopes to make this move in the next couple of months.

As for lockdownloo.com, Adrienne has a goal to monetize it within a year. Because Adrienne already has a site with an ad network, the threshold in terms of page views for lockdownloo.com is lower, which is a huge benefit. Adrienne explains: “I’m almost certain that with the hard work that I’m doing, and with the work that you guys are doing for me, I will be able to reach that goal.” 

Adrienne also has some great advice when it comes to creating a lucrative website: “With SEO and Google it really is just sort of a time thing, so you can have all of these articles and you want to have as much content as humanly possible, so that’s there more chance for Google to pick up something from your site. All you really need is your top five blog posts, or website posts to give you 80% of your traffic. So if you’re on point with your SEO, everything is going good on the backend, then you’ve just got to work your butt off to get those backlinks in there and eventually it will happen.” 

Results

What Does Your Traffic Look Like?

The content that Make Lemonade published on craftylittlegnome.com is now ageing and climbing up the SERPs. 

Meanwhile, lockdownloo.com has 60 posts that are still ageing and are gradually moving up the SERPs. 

Growth is certainly happening and looks set to grow, which you can see on Google Analytics:

Impact

How Has Working With Make Lemonade Impacted Your Life?

When Adrienne took that leap of faith to become her own boss and build her website she worked on her site as much as she could while doing odd jobs such as Uber driving. 

Within a year she began to make money via sponsored posts and MediaVine, and was soon making a living that was comparable to the salary she had at her previous office job. Now, she’s making 5x that amount.

Adrienne feels that her websites have given her a tangible asset. She explains, “I feel like having these niche websites is a way for me to have an investment in a way that somebody would own property. It’s just that for me, it’s digital property.”

 

How Has Website Investment Impacted Your Life?

When Adrienne took that leap of faith to become her own boss and build her website she worked on her site as much as she could while doing odd jobs such as Uber driving. 

Within a year she began to make money via sponsored posts and MediaVine, and was soon making a living that was comparable to the salary she had at her previous office job. Now, she’s making 5x that amount.

Adrienne feels that her websites have given her a tangible asset. She explains, “I feel like having these niche websites is a way for me to have an investment in a way that somebody would own property. It’s just that for me, it’s digital property.”

Working with Make Lemonade

How Did You Discover Make Lemonade?

Adrienne heard about Make Lemonade via networking and her blogging friends. One of her blogging friends had a Make Lemonade coupon that offered a better deal if you referred a friend. Adrienne then signed up for our mailing list, and has been working with Make Lemonade ever since. 

 

What Made You Choose Make Lemonade?

Adrienne had worked with Make Lemonade before, and tried out a few of our services, but being a regular podcast listener and being on the mailing list allowed her to build up a trust that made her want to work with Make Lemonade.

 

What Have Been The Greatest Benefits You’ve Received From Make Lemonade?

Adrienne believes the support that Make Lemonade provides to better manage her workload has been a massive benefit. The consistent quality of content Make Lemonade delivers has also made asking others to write content for her sites less of a gamble.

What Is It Like To Work With Make Lemonade?

Make Lemonade sends Adrienne recommendations for keywords for different blog topics every month, Adrienne then decides what direction she would like to take the content, it’s written and uploaded for her, and all she has to do is hit publish.

Why Would You Recommend Make Lemonade To Someone Else?

Adrienne highly recommends Make Lemonade if you would like to scale your business and build niche sites. 

Make Lemonade can also help you better manage your workload and achieve a good work-life balance. “I don’t think it’s really possible to scale up in your business without help, so Make Lemonade is one of the tools that I use,” Adrienne states. “I love that I can buy back my time, so I can focus on other areas of my business and so I’m not chained to my computer.”

How Does Make Lemonade Compare To Other Services You’ve Used (If Any)? Are You Happy With Your Progress?

Before joining forces with Make Lemonade, Adrienne primarily worked with individuals. But, in Adrienne’s experience, working with Make Lemonade has been much better because she feels like she can truly trust us and rely on consistently high quality.