January was another good month. Slow and steady progress per usual, but good progress in my opinion. Here were the updates for this month:
More freelancing income!
My freelancing manager wants me to essentially help him start a new business by strategizing the creation of the product and managing teams. He knows about my digital nomad goals and says this project can actually work with my life abroad. He’s sent over a sort of job description, and if things work out, my income from freelancing will literally surpass my income from my first job out of college!
Testing a new passive income channel!
I decided to buy this WordPress theme and test it out. I made a site with it, and surprisingly it was quite easy to add Amazon products into it. The theme isn’t really SEO friendly, but it’s more for promoting on social channels or paid ads. I was thinking I would try this avenue in the future, when I’m doing well with my other passive income channels.
An updated design on our travel blog and a “viral” blog post!
I recently met up with my friend to work more on our blog and I’m happy to say the site is looking better than ever and I’m quite proud of it. I published this blog post about Google Flights and it ended up getting thousands of views and over 600 likes/comments/shares on Facebook. It was pretty incredible and satisfying. I was able to speak with people to help them with their questions, and one person even reached out to me with a possible position in marketing (that’s also fit for a digital nomad!). I guess we’re going to Skype sometime this month so we’ll see how that goes!
A partnership with a travel app
We were contacted by Tripwire to be one out of their 15 ambassadors on their app. It hasn’t launched yet but my friend and I have Skyped with the founder twice and got access to their beta version. It’s an amazing app for social sharing while traveling and lets you meet new people through it. The great thing about being an ambassador is that all our posts will show on everyone’s newsfeeds due to our special profiles. I actually have faith that it will be big, cause the interface is clean and I really want to use it while I’m abroad. The thing is it’s only available on iOS currently so I won’t be able to use it until an Android version launches. Since my mom has an iPhone I might need to hop on hers while I wait >_>.
Joint book venture with my real estate mentor
Jay and I are planning to write a book teaching people how to “house hack”. We want to create a really solid book, aiming for 300 pages with a solid marketing strategy. We need to push ourselves further on the project though cause we haven’t gotten too far on it, but yeah!
Planning to create a 1-2 hour documentary
I wanted to create a big project while abroad so I think a documentary could be really cool. Because of this I am about to purchase a new lens today for my camera (planning to get a Sigma 30 mm f/1.4 lens for Canon) – after a lot of research.
I think I have an idea for a business!
The idea has already been done, but I think I would like to aim for this while abroad. I need to find another digital nomad passionate about similar things as myself to work with though. I’m going to keep this project idea on the D/L.
January 2016 Income Report
Freelancing
Again…same as last month; I’ve made a total of $2300 this month for freelancing. This includes managing Facebook ads and consulting for a client and doing graphic design for another client. As previously mentioned I will possibly have a new gig next month which will put me up to $3,300/month!
Normal Income
Still working my fulltime job so received my normal income for the month.
Passive Income
Kindle Books – $50.58 – some improvement…slowly but surely! I now have 6 books on Amazon Kindle. Really looking to put 3 more out in February. It sucks when you put a book out and it doesn’t really sell, but I figure the more I publish the better, regardless. I end up spending a lot of time on each of these books though.
Etsy – $29.44 – made 6 sales from my Etsy shop! I haven’t been making new templates, but I created social channels and scheduled out posts to advertise. I am afraid that this channel won’t be as sustainable unless I put in a lot of work – for some reason I have this unsettling feeling that I won’t get many sales in February lol. I guess that’s the issue with kindle and Etsy – it’s there but you don’t know how stable the income will be!
Total: $80.02 (almost double from last month!)
Patreon
Didn’t make anything from Patreon this month. Haven’t been putting out music videos much!
Blogging
None from blogging.
Conclusion
Last night I got so overwhelmed by the amount of things I’m doing. I have given up a lot of channels but I’m still grinding away on at least 5 other channels. I’m still working on music and that has been taking up a lot of time. (On the bright side I’m making some dooope stuff!) If I can’t get to $1000/month by May, I hope I can at least get to $500…We’ll see.
