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April 2018 Passive Income Report

Posted on by Jerad Hill

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.

April 2018 Passive Income Report

February 2018 Side Income Report

Posted on by Jerad Hill

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.

January 2018 Side Income Report

Posted on by Jerad Hill

The winds are a-changin’. This January was what I will call a Unicorn Month. A Unicorn Month is a month where things were definitely out of the ordinary. I am always watching for opportunities and sometimes what I thought was the opportunity actually turned out to be something else.

In December, I started mining cryptocurrency. There has been a lot of people getting into mining and that has put real strains on the supply of mining hardware. This was already happening when I started buying my initial equipment. I had a lot of people come out of the woodworks wanting information about mining. I produced a video course titled “How to Build an Ethereum Mining Rig” which performed well during the month of January. I also started looking for alternative suppliers of Graphics Cards for Mining Computers. I was fortunate enough to get a large order of them, so I sold them on Amazon and eBay for a profit. I was able to sell so many of them that I paid for all of my mining equipment and am up about $2500 at the time of writing this.

I also started producing a lot of content on the topic of Crypto Mining on YouTube. I enjoy teaching and learning so it just made sense to start producing videos. I am also using these videos to market the course I mentioned earlier.

My YouTube channels continued to grow and saw consistent traffic as the holiday season came to a close. I saw a dip toward the end of January. Revenue was down since the holidays were over so from here on out the monetization revenue will reflect more realistic numbers. A major goal is to get that back up with content that is not so seasonal.

The growth I saw in December and the Unicorn month of January will offer me some additional freedom going into February so I can focus a bit more on my side income streams in between taking care of my existing clients with Hill Media Group. Not having to worry so much about bringing in new clients for a couple of months will give me that extra focus I need to keep things moving forward.

With that said, here is my Side Income Report for January of 2018. This year is off to a great start. In February I have started filming videos on a variety of topics that I post to this website as well as my personal YouTube Channel. Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel to follow along as I continue to explore new ways to grow my personal income.

January 2018 Side Income Total – $8,334.72 (+76.9%)

YouTube

  • StateOfTech – $901.99 (-39.89%) Subscribers: 26537 (+9.35%) Watch Time: 1,399,652 Minutes (+2.49%)
    This YouTube channel is part mobile technology review videos and part tech tutorial videos. There were a few videos added to the channel this month but my focus was on other channels.
  • Ditch Auto – $358.61 (-49.65%) Subscribers: 22053 (+6.37) Watch Time: 882,775 Minutes (-15.49%)
    This YouTube channel is similar to StateOfTech but for Photography. The videos that perform well are reviews and tutorials. Not a lot of content has been added to Ditch Auto this month.
  • Jerad Hill – $25.85 (-33.01%) Subscribers: 4736 (+2.35%) Watch Time: 33,316 Minutes (-8.68%)
    This is my personal channel which I do not post too often. In February I plan to start producing a daily video. I am not sure what this is going to look like yet but I am sure it will eventually add to growth.
  • AltCast – $0 (0%) Subscribers: 439 (+100%) Watch Time: 17,471 Minutes (+100%)
    AltCast is a new channel started January 2018 with a focus on alternative forms of investing and cryptocurrency mining. This channel will not be monetizable through YouTube until I reach 1,000 subscribers and hit 4,000 watch hours for the year.

Amazon Affiliate

  • Amazon Product Links – $1,704 .69 (+67.91%)
    I saw a huge boost in Amazon Affiliate sales this month due to the success of my Cryptocurrency Mining videos and the Mining Course. People were using my links to purchase parts to build their mining rigs. On top of that, I think that a lot of people received Amazon gift cards for Christmas and were spending them on items they found through my content.

Google Adsense

  • Google Adsense links/display – $93.58 (-49.62%)
    I cut some of the fat on a couple of my websites which will initially produce a decrease in traffic. I deleted a lot of content that I did not feel was relevant anymore. Many of these pages would generate a click or two here and there from organic search, but I deleted it all so that the search engines could focus on crawling quality content.

Jerad’s Courses

  • Paid courses on Jerad.Courses – $1,005.00 (+172.57%)
    The “How to Build an Ethereum Mining” course drove the growth this month. Cryptocurrency has received a lot of attention which has driven a lot of traffic to my videos which market my course. I have not done any marketing of this course yet other than linking to it from my YouTube videos.

