My January 2016 Monthly Blog Income Report

Welcome to the 3rd official income report I’m sharing with readers of LRS.
I already feel like I myself am realizing new things and coming up with new ideas solely as a result of writing and publishing these pieces.
Make sure to let me know if it’s helping you. And if yes, what else you want me to include.
Here’s what happened back in January 2016, when I was still hustling on turning this into a business that makes money monthly so I can completely change my lifestyle after that (which I did):
Earnings
Freelance work $728
UpWork $574
Individual clients $140
Another platform $14
Books $21
Sold on Smashwords – $10
Sold on my site – $11 (4 books)
Sponsored content $40
TapInfluence $40
Expenses
Web-servisces, Subscriptions $12
Blubbry $12
Revenue: $789
- Freelancing
Wherever you don’t see the platform where I earned the money from, you see ‘Client’. In the original table I had a name cause I also had relationships with these people. But no need to include it so I just refer to each as a client.
Obviously, freelancing is a lucrative opportunity for anyone wanting to start making their first money online.
It’s nice to have a skill you can offer in order to get paid, and also to provide samples to some previous work. That’s where the articles I had already published on my blog came in handy.
I was eager to send better proposals to jobs that seemed relevant and for which I knew I could do a good job.
If you keep doing that, you’ll find regular clients. Every now and then, you’ll also land a good gig that’s bigger and makes up for a whole monthly income.
If you’re still thinking of ways to make money from your laptop but think you need experience, capital, connections, etc., top right there.
Go to UpWork and make a profile, and start looking at the job offers related to your field.
Even if you can’t fall into a category for freelance work such as writing, web design, or else, you can do virtual assistance for somebody and help them out with easy tasks.
Want it bad enough, and you can make this same income every month.
From then on, you can only scale, build a name for yourself, and increase your income.
- Books
I’ve been selling my books on my site (using the wonderful and free WooCommerce WordPress plugin to add an online store to the already existing site and blog).
I also had a problem with underpricing.
I wasn’t feeling comfortable selling in the first place, and undervalued the effort I put into creating the content, and doing all the other necessary stuff to turn it into a real self-published book that can be read on any device. I put ridiculously low prices on each piece as you can see, and didn’t bother with promotion.
But as we know, creating a product is one thing. Marketing it is completely another.
A platform where I first appeared as an author was Smashwords. Still got my books up there, actually.
I wasn’t on Amazon initially because it didn’t send payments to countries like mine, so I was a bit left behind.
You can find my books there now, though.
The 4 books that sold on my site for that month were obviously priced quite low for all the work I put into them, and I can’t say there was any special marketing involved in this other that announcing it with a post and creating sales pages (like this one).
Quite unprofessional, and was like that for the next year or so too.
- Sponsored content
This time it was TapInfluence, which is a pretty popular platform. I don’t rely on it, as maybe the work I do and what I can offer isn’t that good of a deal to employers and brands on it.
So just every now and then I’d get a social media campaign from them, post a link on a few channels, and get paid for it.
Conclusion
Although I’ve been writing a ton of content for some time before I started the money-making part, freelancing is what helped me realize there’s potential to make a living out of this.
Once I started earning this amount of dollars 3 months in a row, I knew I’d never get a real job and will only improve my skills, learn more about the possibilities of the digital world, and work my ass off till I get results by doing what I love, and go the extra mile.