Welcome to my Passive Income report for April 2018. April was a month of reflection as I looked back over everything I have been doing over the past five months since I really started getting serious about replacing my regular income with passive income. Looking into how I have been spending my time revealed to me a few things which I will discuss here and explain how I plan to fix them.

The big elephant in the room is the topic of cryptocurrency. There were some huge opportunities for me in the crypto space which I took advantage of, but they were short-lived, kind-of. Though my cryptocurrency holdings are recovering well (see below), mining with the current equipment I have is getting more challenging. Though crypto pricing is back up to around where it was in early December of last year, the difficulty to mine has increased quite a bit. With that said, I am still able to turn a profit due to having paid off my mining rigs so quickly. With my current set up, I can still mine $1,500 US worth of crypto in a month. My electricity costs are about $400/mo so that puts me at a profit of $1,100 per month.

The mining rigs do not take much to keep up but with summer approaching, I have some big decisions to make with where they are currently running from. I need a proper cooling system to keep the rigs and the room temperature down. I estimate that increasing my electricity costs substantially right away. Last summer in Modesto, CA we had over three months of 95+ degree temperatures. It was 84 degrees out the other day and the room temperature near the rigs was 112 degrees. So in regards to cryptocurrency mining, I need to look at my options. I will explain more in my next Mining Update video on the State of Tech AltCast YouTube channel. What I really need is a solar solution.

Another source of income over the past few months has been my How to build a Mining Rig Course. With the crypto pricing correction and the crazy prices of mining hardware, the interest in mining has gone way down as well.

I have been putting out a lot of videos but this is the time of year where most will see a slight dip in their average view counts anyway. YouTube has been making a lot of changes to their suggestion algorithm which has helped some of my videos while at the same time hurting others. This is an ever-changing process toward growth.

This is why I am doing all of this on the side while keeping my core focus on Hill Media Group. I have learned a lot over the past six months, especially in the cryptocurrency world. I would not trade that new knowledge for anything. I’m still making money.

Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel to follow along as I continue to explore new ways to grow my personal income.

April 2018 Side Income Total – $4,004.92 (-18.2%)

YouTube

• StateOfTech – $987.69 (-11.76%) Subscribers: 29,902 (+0.44%) Watch Time: 1,116,955 Minutes (-4.53%)
  This YouTube channel is part mobile technology review videos and part tech tutorial videos. After a huge month of new content last month, April slowed a bit which brought me back to normal. Each month I am getting better at determining what content this audience wants.
• Ditch Auto – $419.07 (-4.93%) Subscribers: 25,935 (+4.64) Watch Time: 813,763 Minutes (-1.67%)
  Ditch Auto is a YouTube channel around the topic of Photography. I added a few videos in April but have not had much time to do more than review a few products. The product review videos do not do as well for YouTube growth as educational videos.
• Jerad Hill – $45.13 (+5.27%) Subscribers: 5214 (+0.12%) Watch Time: 37,249 Minutes (+10.65%)
  This is my personal channel. I started uploading more content this month but am having trouble with it being found. This channel is so old and has been unused so many times. I am starting to see very slow growth here. Trying to figure out my voice and what topics are best for me to focus on.
• AltCast – $0 (0%) Subscribers: 1562 (+8%) Watch Time: 32,634 Minutes (-49.59%)
  AltCast is a new channel started in January 2018 with a focus on Cryptocurrency Mining. Growth is slow here due to the decrease in interest in mining Cryptocurrency. I still need to reach 250,000 watch minutes in order to monetize this channel. I am currently at around 185,000. I feel like I will need to pivot here in order to regain growth and bring this channel to monetization.

Amazon Affiliate

• Amazon Product Links – $840.86 (-13.52%)
  Nothing really new to report here except that I am playing around with my own redirect links to Amazon so I could more easily fix links when a product on Amazon goes out of stock. Want to show me some love on Amazon? Use this link the next time you go to purchase something on Amazon.

Google Adsense

• Google Adsense links/display – $29.46 (+6.7%)
  I may finally have seen the bottom of the drop from Google’s Algorithm change earlier this year. I have been posting some of my videos on my websites with short articles which could also be helping. Next months report should show some additional growth here as well because I have been having some of my videos transcribed and that should help with SEO. Will be interesting to see if there was any value in doing that work.
  Sites with Adsense Integration: StateOfTech.Net, DitchAuto.Com

Jerad’s Courses

• Paid courses on Jerad.Courses – $98.00 (-84.61%)
  The Mining Rig Course is definitely not producing like it did for the first three months of this year. On this site alone, that course produced just over $3,200 in income. Not too bad, but I was hoping for more. I should have more aggressively marketed that course while the interest in mining was still high.

Udemy.Com

• Paid courses on Udemy – $122.71 (-63.43%)
  Just like with my personal course site, the revenue has dropped a bit on Udemy. To date, the Mining course has brought in just over $2,200 on Udemy.

Other Income

• Other monthly revenue streams from side work – $1462.00 (+10.62%)
  I am almost back to where things were before in this category. I am not selling mining hardware anymore. This category consists of passive income that comes in from various other past projects and content that I no longer work on growing.

Investments

I was right about last month being the bottom. Things have started to recover as you can see in my holdings below. I put an additional $500.00 into stocks with Robinhood but the rest of the growth was due to stocks recovering value. Crypto has recovered nicely with almost a 100% recovery over last month. I have not put any additional money into cryptocurrency but I have continued to mine crypto through the entire month of April. My plan with Crypto was to hold on to what I had (HODL) and wait for it to recover. My investment strategy is a long game here.

• Stocks (Robinhood) – Holdings: $9,186.30 (+23.21%)
  As I mentioned above, I put $500 into stocks this month and saw some recovery on some other stocks I had that dropped last month. This month I am up and it looks like that will continue into May.
• Cryptocurrency – Holdings: $6,698.15 (+92.36%)
  I was right about March being the bottom. As you can see, my crypto holdings are recovering at a nice pace. I am continuing to mine with 720mh/s of power going to Ethereum and 3,200 sols/s going to ZCash.
  If you want to get started investing in Cryptocurrency, I suggest joining Coinbase. You can buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin currently.

April was a mixed bag. I still need to figure out a good flow for content release so my audiences know what to expect from me. I need to work on a path that I hope to guide them through. I really need to get serious about updating some of my older courses and producing some premium content for my students as well.

I am considering doing more than just reporting monthly on my progress. I have received a lot of questions from people who want to know more about what I am doing. In a perfect world, I would be producing videos a couple of times each week on this, but that just isn’t sustainable at this time. Maybe a thought for the future.

Thanks for coming along. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments section below.