December 2016 Progress Report – $700/month Passive Income Attained

I am currently in Chiang Mai, Thailand, the place considered the “digital nomad capital” (or so they say). I am pleasantly surprised with this city. It is a lot cleaner and more modern in ways than I expected, and I can see why foreigners who visit end up staying here longer term. I’m loving the weather right now, but I don’t know if I could take the summer heat if I tried to hang out here longer. However, I will definitely be back for another winter!

Back to my December progress. December was an interesting month. I was still battling with some anxiety issues, and I guess I still am. On the bright side, I’ve also been making more money with Etsy and testing out a new income channel. I’m so surprised and happy that my passive income is really working out! None of this is a pipe dream anymore, and it feels amazing.

Feelings

My anxiety has literally been coming and lingering for no apparent reason. Well, I guess the stress stems from the physical symptoms that come with the feeling, and the feeling like I have no control over it. It’s fine when I have distractions but when my mind has a bit of room it will go back to the thought that I have uncontrollable anxiety.

So I’ve decided to take a “fake it till I make it” approach. I’m going to stop discussing this issue as much as possible and enjoy life without going back to the bad habit. I’m going to stay confident that I can live a happy, stress-free life. I really hope it works.

New Experiment: Fiverr

Because I’ve been doing graphic design for Etsy, I wanted to try and use my abilities to leverage a different income stream called Fiverr (you can use my link here if you want to test the channel out yourself). Fiverr is a platform in which sellers can make $5 for whatever service they offer.

Most people steer away from it because of its low profit per sale, and it makes sense. For a $5 gig you actually only make $4 – and when you withdraw the funds to your PayPal account they take another 2% cut.

Regardless, my strategy was to start building an account and then outsource the work later if I wanted to. I created gigs that don’t require too much creative work so that if anyone were to take over I could more easily train someone to do so. With some virtual assistants I could turn this active income channel into passive.

However, during this month I found building a profile to be harder than I thought. It’s not like Etsy in which you can rank yourself right from start. You have to keep obtaining views, orders, and reviews to get people noticing you. I was about to give up in December, but when I realized the importance of reviews I started using the tactic of searching buyer requests and making offers. I started taking custom orders. These people who take on your gig may (or may not) leave you a review. I have more reviews now and have now been getting a lot more messages and purchases. In the future, I will create some blog posts around my Fiverr experience.

Etsy

This was another great month for Etsy! I ended up focusing on building my new shops, which generated additional profit for me.

I actually tried to expand to other digital product platforms but it was harder than I thought. Etsy seems to be the largest platform for digital downloads (please correct me if I’m wrong), but hopefully I can find other ones to list my products on. I may eventually create my own website for my downloads and try sending Facebook ads over.

As you can see my goal is to succeed in new platforms now that I know Etsy works. I don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket because if anything happens to this channel it will cause a lot of problems for me.

If you’d like to open your own Etsy shop, you can use my link here which gives you a free 40 listings (and provides me with 40 free listings as well).

Kindle

I made a few bucks here and there with Kindle. Still not focusing on it but I plan to revisit again in the future.

October – $10k/month goal

I’ve been mapping out my plans to attain the $10k/month by October of 2017. I’m going to start writing the book I’ve been wanting to create – an ultimate guide for aspiring digital nomads/financial freedom fighters.

Conclusion

It’s a really good feeling that my passive income can pretty much support me in places like Chiang Mai, Thailand. For 2017, I’m going to focus on my $10k/month goal as well as work on control over myself and my feelings so I can remove random waves of anxiety.