about

Hi, I’m Caroline from Stone Cold Content. I live behind a keyboard in the darkest depths of North Yorkshire, surround by 100+ plants. It’s wild.

I started this business to help you start your blog. Because I know what a struggle it can be, especially when there’s so. Damn. Much information out there.

All I wanted to do was write.

I had no interest in the other stuff: coding, SEO, or even photography. I just wanted to write. I didn’t even care what I was writing about.

So, if that sounds like you, you’re in the right place.

I’m here to help you navigate through all those tricky topics like social media marketing, email lists, and all that other stuff that forces you to deviate from…just writing.

I can teach you the basics of SEO and keyword research so that you can get traffic to your site by spending your time writing, not creating Facebook posts, Pinterest pins, or trying to scam Instagram.

Do you need to start your blog on a budget?

Great.

Aside from £100 or so for hosting annually, you don’t need to spend any more money.

There are so many WordPress themes and graphics websites out there that will help you build a professional blog without having to spend a penny.

My approach to getting traffic and social media

I use social media. A lot. I love to peruse Facebook to see what my old school friends are up to, I catch up with news on Twitter, and I post pictures of my plants on Instagram.

Pinterest is used to find recipes and organisation porn. And sure, a bit of traffic, but I’m not spending hours on it and I’m NOT spending £100 on Tailwind. Nope. Pinterest is WAY to fickle for that.

I view social media traffic as the icing on the cake, but we’re after search engine traffic. And you can argue that Pinterest is a search engine all you like, but until its latent semantic analysis gets up to scratch, it’s social media to me.

You want to write. And whilst I can’t promise to get your fiction writing seen by the world, I can help you quit your day job (not immediately, I’m afraid) and make a living writing about one of your passions.

My story

I started on wordpress.com, and wasted too much money on a pretty website that got no traffic.

So I shifted to self-hosted a year later, writing about cruelty-free makeup. Still no traffic.

My boyfriend lost his job and I switched to writing about personal finance. I was on minimum wage at the time and if I knew now what I know now I’d probably be millionaire. Instead, I was an idiot.

I lost interest in personal finance after a year. I had traffic (a bit) but I had to hustle for it. I spend hours on Facebook comment threads, hooking up IFTTT to make a poor man’s Meet Edgar, and wasted money on Pinterest schedulers.

I deleted every post, and concentrated on my novel, which is awaiting a third draft.

Then I started a vegan blog, but by this time Google was so sick of my content changing I’m pretty sure that domain is blacklisted. Never mind.

And then I started Planet House Plant. Instead of doing the same posts as everyone else I answered questions that weren’t being answered (a LOT of people ask how many house plants is too many).

Traffic started trickling in after..wait for it…five months. Slowly at first, and then it began to gather momentum.

It was exciting, not only because I FINALLY knew what I was doing, but because it was repeatable.

Anyone can do it.

So I started this blog. Not because I think it can rank (blogs about blogging is a pretty saturated niche) but because 2012 me needs this blog. So hopefully it can help you.

I’m purposefully not having an email list. I’m not selling a course. This will be monetised by ads and affiliate (hosting, themes, and maybe design software) ONLY.