Income Report: June

Ok, so this is my second report and it certainly threw up a few elements I hadn't considered before. It's early days with all of this but I've certainly learned a bit about consistency (or lack thereof), assumptions and random trends (in this case "Brexit").

So it's time to have another look.

Writing
Resume writing: $726. So for May I estimated that I made about $800 in resume writing. It actually turned out at a more healthy $953. But at the same time it should have been more...

Why should it have been more? Poor organization by me and Brexit. I'm British so kept a keen eye on events in the run up to the referendum that decided on whether the UK was going to leave the European Union. What I hadn't factored in was the fact that UK voters would actually vote to leave!

How does this relate to my earnings? Well, my resume work is with a UK-based company and they pay in pound sterling. I get paid directly to my PayPal account, denominated in US dollars. The day before the vote you could get US$1.43 or so for every one pound. The shock of the departure from the European Union saw the UK currency collapse and resulted in a US$1.33 conversion rate.

That wouldn't have mattered so much if I had invoiced the UK company at the correct time for payment for May - i.e. before the referendum. But I didn't. As a result, I probably lost about $60 as a result of the pound collapsing.

So the message is to stay organized.

As for June, volume slowed because of the summer so I received less work than before and can expect fewer resumes at the moment. As a result, there's even more reason to build out my own resume writing brand locally.

Article writing: $120. I haven't done much in the way of writing but I did manage to get paid $120 for a single article. That's because the last piece I wrote up required a lot more work to get it into shape.

That's the big problem with this consistent gig. It takes a long time to get the written piece to the right standard. For example, I've been working on a piece over the last three weeks or so and still haven't finished it.

Surveys
Prolific Academic: $27. As mentioned previously, this is the only survey I bother with.

And this was a pretty good month for it as well. One reason for that: Brexit. Because I'm British there were a number of surveys posted to see how people would vote in the referendum. This was great for me.

The currency element sucks again, though. as the surveys are denominated in pound sterling. But all in all a decent month for that.

Other
Fiverr: $0. Zero sales this month.

Postloop: $0. Not the best result here either. I've done a bit of forum writing but only worth pennies, So I'll skip that.

So that's it: $873 compared with a revised figure for May of $1,127.50

Down on the previous month by over $250. For now, I'll give myself a score of C--. No passive income, less diversification and a lower return than last month. At the same time, I'll raise last month's to C+ after getting more income in resume writing than I expected.

It's not the best, but the marathon continues. And the passive income story is to come.

Income Report: May

So, this is the first one I've done and I haven't got a great deal to report as such. I want to use this as my baseline and reference point going forward so that I really can measure how successful (or not) I am being.

For the moment, I'm purely going to focus on my online-related income. That's the real long-term story as far as I'm concerned, even if I could do with significantly picking up my offline endeavors.

My approach to this will evolve over time as I find the right metrics and put aside some proper time to record this information. It's probably not the right accounting approach (but who cares) but I'll record all the income earned during the month rather than received and paid. It's easy for now because my income isn't that diverse or sophisticated. And for the future, there's my finance jobs site. 

So here it goes....

Writing

Resume writing: $800. I'm yet to have the data confirmed but by my estimates it should be around $800 for the month of May. This has become a significant story for me and will continue to be for now. Essentially, I work freelance for a company abroad and they line up the clients etc for me to work on.

Ideally, I want to be able to replicate the same approach where I live in Asia because I won't need to give a big chunk of cash to HQ every time I do the work. That's the plan in coming weeks/months. But I've only been doing it for a few months and they are doing all the hard work in terms of getting clients, so I've no complaints.

Article writing: $160. I write articles for a website in Singapore a few times a month and since the beginning of the year it's been quite consistent. It's great that it's $80 a time but my trouble is finding the time and inclination to finish the work. The owner is quite rightly incredibly thorough and every time I write a piece I "look forward to" the revisions he asks for and added information. 

With both of these writing gigs I need to put my ego by the door and just suck up the revisions that are invariably requested. It's not something I'm used to but it's good for me.

Surveys

Prolific Academic: $5.50. This is the only survey I bother with - the others seem to be boring / hard to monetize / repetitive / confusing and the list goes on. As the name suggests, Prolific Academic is all about academic research and actually pretty interesting. I didn't remember to check for many surveys this month but I had a few. Easy. 

Other

Fiverr: $4 (after Fiverr's $1 costs). Not a great return really but I have a few fairly passive income gigs on the site so I was happy to get this one without really having to work any more for it. 

Postloop: $5. Things have gone fairly quiet for me on Postloop - i.e. I've been busy with other writing aspects so I haven't really focused much on it. But it's always there and it's a useful default when I've nothing better to do (which wasn't that often in May).

