February was definitely a reality check that came quick. I knew that January was a Unicorn Month and stated that in last months side income report. I just don’t like seeing red. I am still turning a profit and am up compared to last year, but there is a lot of red in this months report.
I spent most of February concentrating on content. I also played around with Live Streaming quite a bit. One of my plans over the next few months is to start doing some live streaming. I am still trying to figure out what I want to do in that space. My studio is now set up to live stream.
I burned out on buying and selling Cryptocurrency Mining equipment. It was a lot to keep up with and I did not want it occupying so much of my mental bandwidth. By the end of the month, I had sold off the remaining inventory I had. I still have my small mining farm and have been trying to decide what to do with that. It’s earning an income but when the days start to warm up I will need to figure out a solution for cooling the warehouse.
This has also been kind of a tough month for my investments. The stock market corrected quite harshly this month. I was not hit too hard because in December I sold off most of my stocks that had not seen at least 10% growth in the previous quarter so I got lucky there. The stocks I still hold did not get hit too hard and by the end of February, they had completely recovered.
Cryptocurrency continues to get hammered as well. I am still showing an increase in my holdings because I continue to mine Ethereum and ZCash, but I did lose quite a bit. I hope that the coming months bring some recovery to that market.
March will bring a new challenges as I continue to work on content for these projects in an attempt to grow them. I recognize where most of the opportunity for growth is, I just need the time to put in the work.
I am still thrilled with how things are going so far in 2018. The year started off kind of crazy but I can now start to dig into some of my longer-term plans for side income growth. Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel to follow along as I continue to explore new ways to grow my personal income.
February 2018 Side Income Total – $5,409.45 (-35.09%)
YouTube
- StateOfTech – $879.27 (-2.51%) Subscribers: 28471 (+7.28%) Watch Time: 1,110,876 Minutes (-20.63%)
This YouTube channel is part mobile technology review videos and part tech tutorial videos. I added a few videos in February, but nothing that saw much traction. A few other videos have started to see some growth. I hope to get more content up in March. - Ditch Auto – $333.63 (-6.96%) Subscribers: 23536 (+6.72) Watch Time: 703,892 Minutes (-20.26%)
My photography channel continues to lack content. I have not had time to put anything together for Ditch Auto. I will be starting a monthly photo challenge in March so I hope to be able to produce some content around the monthly challenges. - Jerad Hill – $33.83 (+30.87%) Subscribers: 5208 (+9.96%) Watch Time: 33,665 Minutes (+1.04%)
This is my personal channel. I started uploading a few videos here and there with plans to get more serious in March. - AltCast – $0 (0%) Subscribers: 1170 (+166.51%) Watch Time: 52,661 Minutes (+201.41%)
AltCast is a new channel started January 2018 with a focus on Cryptocurrency Mining. I have seen a lot of growth here due to a give-a-way that was pretty successful. I still need to reach 250,000 watch minutes in order to monetize this channel. I am currently at around 120,000.
Amazon Affiliate
- Amazon Product Links – $855.23 (-49.83%)
The Cryptocurrency buzz is slowing so this income channel cooled off a bit. I also have not spent much time creating new content for State of Tech or Ditch Auto which are two of the bigger driving forces behind Amazon Affiliate purchases for my account.
Google Adsense
- Google Adsense links/display – $49.65 (-46.94%)
Google made a pretty sizeable algorithm change in January which put the hurt on one of my sites. State of Tech’s organic traffic basically cut in half. The algorithm change favors sites that have frequent updates and State of Tech has not had much fresh content lately. I plan to change that over the next few months to regain some ground.
Sites with Adsense Integration: StateOfTech.Net, DitchAuto.Com
Jerad’s Courses
- Paid courses on Jerad.Courses – $784.00 (-21.99%)
The Mining Rig course still continues to provide some income. It has started to taper off likely due to the interest in mining starting to slow.
Udemy.Com
- Paid courses on Udemy – $623.84 (-35.58%)
Just like with my personal course site, the revenue has dropped a bit on Udemy. I have been learning how Udemy showcases courses that decide to use their own pricing rather than allowing Udemy to run sales. I hope to discuss this later in a blog post on my experiences with using Udemy for my online courses.
Other Income
- Other monthly revenue streams from side work – $1850.00 (-43.53%)
As I mentioned earlier in this report, I have just about sold off the rest of my mining equipment that I purchased to resell. I still have my mining rigs, but that is about it. It was a lot of work to find mining hardware and to resell it. This category is going to drop off a lot in the next month as I don’t have any current plans to add any additional side income channels for now.
Investments
This is a new category that I am not including in my side income revenue because these are investments. In my opinion, these investments will not become income until I cash them out. In the future, I may break this out on its own as I have more content for this area. I have been investing on my own for a few years but I have not really taken it very seriously until late last year.
- Stocks (Robinhood) – Holdings: $7,625.02 (+16.40%)
In December I sold off all stocks that were not performing outstanding to fund the purchase of mining equipment for resale. This ended up working out to my benefit as there was a decent market correction in February. I would have lost close to 20%. Instead, I lost about 5% and then quickly regained that and more by the end of the month. - Cryptocurrency – Holdings: 5,497.37 (+36.09%)
Crypto has been hit hard this month and continues to take hits into March. I am still mining which contributes to growth in my holdings but I have lost a good portion of value from when it was at an all-time high in early January. I will likely buy in during March as the prices are too low not to. 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.
February was a good month. Though it was quite a bit lower than January, I didn’t let my expectations get in the way of remaining grounded. I was able to get a lot accomplished in February, but I did have a few setbacks. The emotional high I was riding from things going so well in December and January wore off and I started to feel it. I try hard not to be, but I can easily be affected by a loss of momentum. I am trying to figure out how to course correct when I do lose momentum.
March will be interesting because a lot of Hill Media Group projects will be coming to a close. That will free up a lot of time to work on side projects. I need to continue to work on growing Hill Media Group, but the extra time will be nice to test out a few things.
Thanks for coming along. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments section below.