Making money online was always a dream of mine.

Ever since I got married (at 20 years old), I have always fantasized about opening up my laptop, looking at my website dashboard, and seeing dollar signs.

Passive income, baby.

For years, this was just a fairy tale for me.

But in 2021, I decided to launch my own site: Hockey Question. The goal was to make a place to answer all the top questions newcomers had about ice hockey.

In one year, I grew the website to a $1,000/month business. Internet money was real. But this was far from my goal of making a full-time income from my own site.

So in 2023, I decided to launch a second website on beehiiv: Storey Time. The goal was to make a place to help people make a full-time income online with freelance copywriting.

And in one year, I took it from zero to $100,000 in revenue. And in less than two years, it’s made over $250,000.

In this blog post, I’ll break down the website earning strategies I used to build the two websites. And, I’ll include my biggest lessons (and failures).

If you:

Then keep reading. Below are the website earning strategies that actually worked for me.

Ready?

Let’s begin!

When I first dipped my toes into website earning, I did what most people do: I followed the “traditional” playbook.

That meant starting a niche blog. I chose ice hockey since it’s a passion of mine (being Canadian and all). 

The old way to earn with a website was to run display ads and place affiliate links for recommended products.

It felt simple:

Easy, right?

That’s what I thought too.

In 2022, I first partnered with Ezoic when I had just a few hundred website visitors per month. So, I started running ads across my blog. And I made a bit of money, but not much. About $100/month.

Eventually, I built my traffic high enough (50,000 monthly sessions), which allowed me to apply to Mediavine, one of the best ad networks for content websites.

I also joined Amazon Associates, placing affiliate links for hockey gear inside my articles.

For the first time, I started making “passive income” online: money that showed up while I was asleep.

The first $1 I made felt incredible. Then $50. Then $200. And by the end of the first year, hockeyquestion.com was earning over $1,000/month.

But here’s the reality that most traditional bloggers won’t tell you: it took a ton of work to get there. I had to publish hundreds of SEO-optimized articles to attract traffic, and every dollar I earned depended entirely on search rankings.

If Google decided to change its algorithm (which happens often), my income could drop overnight.

Plus, display ads don’t pay much unless you have serious traffic.

Even at 30,000 sessions per month, I was barely scratching $1,000 per month.

That’s when I realized something crucial: If my entire income depended on someone else’s algorithm, I don’t have a business, I have a dependency.

Well, guess what happened in late 2023?

One of the biggest Google updates in history. And this one targeted one group more than any other: niche bloggers. Within a month, I went from about $1,000/month to about $100/month without changing a thing. All of a sudden, Google went from favoring niche, expert blogs in their search engine to community forums like Reddit and Quora.

My income tanked and I wasn’t the only one. Thousands of bloggers with much more established blogs got crushed too. People making $15,000/month went to $1,000-$3,000 and had to go back to their 9-to-5s.

At this point, I wanted something more reliable. Something I could control. That realization led me to build my second website at the end of 2023. And this time, I did things very differently.

In 2023, I was doing freelance copywriting and content writing for beehiiv, the email newsletter platform. At the time, I was the main case study writer. So I’d be handed interviews beehiiv did with their most successful clients. And I turned them into case studies to help promote beehiiv.

That year, I wrote dozens of case studies like how Dakota Robertson earned $250,000/month with beehiiv as a ghostwriter and ghostwriter coach.

Or how Saeed Ezzati built a $150,000 business in only 5 months on beehiiv.

Or how Moyo Sulyman was acquired after just 7 months on beehiiv.

The more I wrote these, the more I started to see there was a big opportunity in starting your own newsletter and website with beehiiv. One of the main reasons? beehiiv didn’t just let you send email newsletters on their platform. They also gave you a free website to act as the homebase for your entire business.