So that's it. $974.50. It won't set the world on fire but it's better than a slap in the face. For now I'll give myself a score of C. It's a base line and I hope to be able to improve on it. Importantly, only Fiverr out of the amount was effectively "passive". So less than 1%, which is not great.

Hopefully, in coming months I'll be able to build that out.

Income Reports

Over the years, I've enjoyed playing with this blog. It started out as a blog on general musings on life, pivoted into providing personal finance guidance / coaching, and has morphed into a focus on online income streams.

A lack of focus? Maybe.

But I've decided to keep it with an income-stream bias, but I want to add a dynamic to keep me more "honest".  Over the years I've perused many blog sites that outline how much they made from their ventures over a specific month. In other words, they publish a monthly income reports.

I have absolutely no expectation of achieving numbers anywhere close to the likes of Smart Passive Income. Crazy numbers! In fact, there appear to be quite a few bloggers making at least okay money in different initiatives according to this list, and my expectations are still lower.

But I do want to create mechanisms that make me a bit more accountable. It's also a great way to track my various income streams  and its progression (something I really should already be doing but I'm not doing very well). 

Do I expect to attract more readers to this site? No. I haven't made any effort to drive traffic here so far and a few extra musings won't change that. There will still be casual observers, people falling on the site and then passing by. That's what the internet is all about and that's why we love it.

What I do hope to do is use this blog more constructively as a way to record what I'm doing, why I'm doing it and whether or not it's been successful. It's part of my personal journey. Time to embrace it. 

So I guess it's "watch this space" and we'll see how this experiment goes. 

53 Work At Home Online Opportunities...And other Fiverr Gigs

I'll get to the 53 Work At Home Online Opportunities element in a second.

But the thing about 'living' online is that there is so much out there that you didn't realize existed (or even realized that you ever needed!). That in itself is a charm and a curse. Is it useful? Is it relevant? Am I killing brain cells and time or am I genuinely adding value to myself?

That's the world I'm still learning to navigate as I look at earning more online income. There are a lot of good strategies out there which may have value for me in the future; there are plenty that make absolutely no sense to me at all. In the meantime, I'm having fun learning and falling at every turn.

And in my endeavors to build more in the way of income streams online, I've spent quite a bit of time on Fiverr, pitching my wares there and learning how other people are making money there. There are people pitching all kinds of services there. You need a logo? It's yours for $5 (well, $5 plus a bit of Fiverr commission). You need an article written for you? This is the place to go for the cheap and cheerful.

Make money online by being smart

The problem with the approach in many cases, though, is the extent to which you are trading time for money. If it's a gig that takes five minutes to create, then brilliant -- you've earned your $5 (minus commissions) in five minutes flat. But if you've got a gig that doesn't allow you to upsell any other service, and it's not taking just a few minutes to do, then you could be working an hour or two for $5. And that doesn't work out well in my head -- I realized that after a bit of trial and error.

It's true that different parts of the world have different costs of living and some people are actually able to make a decent living by being ultra efficient. But for someone like me with a lower work ethic than a lot of people I've got to work out whether I'm really making the most of my time online.

And then there are gigs like this 53 Work At Home Online one that fits perfectly into the model. It's created once and can be sold multiple times. You are, in reality treating Fiverr as your retail outlet. Your Amazon, if you will. Ok, you don't get the traffic in the same way, and you will have to promote and manually send out your work by yourself, but it's a great way of using the Fiverr system without spending hours upon hours in creating a service. It's an approach that I'm adopting.

At the end of the day, making money online is very much about having the right systems in place that will allow you to leverage other people's time, money, energy and platforms. It's about working smarter as well as harder. Time for me to practice what I preach.

Building Online Income Momentum

Making money online is actually quite easy....if you have something to offer. And package it in the right way.

That's my current interpretation anyway. Over the last month I've been focusing exactly on that - having something to offer and making it looking appealing enough for someone to be willing enough to pay for it. Well, I've spent a lot time fine-tuning my profiles on PeoplePerHour and Upwork, in addition to looking at the skills I've got to offer and tried to improve them. And it's started to pay off.

I've managed to snag myself a regular resume / CV writing gig with a company out of London, while another company contacted me to help re-write the content of their website. I've also had requests for two one-off projects. So there's clearly been some traction.

Yes, it is still trading time for money. The slower I do a task, the less of a return I'm getting on a per hourly basis. It's not perfect and it doesn't represent my long-term focus of building passive income streams.

But for now, at least, it's a regular income stream that can build into something bigger if I play my cards right. It also helps me to improve my career capital.

So I will still default to Prolific Academic and Postloop for easy and consistent earnings opportunities. They do that very well. But for building my long-term opportunities I will continue to look to build the future.

