Having success with one business doesn’t mean you have it all figured out. Every niche has its challenges, struggles, and competition. Today’s podcast is a story about overcoming hardships in business and discovering things on the journey that help build a sustainable revenue stream. My guest is Debbie Gartner, better known as The Flooring Girl. 

Many years ago, Debbie started a business where she went to people’s homes to help them select the best flooring to meet their needs. She eventually created a website and a blog to support her business.

I found our discussion refreshing because I’m always so paralyzed about trying new things and worrying they’re not going to work. But this is truly the way that successful online businesses evolve. Debbie’s “rags to riches” story reflects that. 

Let’s dive into my conversation with Debbie and explore how she achieved sustainable revenue stream in her business by trying different things to get where she is today.

The path to sustainable revenue is not always a straight line

Debbie says she started with nothing and didn’t make money online until she learned about blogging back in 2010. In 2011 she started her website and avidly worked on learning SEO (search engine optimization).

Her primary goal was increase traffic to her website. Around this time, someone introduced her to the idea of monetizing her blog. Her reaction was:

Oh yeah, whatever. I don’t have time for that.

In 2015, Debbie learned more about monetizing her blog. She believed she had already tackled the challenging part by learning all about SEO. She believed that all she needed to do was add some affiliate links. 

She imagined making $10,000 a month without much effort. She says she quickly discovered that that was an incorrect assumption.

In 2016, her life took a turn and she found herself in a big mess. She was $238,000 in debt and no longer had her flooring business (and was not allowed to work in the flooring business for 2 years). 

At the time, she lived in an area with an extremely high cost of living (New York City) and she owned her condo. So moving back home with mom and dad wasn’t an option.

Debbie had no idea what she was going to do. She thought about working for a painting company because that business was related to flooring. But it was winter and there wasn’t enough demand for painting services. Eventually, she did get the painting job but it was only a part-time gig.

So she decided she would try to learn how to monetize her blog because blogging was something she did know how to do.

She also knew that it would take a while to build an income blogging, so she took on two additional part-time jobs. She did some freelance blogging and SEO for people.

She planned to muddle through for two years until she could return to the flooring business.

But it didn’t work out that way.

Debbie says it was such a devastating time for her. She needed to make about $10,000 a month just to pay her bills and the income just wasn’t there.

She found herself juggling credit cards, putting payments on whichever had the lower interest rate,