Udemy.Com

  • Paid courses on Udemy – $968.48 (+196.93%)
    I decided to add my Ethereum Mining course to Udemy as well. Udemy organic drove most of the traffic to this course which means I received a much smaller portion of the sales than I would on my own website It took 3x the signups to Udemy to make this amount compared to what it takes on my own course website.

Other Income

  • Other monthly revenue streams from side work – $3,276.52 (+134.21%)
    My buying and selling mining hardware paid off as this month. I was able to make some solid side income from Amazon and eBay. I even made my employee James $2,500 as he had me sell the hardware he had purchased to start mining. I made a video explaining how I bet on Mining Hardware in January over Cryptocurrency, and it paid! I put this under other income because this is not a sustainable side income that will continue on. I am only able to sell mining hardware so long as there is a huge supply and demand issue. This revenue does not include what paid off my mining hardware. I was able to pay off all of my mining hardware with the profits and have money left over, which is what I have reported here, otherwise, this number would have been much larger. I will explain this more in the side income report video I will post to my YouTube Channel.

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: $6,550.43 (-68.62%)
    In December I sold off all stocks that were not performing outstanding to fund the purchase of mining equipment for resale. My original holdings before the selloff were at $22,000 as of December 1st. I will talk about it more, but I am glad that I did. I would not have seen the huge drop in the Stock Market that happened in February. I invest in the Stock Market using the Robinhood App. I will be talking more about how I use this app on my personal YouTube channel and the AltCast YouTube Channel.
  • Cryptocurrency – Holdings: 4,039.42 (0.0%)
    Up until 2/8/2018 I held my crypto in various wallets with no simple way to get metrics on the performance of my holdings as the market fluctuates and new payouts from the mining operations are deposited. I have since started a spreadsheet to keep track of my holdings. I should be able to better report on the performance going forward. 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.

What a way to start off 2018! I am excited to see where things go. I have prepared myself for a much lower February but I do not plan on letting grass grow under my feet. With all of my mining equipment paid off, I can focus on sharing revenues from my mining operations as well. I am still working out how I am going to add that into this report as what I earn from mining I see more as an investment than I do actual revenue.

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

October 2017 Side Income Report

Posted on by Jerad Hill

I did mention last month that October was going to see a decrease in side income revenue. To recap, this is due to my inability to put much time into the below-listed channels. In August and early September, Hill Media Group saw an influx in new business, which left me with little time to work on my side-income channels. With that said, it is cool to see that I can take my eye off of these channels and still have some income from them. I recognize that I can not ignore them forever, but a month here or there is not going to kill them off.

Next month will show some growth due to the holidays approaching. Much of my content revolves around technology and photography gear so people often look for content to help make purchase decisions. I don’t see having much time in November to work on content but I am going to try to get a few things out at least.

October 2017 side income total – $2359.31 (-3.56%)

YouTube

  • StateOfTech – $822.89 (-9.53%) Subscribers: 20156 (+4.35%)
    This YouTube channel is part mobile technology review videos and part tech tutorial videos.
  • Ditch Auto – $338.48 (-3.15%) Subscribers: 18199 (+5.64)
    This YouTube channel is similar to StateOfTech but for Photography. The videos that perform well are reviews and tutorials.
  • Jerad Hill – $38.38 (+17.66%) Subscribers: 4583 (+0.31%)
    This is my personal channel which I do not post too often. I do plan to do a lot more on my personal channel in the near future. I am just trying to decide what I want my focus to be there.

Amazon Affiliate

  • Amazon Product Links – $388.10 (-26.46%)
    We have not put out much content that includes product links so I don’t expect much growth here until Christmas shopping begins.

Google Adsense

  • Google Adsense links/display – $75.63 (-30.6%)
    I cut some of the fat on a couple of my websites which will initially produce a decrease in traffic. I deleted a lot of content that I did not feel was relevant anymore. Many of these pages would generate a click or two here and there from organic search, but I deleted it all so that the search engines could focus on crawling quality content.

Udemy.Com

  • Paid courses on Udemy – $11.83 (+100%)
    I only have one paid course currently and that course is getting old. It needs to be refreshed. I have plans later this month to get new courses out that will be paid and to revise a couple of my existing courses to drive some return traffic to my instructor page.

