Advice for my site?

Well, even though you are new here, I'm not sure the mods are going to appreciate, or approve, placing your link in your post as that does violate forum rules regarding 'self-promotion.'

You have a better chance of getting away with that in the 'Beginner's Area.'

Best to read the forum rules to get off on the right foot, here.

Cheers.

Yikes. Did't know, thanks. Deleted the site name and made it a more general help question. Thanks for not blasting me. (:

The main thing to do would be to better define your niche. "Living, learning and gardening with kids in Florida." is so broad it includes a sizeable preceding Floridans, without especially identifying with any of them.

The tighter you can define your niche, the easier it will be to engage them. It's why most profitable blogs have a well defined niche, and have created an avatar of their perfect visitor, that they write for.

It sounds like you're doing a celebrity style blog where it's basically just about your life, which certainly can work, but in those cases I'd suggest you focus on including pictures. That type of blog lives or dies by the identifiability of the people running it. So make sure they see you doing what you're talking about, and that they would recognise your face on the street.

The main thing is of course...keep going! You're already making money from the blog, and that's the biggest hurdle.

You have an interesting tag line "Living, Learning and Gardening with Kids."

Since you have some time to become successful, which you think should be by January. Between now and then you have a good amount of time.

The first thing you should do is create a list of topics you want on your site. That will make it easier to research the topic and create some good content. For each of the word you have decided like Living, Learning and Gardening, find out the questions you want to answer in your blog.

Find out about 10 questions people are asking and create post around these 10 questions for each of the words you have chosen to address. So this will be 30 good posts.

Target each post between 2000 to 5000 words. Each blog can have different count of words but in each blog address sub questions related to the main questions.

Once you are done with the 30 Posts 10 for each of the Keyword you are targeting. Then you create a Pillar Content or Resource Page. In this resource page you link up these 10 post. Also when writing the post if there is any links you think are required internally then do it.

These 30 post should take you sometime to do because they will be of good quality. But you will see that google starts ranking your website.

Once you see traffic on your website increase then you can start guest posting and linking back to your site. This will improve your rank and further increase your visibility on google.

As far as Adsense or Affiliate Links is concerned you can think about these later. Once you get a steady 10K+ views per month. You can start thinking about adsense or affiliate links.

If this was my website, I would only focus on one strategy for monetisation. Either Adsense or Affiliate Links and not both. The reason is that both are different things and require different treatment. Ads work very well for news type sites. Affiliate links work for Niche sites like yours.

Hope this works for you.

Best of Luck.

You all are too kind. Thanks for the advice. I know it's all stuff I could have (should have) taken the time to read in the beginners blogs, so I appreciate you all taking the time to write it all out. I will definitely pay it forward by sharing what I learn along the way!

Do some research on finding hot products that are able to convert well in your niche and focus on writing good articles that related to the products. Also, you may want to do list building for long term success.

How is a new member to ask for advice on a website without linking to it?

Do you have time to search for and join forums / Facebook groups related to your niche?

What you need is an audience as in a group of readers who know, like and trust you to read all your 5 articles and more.

5 articles is good way to get started but not good for long-term profits or even SEO for that matter.

Sure you can outsource to freelancers to write more articles or write them down.

But exactly what are your articles all about, do they provide value and help for people wanting to visit your site?

Or why should they even visit your site let alone buy from you?

I know this may sound harsh.

But you need a group of people that you can reach out and are willing to support you.

That is how you grow and learn.

Not just financially but socially.

Because at the end of the day, sales and marketing is NOT just about selling but also about connecting to and helping people.

It's generally pretty easy to tell when someone sincerely wants advice and straight link drops.

In theory, experienced moderators would make this judgment call.

I'm a Libra - and I don't do conundrums. I find them confusing.

I agree with some of the others here. You will need to get a few more article published quickly and then do it on a regular basis.
If your blog provides real value, then it should be easy for you to get traffic through Social media. I would suggest Pinterest. On Pinterest try to get to around 1000 followers first. You can easily do that just by following others and repinning their pins.
Once you have that apply to group boards. It's easier to get accepted when you have a 1000 followers.
Then start pinning your own blog posts/ articles on these group boards. many of them have hundreds of thousands of followers.
Your images on Pinterest should be good enough to make people click on them.
You should easily be able to increase your web traffic if you follow this consistently.