I had been a freelance copywriter for years at this point, with plenty of experience doing email strategy and email copywriting. I’ve generated over 7 figures in results for clients with my copy. Generated millions in traffic to websites. But I had never seen anything like this in terms of the ability to easily produce and distribute content to an audience. 

beehiiv created the most seamless digital publishing tool on the internet.

In December 2023, I wanted to take everything I learned from my first website and apply it with one goal in mind: Build an audience I own with more control over my earnings. So I decided to launch my own beehiiv newsletter and website: Storey Time.

I launched it on beehiiv, a platform built specifically for creators who want to grow and earn with an email-based website.

Within just three months (by February 2024), I had already earned from it.

Within 12 months, it generated over $100,000 in revenue.

And by late 2025, that number had surpassed $250,000+.

Here are the exact website earning strategies that helped me get there:

My first income stream came from one-on-one coaching.

After I launched my beehiiv newsletter and website, started sending newsletters, and growing my audience, people started asking me questions. New copywriters wanted to know how to learn copywriting, how to land clients, and build a full-time income online.

And some eventually started asking me to hop on calls over Zoom with them. So, I could see there was demand, and I launched a coaching offer.

I offered to mentor these new copywriters for one month to teach them copywriting, how to position themselves online, how to do outreach, and get clients results.

After I had built up my one-on-one coaching for a while (and grown my beehiiv newsletter to over 1,000 subscribers), I decided to introduce a new coaching offer.

I could see that more people wanted my help but couldn’t necessarily afford my one-on-one coaching. So I introduced a group coaching option that still gave them personalized help but in a group setting.

After running my one-on-one coaching and group coaching for several months, I could see there was still a portion of my audience that needed help but weren’t necessarily ready for the financial or time commitment that coaching required.

So I created a self-paced course, The Six-Figure Copywriter.

I knew from my coaching experience that most new copywriters struggle with the same three things:

So, I built my flagship course around those exact problems (and several other digital products).

After the Six-Figure Copywriter Course, I launched a low-ticket course, the 30 Day Copywriter.. It helped beginners write daily and gain momentum.

Then I introduced a few upsells, including my Niche Mastery Toolkit and Inbox Ninjas email crash course.

Each digital product served a clear purpose in my funnel:

The lesson?

Don’t just create digital products. Create a product ladder: a series of offers that meet your audience at different stages of their journey.

The easiest place for most people to start would be some kind of coaching. The main reason is that you really get to know what your audience wants and how to solve those issues in a personalized setting. Then you can package up the main questions and challenges they face into a self-paced option later.

After I launched my one-on-one coaching, group coaching, and course, I wanted to offer another way people could get some hands-on coaching help without needing to commit to my full programs. 

So I introduced workshops: one-time training events with open question and answer periods to help people solve a specific problem in their freelance copywriting journey, like landing their first client.

There’s one more way I’m earning with my website: community.

Since I first built my beehiiv newsletter and website, I’ve had people ask me to launch a copywriting community.

A place where copywriters could gather, ask questions in a group setting, get the help they need, encourage one another to keep going, and reach their goals together.

So, I decided to launch my own community in November 2025: Six-Figure Copy Academy.

The Six-Figure Copy Academy is a combination of all of my previous offers:

Unlike my other offers, the community is a monthly subscription. It’s a seamless way to turn one-time purchases (all of my previous offers) into a recurring revenue stream.

That way, I can focus on just sending email newsletters from beehiiv and publish them on my beehiiv website. Then, all I have to do is place a call to action to my paid community at the end of each newsletter to convert people on autopilot.

One of the most important earning decisions I ever made was building my website on beehiiv. Unlike my hockey blog, which relied 100% on Google, Storey Time allowed me to own my audience through email.

Here’s how I used beehiiv to turn my second website into a six-figure business:

I first started on X (formerly Twitter). In my first week, I launched my email newsletter on beehiiv. Then, I invited my social media followers to subscribe. I used beehiiv’s native landing pages to grow initially. Then I started using Boosts, their paid recommendations engine to grow faster.