Other Income

  • Other monthly revenue streams from side work – $688 (+32.82%)
    I turned off a couple of sources of this other income that I did not plan to maintain any longer. These sources really only brought in $20-75 per source and took an average of 3 hours per source. Not a good return on invested time, so they are gone.

Going into the holidays, things tend to slow down a bit. I hope that as the end of the year approaches that I will have extra time to work on content. Another area I plan to spend time in research is cryptocurrency. I have been watching Bitcoin since it’s inception and have had a lot of interest in mining. Perhaps mining will become another side-income channel in the future.

Check out the September 2017 financials.

My September 2017 Side Income Report

Posted on by Jerad Hill

I have certainly let time get away from me this year. I mean, I meet all of my deadlines and don’t miss anything at work, but the goals I make for myself often get put off. My goal of reporting my monthly side income finances is one of those goals that quickly got put on the back burner.

I know we are supposed to be talking about September but October was a crazy month for me. I had two jobs out of state which took up just about two full weeks of the month. Both jobs were on the east coast. I felt it in my productivity and my ability to create content that would assist in my goal of increasing my side income.

With that said, a few things took place in September that was notable.

Toward the end of the month, I hired someone to assist with editing video. This part-time position was created to help us catch up on all of the video content we had filmed but had not yet edited. We had about 30 or so videos in the backlog. I will talk more about the progress here in Octobers post.

I am approaching some major milestones on Youtube. From here on out I will include subscriber counts to the YouTube channels and the increasing percentage as well. Though this report is about income and income is usually referred to in dollars, I also will be paying attention to reach. At this phase, I would prefer an increase in reach over income.

September 2017 side income total – $2446.50 (-17.56%)

YouTube

  • StateOfTech – $909.62 (+17.42%) Subscribers: 19314 (+5%)
    This YouTube channel is part mobile technology review videos and part tech tutorial videos.
  • Ditch Auto – $349.52 (+1.77%) Subscribers: 17227 (+6.04)
    This YouTube channel is similar to StateOfTech but for Photography. The videos that perform well are reviews and tutorials.
  • Jerad Hill – $32.62 (-2.51%) Subscribers: 4569 (+0.41%)
    This is my personal channel which I do not post too often. I do plan to do a lot more on my personal channel in the near future. I am just trying to decide what I want my focus to be there.

Amazon Affiliate

  • Amazon Product Links – $527.77 (-47.31%)
    With August being back to school, it makes sense that these numbers would be higher. The majority of the product links I have out there are for technology and camera equipment. We have not put out much content that includes product links so I don’t expect much growth here until Christmas shopping begins.

Google Adsense

  • Google Adsense links/display – $108.97 (-7.41%)
    I cut some of the fat on a couple of my websites which will initially produce a decrease in traffic. I deleted a lot of content that I did not feel was relevant anymore. Many of these pages would generate a click or two here and there from organic search, but I deleted it all so that the search engines could focus on crawling quality content.

Udemy.Com

  • Paid courses on Udemy – $0 (-100%)
    I only have one paid course currently and that course is getting old. It needs to be refreshed. I have plans later this month to get new courses out that will be paid and to revise a couple of my existing courses to drive some return traffic to my instructor page.

Other Income

  • Other monthly revenue streams from side work – $518 (-23.28%)
    I turned off a couple of sources of this other income that I did not plan to maintain any longer. These sources really only brought in $20-75 per source and took an average of 3 hours per source. Not a good return on invested time, so they are gone.

I like the color red on a car, not on income statements. I have not looked at the numbers for October yet but I am sure they won’t look much better. Unfortunately, I just have not had the time to spend on much. Unless I cut back somewhere, there is no room left for growth. This is why I have started removing some of the items that consumed a small bit of my time. Removing, even more, will allow for more time on my side projects.

October is going to tell a similar story as to September. I battled with not posting September or October at all, but that would not paint a very fair picture of reality. The reality is that sometimes I start things and don’t have the time I thought I would have. I often get into trouble in this way. I am learning that it has to do with some fear that I carry that stems from a need for security. It’s not completely unhealthy, but there have been times I have missed opportunities because I chose security over risk.

One last thing of note: Both of my brothers have now entered the realms of the self-employed. My middle brother bought a truck and started his own mobile diesel repair business. My youngest brother was doing some sales for a solar company and saw a need for solar panel cleaning. One of them is full-time self-employed and the other is on his way there. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Stay tuned for October’s numbers. I know I didn’t provide much hype, but I will be posting them soon.