It sounds like you need to build the site out before much more.. 5 articles isn't enough, try to get that up to 20+ or even more..

A lot of SEO's and web producers won't admit it but it's about the quality of your content, not the quantity.

It's better to write a few superb articles than a hundred half-baked ones. A good example of this strategy is Backlinko who has published less than 30 blog posts in several years. The quality of the few posts that are there is stunning, useful and on message.

5 decent articles is good start, but it's not enough. If you want to grow, you need to have at least 20+ decent articles focusing on different aspects of gardening. Also, try to do some guest blogging, so that other bloggers in your niche to recognise you as an expert in the field. To develop a low ticket product, so that people may sign up as an affiliate to promote you and start boosting up the traffic.

So we got it that quality content is step one. What next?

I have my Amazon Affiliate links in my articles (and they aren't too spammy) and Adsense Ads. I found one product on Clickbank that I like...

If my goal is to pull in $3k a month, what should my next step be??

Remove the January timeline. Focus your full attention on helping people through your blog and befriending bloggers in your niche, by promoting them and commenting genuinely on their blog. Lays the framework for lasting, increasing profits.

Do some research on locating hot products that have the ability to convert nicely in your niche and concentrate on writing good articles that related to the products. Also, you might want to do list construction for long term success.

Make sure you use "Organic SEO" for your content....
it's a simple way to catch high ranking on search engines ( it works pretty good)

Use a simple opt in page, build your list and give info and sell affiliate products or your products.

FORGET ADSENSE: with 10 visitors a day you will earn nothing.

and it's not an asset: they can freeze your profit when they want without a prior notice.

Treat it like a business and build your valuable email list asset.

I would look for keywords that are easy to rank for and write maybe one article a week on those terms (more if you can). Takes time but the traffic amount will slowly increase that way

You should be focused on his unique content on any famous topic. It must have including long tail and short tail keywords. And then you pay attention to his off-page optimization.

What is the site? Are you collecting email addresses and leading them back to your site for more content and "goodies" that they will love? You need to increase your engagement with the visitors to your site. Where is the bulk of your traffic coming from? You dont want 100% of that traffic to go away for the sake of a $0.25 adsense click. Collect the email addresses with a hover ad and keep leading them back to your site when you update your site daily.

Definitely youtube

5 Articles wont be enough to get you a lot of traffic. You need to build up a community of readers by posting interesting articles on a regular basis and capturing your visitors' E Mails.
This way over a period of time, the number of visitors will increase and so will revenue.

Choose affiliate products in your niche and write reviews on them on your blog in order to earn comissions

You can use Organic SEO Content for long run.

I think that you should start with advertising on social networks, this should help you. Gradually you can accumulate traffic for your site.

Focus On Writing Great Content And Promoting It On Social Media And Later On You Can Go For lInk Building

Post more often, use social media, get more backlinks, SEO and practically anything else to bring more than just 10 people to your site, then monetize it.

If people see you have little content and ads, your site wont convert well. Its users first, then yourself. Give something valuable first, then expect something in return

And I would recommend that you try to study advertising in other social networks. It seems to me that FB is losing its relevance. Try to study the advertising of Instagram.

All that is required of you is good content and the ability to beautifully present information. You need to make sure that the public is interested in everything you do. Also, if you do not get anything, then you can try using IG bots. Many people say that this is a pretty good thing. There you can accumulate real subscribers to your target audience.

Think about the task that your site really needs to solve. At what in the decision of this task it is the best. Just create a site "to be" is also good, but in the future you still have to return to this issue. The task of the site (or call it a goal) will keep you within the necessary framework when it is administered. At each stage it will be possible to measure how effectively the site performs the assigned task or how much you deviated from it.

Cool! You must definitely launch your website and make sure to post articles consistently. Maintaining consistency will play an important role in monetising it.