I emailed my list once a week to start. But after about a year, I ramped things up and started every day. Emails included a variety of practical tips, stories, case studies of successful copywriters, and lessons about landing clients and more.

This helped me build trust faster than any algorithm could. And it helped me earn over $3 per subscriber per month to build a six-figure business.

beehiiv’s intuitive email editor made it simple to write emails quickly and easily. I’ve used all the major email platforms over the years to write emails for copywriting clients. beehiiv’s is hands-down the easiest to use.

It made it simple to send out emails multiple times a week without burning out.

When someone downloaded a lead magnet, beehiiv automatically added them to an email automation. Not only did it provide even more value to my audience, but then, those automations sold my courses and coaching on autopilot.

Here’s a quick look at my results:

In the 21 months since launching, my list size is 3,200 people.

The average email open rate for my daily newsletter: 36.71%

And over $200,000 in revenue has been generated directly through beehiiv.

beehiiv made the entire process simple. I wasn’t juggling some complicated tech stack with 7 different tools. Instead, everything from my website, blog, automations, and email campaigns lived in one platform.

If you’re trying to earn with your website, start building your email list with beehiiv now.

After earning with both an SEO-driven blog and a newsletter-driven business, I’ve learned a few big lessons:

You can have 1,000 visitors a day (like I did), but if you don’t have a direct way to reach them again (like email), you’re leaving money on the table. You need to make sure you actually have a direct way to contact your audience otherwise, you’re not in control of your brand.

I didn’t hit six figures because I used some secret hacks. I just showed up every day and served my audience. It started with social media, posting content that attracted new copywriters interested in growing their businesses. Then it was inviting them to my email newsletter. And from there, presenting offers that made sense for them.

I just spoke to people daily through my socials and newsletter, which helped build over time.

I believe the majority of your content should be free. The goal isn’t to charge for every idea, but to use your free content to build trust that leads to paid offers. And the content you put out should be “good enough” to charge for if it were put into a course or coaching program. Make it good.

No social platform even comes close. Even though I used X to attract my audience, the moment I got a follower, my goal was to convert them into an email subscriber. 

The reason? 

I know email subscribers are hotter leads. They’re more bought into you and your brand than your social media followers. They have to explicitly opt in to receive your marketing messages. They also give you a piece of contact information (email address) to prove that they’re more invested.

The average return on investment of email marketing is 36:1. And, conservatively, my beehiiv email list has generated me personally an ROI of at least 40:1.

It took me one year to earn $1,000/month from my first site.

But it took me three months to earn with my second site for the same amount. The main reason is that this time, I had the right strategy.

The first thing I would have changed is a major missing piece with my first site: an email list. This was detrimental to my brand when the “Google slap” hit me in 2023.

I was getting solid traffic to my first site. I averaged 30,000+ visitors per month for about a year at its peak. If I had converted even 2% of those visitors into email subscribers (which is conservative), I could have been growing my list by about 600 people per month (7,200 per year).

And if I had been emailing them consistently, I would most likely still be pulling in thousands from that website every month, maybe even five-figure months.

The second thing I would have done if I could start over would just be to build the website on beehiiv and focus on the quality of the content rather than chase SEO rankings on a WordPress site.

I’d launch directly on beehiiv, start collecting emails from day one, and focus on solving a clear problem for my audience through products, coaching, or communities.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to earn with your website. There are dozens of paths to generate income from your site.

I’ve tried the slow, SEO and ad-based route. And I’ve tried the fast, email-driven route. Both worked. But only one changed my life.

If you’re ready to turn your website into a real business and you want to ensure you’re not stuck relying on algorithms, ad rates, or luck, then you should start by building an audience you actually own. That starts with email.

And there’s no better platform to do it than beehiiv.

beehiiv is the all-in-one growth system for digital content publishers. 

Ready to dive in?

Start earning with  your website for free with a 30-day trial of beehiiv today.