Thanks for reading. If you want to connect, shoot me an email or contact me through social media. I enjoy connecting with others on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Check out August 2017 financials.

Going Public With My Financials

Posted on by Jerad Hill

Over my years as a self-employed, I have always had some kind of work on the side that I have maintained. When I started in Photography, that was my side business. I started earning a few hundred extra dollars each month from side photography jobs and that continued to grow fast. When I started designing websites, it was a side business but in 2005 I made it my full-time business.

In 2007 when the first iPhone was launched, I started another side business reviewing apps. Years later that turned into a technology review YouTube channel which I still run (very much on the side) today. I mostly review and produce tips/tricks videos for technology that I use or purchase for work.

In 2014 I filmed a photography course which I put online for free. A year later I started a YouTube channel and started producing content around photography as well. The photography course took off and at the time I am writing this, has over 240,000 students that have taken the course. Unfortunately, I did not provide much follow up to that course to generate any revenue, but I have attempted to gather emails and engage with some of the students through a Facebook group.

I always have to be working on something. I spend the majority of my day focusing on creating for my clients. I pour a lot of thought and effort into their projects, but I still desire to work on something of my own, which is why I keep a couple of things going at all times.

In an attempt to be more accountable to my side projects I am going to start challenging myself to give some extra time to those projects. As my side projects produce more income, I can afford to work on them more. At this point, I am only able to work on them once I have completed all of my client work. That leaves enough time to work on them, but not really create on the level I really want to be at with these projects. That might require adding someone to my team who’s job is to help with the creation of the content I want to be producing. This will take more revenue.

I’m going public with my financials

Ok, so I am kind of going public with my financials. I am going to be sharing a monthly post that breaks down where all of my side income is coming from and how it’s growing. I am doing this because if it is not growing, change needs to happen, and this will help me visualize it. This will also keep the fire lit under my butt because who wants to read financial reports on something that is not growing. This will start out very rudimentary, but I hope to evolve it into something fun to look at and read. This has been something I have wanted to do for quite some time, but have not due to not having time to make it look awesome. NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS TO LOOK AWESOME JERAD! Ok, so it would be nice if it did, but for now, it’s just going to be a list.

I am not posting this information to show off or come across like I am bragging about success in any way. I am posting this information to be accountable and to show that you can earn enough money on the side to afford to take your family on vacation or put money into savings. The goal is not to be rich, the goal is to be comfortable and to have the freedom to choose my work.

To get started, I am going to post what August of 2017 looked like. I will explain what each of these items is in short and will post about them more in length at a later time. I plan to have revenue goals and reach goals as well. Reach goals will be around subscriber count, new students, and sign-ups.

My side income comes from a few different locations online. I am going to list everything that I plan to grow. Know that there are some small side income streams that I do not care to grow anymore so I will bunch those together into an “other” category which is where old side income revenue streams will go to die. The numbers below are gross revenue. In future months I will try to list expenses associated to having earned that income. Currently, I have some overhead that is shared between Hill Media Group and these side projects so some of the income reported below also has to pay for a portion of the overhead.

Current side income total – $2,967.69

YouTube:

  • StateOfTech – $774.62
    This YouTube channel is part mobile technology review videos and part tech tutorial videos.
  • Ditch Auto – $347.75
    This YouTube channel is similar to StateOfTech but for Photography. The videos that perform well are reviews and tutorials.
  • Jerad Hill – $33.46
    This is my personal channel which I do not post too often. I do plan to do a lot more on my personal channel in the near future. I am just trying to decide what I want my focus to be there.

Amazon Affiliate:

  • Amazon Product Links – $1,001.61
    These are a bit hard to track because I have one Affiliate account that has links spread across a couple of websites and YouTube channels. Typically, if I am not making new videos, I see a major dip in revenue from Amazon Affiliate links.

Google Adsense:

  • Google Adsense links/display – $117.69
    Adsense links are also a little hard to track because I am using one account to manage ads placed on a few different sites and I have not yet segmented out those ads so I can see which are performing well and which are not. This is an area for growth for sure.