Prolific Survey: A Great Online Survey Site

If you look hard enough you can always find ways to earn money online. Don't get me wrong, sometimes you have to put the time in to get very little in return. But sometimes it seems like taking candy from a baby (albeit still a small candy...).

I don't tend to get excited about the world of surveys. They seem to take forever and you really don't get a lot in return very often. The one survey site I do like to have plenty of time for, however, is Prolific Academic. I signed up to be a survey participant back in December and I've been fortunate enough to get signed up for quite a few surveys.

The surveys themselves tend to be academic in nature (hence the name of the site) created by universities all over the world, so some of them are actually quite interesting. Face perception, the relationship between the multiple meanings of ambiguous words, apparel shopping, your willingness to buy a solar charger were all among them.

From experience, they tend to take anywhere from a few minutes all the way up to 30 minutes to complete. They also pay from about $1 a time up to about $6, if you are really lucky in being part of the right demographic -- not a bad return for a survey. The minimum checkout level is around $7.50 (essentially it's denominated in pound sterling and so has a checkout at GBP5.00) and gets paid through PayPal. It just seems like a win-win to me.

So take a look -- there are far worse ways to earn a few dollars online than Prolific Academic.

Getting Focused on Income Initiatives

The trouble with the Christmas period is that it's so easy to get derailed from all the grandest of intentions. One minute you're thinking about slowing down in the run up to the main days in question, the next minute it's the first week of January. And you've been extremely unproductive for a solid three weeks.

So that's where I am now, trying to get a bit of momentum, focus and grit into my money earning approach. What the downtime did, though, allow me to do was to do a bit more reading and research about the whole active-passive income world, and how I might be a bit more strategic in my approach.

This was the backdrop to me falling upon Side Hustle Nation, which I guess is like a movement promoting your sideline enterprises which, if you so choose, can come to replace your 9 to 5 job existence.

So far I've only managed to listen to one of the podcasts on there but it was incredibly inspiring. Essentially, there are plenty of us out there trying our hand at creating a bigger and better earnings world than we are currently experiencing. And it's sites like this that can only be good for keeping us connected to like-minded people (it sounds like I'm evangelizing like a paid spokesman, but I'm certainly not associated with the site - I just like the principle).

I also signed myself up for the regular email updates, again viewing it as a way to stay connected with the type of conversations I need to hear. Pretty useful stuff. One that stuck out was an interesting insight from a recent email that talked about getting the balance between time spent on your active and passive income streams.

I'm currently still in the building phase of my coaching and freelance writing space, both of which can be viewed as active income areas - areas which need to monetize sooner rather than later if only to help cover the bills.

Then there's the passive income space - the information product and eBook ideas. These require upfront investment without any promise of a return. If I build it people still may not come, but I need to build because that's part of my long-term income strategy. So how should I split my time? Well, I've decided that currently it should be a 75:25 split, where 75% of my time I'm working on the active income areas and passive income makes up the rest.

Importantly, though, it's the very fact that I've added time allocation to both spaces that's significant. I hadn't until this point been focused enough to think in these terms. The ratio itself may well change very quickly once I get a better sense of the amount of time I should be spending on both. But at least I'm finally having the conversation in the first place.

It's a great way to get more focused for 2016.

Slow Inroads Into Online Money Making

The good thing about keeping a blog on this type of topic is that it keeps you "honest". That is, you can state one week that you focus for the coming week is X and realize that you have to justify the reason why you took the Y route.

We all have ideas and intentions but unless there's a bit of energy and action to back them, they simply remain as ideas and intentions. So I find myself writing this having not touched the information marketing product space at all. That's potentially one week of passive income I've thrown away. Okay, maybe that's a bit dramatic but that's the principle.

To be fair, I did intend to work on the information marketing side but I was a bit under the weather for a few days so was sidelined. I also had a few distractions.

One of which was writing for Scripted - editing a previously offered piece, in addition to creating one fresh "How To" article. So that's a few extra dollars ($28), which is nice.

The other distraction was working on an Elance test I had received. I've been put on a three-person short list for a specific job. The job itself is a long-term freelance gig that involves compiling a weekly report. So in order to get the gig, I needed to work hard on my test report.

The trouble with all that is that the test also showed that I really hate reading instructions! Spell them out in person, put them in video form, give me pretty pictures. All fine. But physically having to read them and work through them simply shows up the learning style that works least for me.

And to add to that, having to reconcile numbers and words in a coherent format is also not my strong suit. Suffice to say, the task took a hell of a lot longer than it really should have.

Maybe if I get the gig I'll be able to sail through it all, now that I've worked through the basics. And the money being offered isn't crazy bad ($15/hour). But that's time taken away from me investing in my business, it's time doing something that I may intrinsically struggle with, and it's time doing something that I really don't find interesting.

Let's see how this plays out.