When Emma and her partner Den first moved in together they decided they weren’t going to sit on the couch every night, they were going to go on regular dates with two rules: 1/ each date had to be different, and 2/ they had to cost under $30. And that’s how the idea for their website $30 Date Night began…

www.blog.30dollardatenight.com

Emma’s blogger profile…

Blog: $30 Date Night

Blogger: Emma Merkas

Lives: Australia

Twitter: @30dollardate

Visitors per month: 30,000 across our $30 Date Night Network, 8,000  for the blog.

Date started: July 2008

What’s it about? Marriage, romance, relationships, date ideas and our own date-night reviews.

Why did you start blogging? We started our date ideas website $30 Date Night and wanted to make it more interactive and also provide readers with evidence that we do as we preach as far as date night goes.

What was life like before blogging? I was working as the marketing communications manager at Park Hyatt Melbourne. The full time work schedule and I never really got along. I eventually bit the bullet and left to work on the business. Now I choose my own hours (which is brilliant because I love sleeping in) and work from the comfort of my house or a favourite café.

Which blogging platform do you use? We started on WordPress.org and haven’t looked back since. It’s a fantastic platform for complete customisation and even tech nuffies (like I used to be) can get around the back end without any dramas.

Biggest blogging achievements? My column at mX newspaper came as a direct result of my blogging. The editors there had been reading my posts and when a spot as the dating and relationships columnist opened up, they offered it to me.

I’m a huge believer in self-publishing for that reason. It makes you a proven concept and opens up so many avenues in the real world as well as the online world for you to achieve your goals.

How long do you work on your site? It varies from week to week – how long is a piece of string, really? I post five times a week at least and also do all the marketing, plus guest posts and articles, media spots, emailing, comments, writing e-books and more. It’s not quite a full-time role but it’s pretty close. My husband Den does probably 30 to 40 hours a week across all our sites working on coding, design, building new sites and fixing glitches.

How’d you get traffic in the beginning? To be honest in the beginning we fluked it. We put up the date ideas site and… people just started coming to the site! We were profiled in different media outlets all over the world without even trying. It was nuts. Since then, we’ve been doing everything we can to learn about attracting more traffic.

We rank third for “date ideas” on Google.com and first on Google.com.au. About 65% of our traffic comes from search engines. Writing guest articles and posts has always been good for generating extra traffic too.

How has your blog changed over time? We started with a really narrow focus on date ideas and date-night reviews but now we write about all things dating, marriage, relationships, products for couples and more.

Do you make a living from your blog? We haven’t monetised it properly yet, to be honest. Our first e-book is in pre-launch phase and we’re waiting to grow our traffic a little more so we can get onto a good advertising network.

We trialled Google Adsense for awhile but, being a dating site, we were getting a lot of singles ads and quite a few dodgy ones too. We would prefer to match our advertising better to our readers so we don’t annoy them with crappy ads.

We’re fortunate that our offline business allows us enough time and money to play around with this new internet venture of ours while we learn the ropes and get the formula right.

Your best advice for bloggers? Learn all you can from the experts as you go. There are so many little things that so many bloggers do wrong that can be easily fixed. I just found a bunch of them that I’m guilty of at the Problogger Event last week! There is always more learning you can do.

That, and network with the industry. Other bloggers can help and point you in the right direction and there are great forums for real-life networking that you should be taking advantage of.

Biggest blogging mistake you’ve made so far? My inconsistency in posting. I’m guilty of not always posting when I’m supposed to, or completely dropping the ball if I’m having a busy week elsewhere. I used to just wake up and write whatever I felt like writing on that day… I now have a blog plan which is updated to the rest of the year so I know what I have upcoming and can write for future posts and more. It’s still in early days but hopefully I can sustain it!

Do you run any other blogs? No, but I have a few niggly ideas sitting in the back of my head that won’t go away. As soon as $30 Date Night is making some money, I think I’ll need to jump on them and get them going!