Udemy.Com

  • Paid courses on Udemy – $17.36
    Most of my courses are free. My goal was to produce free courses and then have a paid course as the next step. The problem is that I never produced any of those paid courses. I have one course that gets one or two new sign ups each month producing a tiny revenue but I list it here because I plan to grow this.

Other

  • Other monthly revenue streams from side work – $675.20
    I will elaborate more on this “other” category in the future. This amount is nothing to be upset about and some of you will wonder why I am not trying to grow it. This section represents income from about 8 different locations and it will take a lot of work to continue to grow it.

I do have other monthly revenue streams such as the income earned from Hill Media Group and my Photography work. My main work is what pays the bills. The goal here is to increase my monthly revenue from my side projects and eventually try to narrow my focus. As I mentioned before, the purpose of this post is to be public about my side work financials for accountability and to keep me motivated. I do hope that this information motivates others as well. This is very much side work for me. Some months I put 20 or so hours into this, other months it’s less. If I devoted a bit more time and focus to these projects, I would see substantial growth, and that is the goal here.

In sharing this information, what is something you are currently doing on the side? Are you earning any income from it and would you want to if you could? I would love to hear your thoughts or comments below.

50/50

Posted on by Jerad Hill

If you went 50/50 on something instead of just 100% on one thing, how could that change your life?

This may be a weird statement coming from a person who is self-employed, but my goal for 2017 is to transform my income stream. My goal is that by the end of the year, at least 50% of it will come from self-generated projects or products. This means that at least half of the income I earn this year needs to come from projects or products that I have generated, not from client work.

You see, since I started this journey as a self-employed person, I have made my income doing work for other people. Whether designing websites for businesses or photographing weddings, I am doing work that I was hired to do by someone else who had a need. I may own my own business, but I am working for others.

There is nothing wrong with doing work for other people. Our country runs on the trade of services for dollars. Ultimately, I want to get to the place where the majority of my income is generated from products and services I have created. I have spent the last 19 years of my life pouring my energy into the projects of others. I would moonlight occasionally on my own projects and have had some success with a few of them, but they always ended up on the backburner because client work paid faster.

So how do I plan to transform my income stream this year? Glad you asked.

I have a couple of projects that I will be working on a lot this year in an attempt to tip the scale toward self-generated income. A couple of these projects are still in the conceptual stage and I am not ready to share much about them. The other projects are already live and I will pour into them even more this year.

The first project is Ditch Auto. Four years ago, I filmed a course to help people get out of auto mode on their cameras so they could unlock the true potential of their cameras which are found in manual mode. Pro photographers use manual mode to properly expose and capture the image they see rather than the image the camera sees. I filmed this course in a day and did not anticipate it growing into a thriving photography community. Today, over 125,000 people have taken the course and we have a pretty active Facebook Group as well. Starting the beginning of this year, we launched a weekly photography challenge, which kicked off strong and is growing larger each week.

My plans for Ditch Auto this year include the modernization of the original course, creating additional courses, and growing the community to help people grow as photographers whether they want to be in business as a photographer, or enjoy it as a hobby.

The second project is State of Tech: In 2007 I started a blog where I reviewed iPhone Apps. Over the years that turned into a podcast that diversified into a variety of different mobile technologies. The last 10 years in the mobile tech space has taught me that many people still do not understand the technology they are walking around with each day. State of Tech has a small, but growing online community on Youtube and I intend to grow that following through the production of valuable content. State of Tech will also expand into a variety of educational courses geared toward helping people better understand and use their smart devices. I believe that Ditch Auto has more promise as far as generating an income goes, but there is a huge gap in educating people on mobile technology.

Project #3 is not a product that is going to help me meet or exceed my goal as mentioned above, but it will eventually contribute to my bottom line.

As I mentioned before, I have spent the majority of my adult life doing creative work for others. During that time, there are many tools and services I have become a professional in using. A few years ago, I started to work towards shifting the income stream of my company Hill Media Group. For years I was doing project-based work for a fixed fee. Once the project ended, I was paid and I had to find a new project. I still do a lot of project-based work, but about 25% of Hill Media Group’s income comes from ongoing work we do for our clients.

I realized that we are really good at handling tasks for our clients. When our clients deliver a clear task to us, we often can turn it around for them in a short period of time. The relationship we have with our clients that retain our services on a monthly basis makes it easy for us to prioritize their tasks and get them done.

