The 9-to-5 lifestyle never quite suited Kelan Kline. His first job out of college in 2012 was in insurance sales and involved cold calling.
“It lasted about two weeks,” he told Business Insider. Quick corporate stints became “kind of a recurring story for me.”
He cycled through several jobs before becoming a jail deputy in Rochester, New York. By 2016, he and his wife, Brittany, were newly married, had bought a starter home, and were paying down roughly $40,000 in student-loan debt.
“There was a lot of financial burden on us,” he said. Plus, they wanted more control over their time.
The couple started looking into businesses that could eventually replace their salaries. They landed on a personal finance blog partly because the startup costs were minimal: they launched The Savvy Couple with a web-hosting plan that cost $2.95 a month.
The potential upside also appealed to Kelan.
“With an online business, it’s unlimited scalability because you’re reaching the entire world,” he said. At first, however, they weren’t reaching anybody. “It was tough. We were starting from scratch. We didn’t have any tech background.”
For nine months, the blog generated no revenue. Then they made $50 from a sponsored post.
It was enough to convince Kelan that their site had potential, and about two weeks after that first paycheck landed, he left his job to focus fully on the business. The Savvy Couple eventually grew enough for Brittany to leave her teaching job in 2019 and join it full time.
Courtesy of Brittany and Kelan Kline
In 2023, their business surpassed $1 million in annual revenue for the first time. Profit-and-loss statements from Savvy Media Marketing, reviewed by Business Insider, reported total sales of about $1.3 million in 2023. In 2024, they brought in about $1.1 million.
Over the years, the Klines said they’ve used four primary methods to monetize their online businesses.
1. Display advertising. According to the Klines, one of the simplest ways to monetize a website with significant traffic is through display advertising. Think: visual online ads, such as banners, images, or videos.
The way it works is, a publisher — website owners or app makers — can join an advertising network that places ads throughout the site. The publisher is then typically compensated based on how many people view those ads.
For the Klines, the appeal was that once the traffic existed, display advertising as an income source was “really passive.” The limitation is that the model depends heavily on maintaining an audience.
2. Affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing allows a creator to earn a commission for recommending another company’s product or service.
The Klines, for example, have written articles that review or compare products and services. When a reader follows an affiliate link, “you get paid a commission based on either them signing up or purchasing,” they explained.
It can work particularly well for creators whose audiences already turn to them for recommendations. However, like display advertising, affiliate marketing requires a reliable way to reach potential customers. If website traffic disappears, which the Klines have dealt with over the past couple of years, affiliate revenue can decline with it.
Courtesy of Kelan and Brittany Kline
3. Sponsorships. Once a creator builds an audience, “there’ll be companies that want to get in front of your audience because you have their ideal audience’s attention and trust,” Kelan said.
A sponsorship might be a one-time campaign or an ongoing arrangement in which a company pays a recurring fee.
4. Selling your own products and services. The Klines have increasingly favored a fourth strategy: selling something they control themselves. That can include courses, memberships, digital downloads, or coaching.
Brittany has taken the lead on The Savvy Mama, an offshoot of their original site focused on household finances, meal planning, and family routines. She said the key to creating products has been identifying specific problems her audience already wants solved.
“We didn’t make products just for the fun of it,” she said. “The audience needed something. They had a problem, and then the products that I created solved the problem.”
One common issue among her readers was deciding what to feed their families, so she created a membership that provides meal plans and recipes. The membership costs $9 a month and had about 1,000 members at the time of the interview, according to the Klines.
Digital products can require substantial work up front, but once they’re built, there’s not a ton of maintenance required, she added: “You create it, and then market it, and let it do the work.”
Why they’re prioritizing recurring revenue
The Klines still believe online businesses can offer low startup costs, flexibility, and significant room to scale, but if they were starting from scratch in 2026, they wouldn’t build a traditional blog that depends primarily on Google search traffic.
“The big lesson we learned from both of our blogs losing traffic is the importance of owning the business and not being reliant on one traffic form,” Kelan said.
They’re now focusing more on digital products, memberships, YouTube, and a marketing agency that helps local businesses. Kelan particularly likes models under which customers pay month after month.
The broader principle, he said, is to do more of the work up front — whether that means building a useful digital product or setting up systems for a business client — and then create a revenue stream that can continue over time.
