January 2015 Side Hustle Report

You can view this month’s full financial report when I write it tomorrow. I thought it would be good for me to keep track and maintain transparency surrounding my success (or lack thereof) in my side hustle endeavors.

Freelance Writing (SeekingAlpha)

My 2015 Goals for freelance writing were to write 12 premium articles (average one per month) and to make $1,200. After January, here is where I stand on those goals:

I got my first article published on January 19th, and for the month I got three articles published on three stocks: Netflix, RetailMeNot, and MercadoLibre. SA paid $35 per article and 1 cent for each of the 7,262 non-mobile page views. The MercadoLibre article was accepted as a PRO article, so I receive a minimum payment of $150 for that little dandy.

It’s apparent to me that both goals in this regard were probably low. I think 5-6 articles will be the monthly average going forward, and I’m thinking $1,200 will probably be accomplished in three to five months. I’m hoping to see a “network effect” with the SA publishing. As I get more articles published, I get more followers (I have 81 so far), and then more views from those followers. I also have this blog on my SA profile page, so it’s great to see links feed from one website to the other.

The Blog

I made three goals this year with regard to the blog. Hit 5,000 page views in a month, make $120 (average $10 a month), and write 100 blog posts. I’m still not sure how I’ll actually make any significant money on this blog. You may have noticed an adsense box in the right sidebar. I’m sort of content with that for now–I really just want to make enough to pay the hosting fee. I also have some Amazon affiliate links in a couple articles when I reference an item that I actually use and think is beneficial.

I wrote 12 posts in January (I’m not counting the SA article posts that I link to from here)

I didn’t make any money at Amazon this month. I did pull down a solid $5.78 in adsense, though–so I’m pretty psyched about that.

I’m very pleased with the views in January. I had 218 views in December, and I would guess about half of those were made by me on various devices trying to get site formatting and stuff corrected. January was so much better with 4,127 page views. A huge part of that was a result of SeekingAlpha syndicating one of my blog posts–which led to 1,250 views in one day. It definitely pays to start associating yourself with bigger fish. I will just keep writing, keep interacting with the financial independence community, and trying to write relevant and compelling posts.

Conclusion

All side hustle income this month added up to about $297. I’m really happy with that, and I hope that it establishes a baseline. It probably took me 20 hours to make that money, so the hourly rate is pretty terrible. But, I’m pretty confident things will only get better and more efficient from here.

Thanks for reading!

Eric