Project #3 will be a new company that specializes in handling a variety of digital tasks for small businesses and organizations. I am partnering with a long-term employee and friend of mine to launch this. I am really excited about the concept and have already begun developing the infrastructure needed to manage this new startup company.

Growth through actual products, not affiliate marketing.

It’s not that hard to create a ton of average content and link to products to generate income. Nobody will make much money doing that. If you want to generate income from affiliate marketing you have to create fantastic content and a lot of it. While there is nothing wrong with generating revenue from affiliates, I prefer to generate content to market my own products.

I have had some limited success in affiliate marketing. When the Hoverboard was new and exciting, I filmed a review of my Hoverboard for State of Tech and the Amazon Affiliate link generated between $1,800-$2,500 for several months until Amazon removed all of them from their inventory. What I learned from that experience was that your affiliate income stream is only as good as the product. Technology changes quickly, and fads move even faster than technology does. It takes a lot of effort to stay ahead of the curve to assure you always growing.

Why do I need my income to be self-generated?

I’ll say it again: There is nothing wrong with doing work for other people. The products and products I want to create will be consumed or used by other people, but there is a difference. The effort I am putting into my projects and products are generated from ideas and inspirations that I had. I saw a need and created something. These projects and products will be for others to consume, but they will be something that I saw from conception to delivery. If it succeeds, it will be because I saw the problem and executed on a solution. If it fails, it will be a lesson in which I can not direct a complaint at anyone but myself. I need that kind of challenge in my life. It will be an exercise in generating more control over my destiny by executing on my own ideas instead of focusing on others. It sounds like a selfish move, but it’s really not. I will do more good this way.

For years I have also had a desire to share my financials publically. I used to be held down by debt and seemed to always be carrying a balance somewhere. Whether it was car payments or credit card debt, I had it, and somehow justified it. These days I try to keep my family as close to debt free as possible. Though it is not always possible (yet), we are closer than ever. I plan to share some of my financial information as it pertains to achieving the goal mentioned above. Stay tuned for more information on that.

Goals!

Shortly after turning 30 and having a few kids, I made this list of things I wanted to achieve over the next few decades. I called it my challenge list and I have not done a very good job of working on achieving those challenges. Now I could give myself the benefit of the doubt and blame it on being a busy business owner, husband, and father, but I’m not going to do that. The whole idea behind this list was that I would attempt to achieve some of these things while maintaining the life I am living. No excuses. So in 2017, I am going to start crossing off some of the challenges from the list. I encourage you to check back often and if I seem to be slacking, please call me out on social media.

A Challenge

My main goal for 2017 is to slide the revenue scale away from client-based work to my own projects and products. If you could slide the scale away from 100% and closer to 50/50, what would that look like, and how would it change your life? I’m not just talking about income, but anything. Perhaps you want to change your diet or travel more. How can you slide the scale toward doing that more?

If you could, take a moment to think about that. If you have a thought or an idea, share it in the comment section below! I would love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for sticking around to the end of this post. If you want to follow along as I work toward my goal, make sure to follow me on social media. You can find the links on this page.

Creating a Blog for Profit, My Path – Part 2

Posted on by Jerad Hill

First off let me mention that I truly believe if your 100% intention to start a blog for profit outweighs your desire to provide great content, you will fail. Your viewers/readers/listeners will sniff you out and walk right past you faster then the guy collecting signatures outside of Walmart. With that said here are a few other items to consider before you start blogging or podcasting.

When you blog/podcast you are associating your name to something. Everything you say or do is a direct reflection upon yourself and the integrity of who you are. It is important to consider this because if you have no desire of being tagged as a sports guy then you have no reason to be blogging about sports. Catch my drift? You need to make sure that your blogging platform matches the one you are currently standing on.

I have always been the tech guy to those around me. When the iPod was first able to hold photos, I made sure my wedding clients could view their photos on their iPods to show others. When the iPhone came out I did the same, I even made sure that the video slideshows I put together for my clients would play on their iPhones. I wanted to make sure the content I gave them was readily available to be shared with ease. In website design I have always pushed my clients in the direction of mobility. I tell all of my web design clients that they need to be accessible on mobile devices because that is where many customers of the future are going to be doing their searching. I have always been pro-mobile. When I decided to start the iPhone App Podcast I saw a good connection there that would bridge something I was already passionate about with my own personal brand.

