Today’s episode is all about how to change your blogging mindset when it comes to Pinterest. We want to help you move from just being a daily pinner or blogger to really scaling higher and thinking bigger about your business.

I’m excited to interview my friend and client, Ruth Soukup, of Living Well Spending Less and Elite Blog Academy. Today we’ll dive into the growth she’s experienced since 2010 and dissect exactly what she did to generate that growth. She’ll end by giving you five brilliant tips to keep you motivated in your business.

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How Ruth Got Started

Ruth originally started out with a blog called Living Well Spending Less and then expanded into other areas. About two years after she started her blogging business, her husband was able to retire. Naturally, she gets lots of questions on how the blog made that possible. Ruth wrote a book that told her story in full detail —  How to Blog for Profit (Without Selling Your Soul).

The next major milestone in her business was the creation of Elite Blog Academy. Knowing that all of her readers had the same questions and that she had the information they needed, Ruth created the course, which launched in 2014. She then developed the Living Well Planner and has just recently launched a podcast.

Why Ruth Started Blogging

When Ruth started blogging, she was a stay-at-home mom of two toddlers. She wasn’t trying to create a huge business. She was just trying to stay away from Target! In her mind, every penny she spent at Target was the time her husband had to spend at a job he hated.

Ruth knew that something had to change, so they agreed to adhere to a strict budget. Ruth started couponing and then started blogging. She had never even read blogs before she started her own blog, but it opened up an entirely new world for her. She started reading everything she could about professional blogging, beginning with Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, which she read over and over again.

The Coupon Wave

Ruth was writing about her couponing system, but some people still had questions about how to get started. To address those questions, she wrote an 8-part series on how to effectively coupon. About three months after it was published, the show Extreme Couponing premiered. As luck would have it, Ruth’s blog series was the top search result when all of those people began to search for couponing tips.

Getting Back to the Core

The blog traffic frenzy from Extreme Couponing lasted for about six months before a group of new coupon bloggers came onto the scene. Interest in the topic started to die down at that time as well.

At this point in her online career, Ruth was running four blogs, not making much money, and was getting exhausted. She finally decided to close one of the blogs, sell two of them, and go back to only blogging at Living Well Spending Less.

She wanted to really focus on her heart and her passi...