A note on Personal Branding: We all have a personal brand, some stronger than others, but our brand is what we stand for and what we lend ourselves out to. My personal brand stands for excellence in wedding photography and website design but it lends itself out to other brands such as Apple, Toyota, Guess, Nike, and a myriad of other brands in which I support by purchasing and allowing other to see me using. I love Apple products and I wear that on my sleeve. When you start to blog or podcast, the attention of the people you reach are going to start to notice those other things about you. The more popular you become the more the associations you have with others will be noticed as well. Consider what you are doing to your name before you start talking about something. Make sure it does not water down your name or spread it thin. Think about the celebrities you have seen over the years who farm their name out to anyone with a few dollars to throw at them. Your name is important in the biz world and it’s use should be well watched over.

1. Find your audience
Before you start blogging or podcasting you need to define and find your audience. The first thing I did when starting my blog and podcast was to identify that my viewer was not just an iPhone or iPod Touch user but also a business person, a student, a father, a husband and much more. If all I did was review game applications for the iPhone then I would miss a large part of my demographic which are business people who are looking to get productivity from their iPhone. I make sure I cover all of the bases.

2. Be passionate!
When you are talking with someone who is in business strictly because they are trying to make a quick buck you can tell. You don’t feel the passion that someone who truly loves that business would have. The most successful people in this world were passionate about what they were doing. Having a passion for something means that you love to do it and would not care if it paid the bills or not. Of course you have to decide when you can afford to have passions and can not. One of my passions is to go to pilot school so I can learn to fly a plane but that passion is not in line with my bank account at the current moment.

3. Be specific
It takes enough time and effort to become a voice in any industry, if you decide to talk about to many things you risk not having enough content about each topic to hold an audience. I have been asked over and over to start reviewing applications for the Blackberry and the Google Phone. I have no desire to do this because it goes outside of what my website is all about. My website is the iPhone App Podcast, somebody even started the iPod App Podcast because I so specific. Of course most applications for the iPhone work just the same on an iPod, my demographic is people like me who have an iPhone and use it wherever they go.

4. Don’t be afraid to invest in your passion
Like I shared earlier it cost me a few dollars to get started. I am fortunate enough that I have years of website design experience behind me which saved a ton of startup costs. There are blogs that are very popular such as the photography blog “The Strobist” which have been using Blogger since the beginning and still do. My podcast is video so I wanted to make sure that the video I served up was of quality. My viewers watch the podcasts on their iPhones, iPods, computers, laptops, Appletv’s and I’m sure several other ways as well. I started out using my digital camera to record video and quickly upgraded to a nicer camera so I could use a better microphone. After watching my podcast on my own tv and hearing my voice through my Dolby 5.1 system I was a little embarrassed and knew I needed to step up quality. People will pick up on quality and believe me quality makes up a large portion of value.

5. Live what you preach
I have been an Apple Fanboy for lack of a better term since 2001 and everybody knows it. I always have the latest Apple offering. When the iPhone came out, I got one. When the 3G came out, I was in line to pick one up. Everybody comes to me for Apple advice and if you are going to blog about a subject everybody should know you are the one to come to for that topic. If you blog about gardening then you should have the best garden in the area. It just makes sense, nobody writes books about topics they don’t have any clue about… Ok maybe some do, but they will never become a best seller. People are not stupid, give them something to follow.

By now you have figured out that creating a blog for profit is not going to come easily. Trust me, it did not come easy for me. I have had 100’s of blog ideas, dozens of blogs launched and this is the first one that has turned a profit worth getting excited about. I bet if you contact all of the other “successful” bloggers out there they will tell you the same thing. Your core value should be to share what you love with others in hopes to inform them and empower them to love it as much as you do.

Once my blog and podcast started getting popular the cost of running it went from moments of my time and mild stress on my server to gobbling up my spare time and sucking the very life from my server. I knew that I needed to create an income stream from this project or it would quickly have to be put on the back burner. Here are some of the things I did to start generating income from my blog and podcast, some worked great, others were a waste of time.

The first thing I did was create some ad spaces on my blog and hook up Google Adsense to them. I did this not because Google pays out much at all but what it does do is serve up random content that is ever changing so it brings the appearance of activity in those ad spaces. I have never generated more then $120 in one month from Google Ads. My goal was to sell those spaces to companies for a monthly fee. I have successfully done this a few times earning as much as $250 a month for a 300×300 side bar ad space. The downfall to this was having to remember when to remove those ads and email the company to renew that space, most did not. I knew that this was not going to be my core source of income.

From the beginning I was plugging the idea of pre-roll and post-roll advertisements on the podcast. I wanted to keep clear from an actual commercial because that would require me to have to edit that into each video file. I did not want to have to drag any of my video reviews into video editing software. I contacted Godaddy and was able to land them as an affiliate sponsor. I have my own coupon codes and earn about $100-$200 a month from them depending on how much time I spend plugging them.

One of my goals from the beginning was to provide a way for the new app developer to get noticed. I knew that the iTunes App Store would quickly become like the music store. Great music is released every day in the iTunes Music Store but is never found because there is so much there. The same is becoming of the app store. This means that Developers will have to find ways to get their name out there just like music artists. Even on my own website apps will get buried as I review more of them. With my website growing in viewership I realized that there was value in that viewership. On most websites, front page placement is worth a lot of money. My front page was receiving a lot of attention as I was getting linked up on websites such as Digg.com, Makeuseof.com, Appscout.com and many others. I decided to start offering a featured placement to developers for a small fee of $25.00. This would get them on the front page of my website in rotation for 7 days. The day their review released they would be in the #1 position until the next day when another app review took it’s place pushing it down to #2 and so forth until seven days later it would be pushed off of the front page. I also created a category in the menu titled “Featured Apps”. The name lends itself to believe that there is more value in the apps listed under it then apps that are not. Our minds are predisposed to this kind of thinking because we like words such as value, sale, special, featured, etc. They are verbs that get our brain in take action mode. From the get go I started selling that Featured spot almost daily, after a few weeks I was selling it daily and with in the first 30 days I was selling the space more then once a day. This quickly turned into a problem, though it was a good problem. My website went from generating about $200-300 a month from Google and Godaddy to $750 a month not including Google and Godaddy. The problem was that now I had a waiting list. I could not get the app reviews up as fast as they were coming in because I had created this Featured placement that only allowed for one to be released per day. To be honest, I am still backed up to this day but I am always working toward finding quicker ways to do things and get content out faster.

One of the most important things I have done to show that there is value was to put they data out there about my website’s viewership. I posted screen shots of the Google Analytics reports, the views each video was getting from my video hosting solution, and I contrasted the different in views a Featured App review received from a non featured app review. This was important, it’s like comparing vehicles when you buy. You will spend more if there is more value in the selection. Check out my Submit An App page to see what I have done.

Featured App PlacementFeatured Plus App Placement

My website was on track to earn a projected fourteen thousand dollars in it’s first year but developers were getting restless and uneasy about having to wait 15+ days for their review to show up on the front page. With the layout I had created for featured placement on the front page there was no way to feature two apps at the same time so I decided to offer another way to get special placement on my website and use more of my front page for featured reviews.

I removed the “recently reviewed” section and added a new “Featured Apps” section that allowed me to list apps in blog view down the front page below the old “Featured Apps” section which is now called the “Featured Plus” section. My website now offered two different ways to get on the front page. The featured plus section provided much more real estate so I increased it’s price to $50 and kept the same 7 day rotation plan as before. Below that is the $25 featured app section which will list apps eight deep. Now I was able to list 8 apps on the front page at $25 each and one app at $50 each day increasing the ability to earn $250 per day should I receive that many requests. Do the math… The featured placements alone at max fulfillment have the potential to bring in over $66k a year. You can now see the issue of finding time to blog and podcast floating out the window.

My biggest issue at this time is organizing my time effectively so I can keep up with this podcast and my clients in my other businesses as a website designer and wedding photographer. I use a great app called Things for the Mac and iPhone to keep myself in order.

I have always seen live as more of a journey then a destination. This blog is no exception to that rule. In the next couple of months I may have to transform the way my blog works again to fill the needs coming at me, who knows what will come. That is what keeps it exciting. I am now getting offers to attend seminars and conferences for free as press to interview app developers and I look forward to getting to speak to developers and businesses as well.

I feel this experience has brought a lot of insight to me about the industry. I would be more then happy to answer any questions you may have, please feel free to post them in the comments section or use the contact form on my blog.

Thank you so much for reading my blog. I hope it helps you take your passion to the next level so you can share it with the masses.