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May 2018 Passive Income Report

Posted on by Jerad Hill

Welcome to my Passive Income report for May 2018. I am excited to report growth in May and am looking forward to June. May was a busy month personally, so I didn’t get to spend as much time on growing passive income streams as I would like, but it is nice to see that growth can still happen if I continue to produce more content that has value.

I am realizing that I need to increase the production value of my YouTube videos. The content is great, but the production value is just lazy. Other creators are stepping up their production quite a bit. People are expecting more out of the videos they watch. I need to focus more on producing an all around great video rather than just trying to get something out in a timely manner.

Traffic to my websites saw a boost in May, but I need to be more consistent with creating content there as well. Having videos transcribed has helped quite a bit with search engine ranking but a direct transcription of a video is not providing the best experience for those who land on this written content. I need to take my videos and turn them into a well-organized article with quality photography when necessary.

It’s hard to do all things well. That is why most people focus on only doing one or two things to the best of their ability. I have never been that way. I want to do all things and do them to the best of my ability, but I know that to be near impossible. I give myself eight hours each day to work and I don’t work weekends. I either need more manpower or I need to scale back in a few areas. I guess I have some thinking to do over the next few weeks.

Going into June, I have a lot on my calendar in regards to family time. We have something scheduled each weekend through the end of summer with family events and other short trips scattered throughout June and July. It is going to be hard to focus on Passive Income Growth so I will take time when I can find it to create. Summer is a prime example of why I am doing this. I will have extra income in June and July because I have done this work. Passive Income is providing more freedom for me this year than I had last year, and that was the goal. I am getting closer to replacing my families income needs and feel 100% confident that I will be able to pull that off well before the end of this year.

Later this year I will bottle up everything I learned growing my Passive Income (Side Income) from a few hundred dollars to what it is now in under a years time. People ask me about these monthly Passive Income Reports all of the time. I know there is a huge need for education on building passive income streams from someone who actually has proof they are doing it.

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

May 2018 Side Income Total – $4,698.92 (+17.33%)

YouTube

  • StateOfTech – $1,378.28 (+39.55%) Subscribers: 31,567 (+5.57%) Watch Time: 1,507,912 Minutes (+28.93%)
    We have released a lot of videos over the last few months and the numbers are reflecting that. We broke through the 30,000 subscriber mark as well. This is a huge milestone and has given me a fierce desire to grow this channel. I still feel that I need to narrow down the topics a bit to appeal more to a specific audience. With over 1.5 million minutes consumed each month, we should be growing at a subscriber rate greater than 5%.
  • Ditch Auto – $522.90 (+24.78%) Subscribers: 27,311 (+5.30%) Watch Time: 904,417 Minutes (+11.14%)
    I was able to get a few new videos live this month. I am looking more into affiliate programs in the photography space to grow revenues and seek out new opportunities. A video I did for a Peak Designs Camera Bag brought in over $175 in affiliate commission. Over the next few months, I am going to try to bring on a few more affiliate programs for products I believe in.
  • Jerad Hill – $57.64 (+27.72%) Subscribers: 5302 (+0.34%) Watch Time: 40,005 Minutes (+7.53%)
    I didn’t upload as much in May to this channel as I have in the previous few months, but the transcriptions of the videos I have been posting have been helping grow traffic to my blog, which has these videos embedded. My income reports have also been getting talked about a bit which has resulted in more views and subscribers. Looking forward to growing this channel as I would love to catch up to State of Tech and Ditch Auto.
  • AltCast – $0 (0%) Subscribers: 1,718 (+3.99%) Watch Time: 34,106 Minutes (+4.51%)
    AltCast is a new channel started in January 2018 with a focus on Cryptocurrency Mining. I am not sure what I want to do with this channel. I have not been doing much with Cryptocurrency Mining over the last few months other than just making sure my mining rigs continue to run. I sold off some of the hardware so I only have two rigs left. I think I am going to need to pivot and come up with another topic for this channel in order to keep moving forward with it.

Amazon Affiliate

  • Amazon Product Links – $804.83 (-4.28%)
    This last month I have been publishing a lot of informational content rather than product reviews which is where most of my Amazon revenue comes from. I need to start doing a better job representing products in my videos without the video having to be a review for an exact product.
    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 – $42.10 (+42.9%)
    As I mentioned last month, I have been publishing more content on the two sites I monetize with Adsense. This shows up in the numbers. Though it is only $42, that also represents a huge bump in traffic to these websites. In order for adsense revenue to almost double, traffic to the site had to almost double. I am glad to see some forward momentum after how the last several months have been.
    Sites with Adsense Integration: StateOfTech.Net, DitchAuto.Com

Jerad’s Courses

  • Paid courses on Jerad.Courses – $49.00 (-50%)
    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 $3,300 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 – $163.17 (+32.97%)
    Just like with my personal course site, the revenue has bottomed out here on Udemy. To date, the Mining course has brought in just over $2,300 on Udemy.

Other Income

  • Other monthly revenue streams from side work – $1,681.00 (+14.98%)
    Over the last few months, I have started to build content for a few small affiliate programs that will eventually become their own category in this income report. The affiliate programs are for products I have reviewed or produced other content for. In the next few months, I will break apart this category a bit to further explain what it is made up of.

Investments

I didn’t touch my investments this month. My stock holdings in the Robinhood app grew at a decent rate but my cryptocurrency holdings decreased a bit after last months rebound. Nobody knows where Crypto is going. I know it is not going away, but it’s hard to tell where it will go in regards to value over the following months. 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: $10,402.92 (+13.24%)
    Continuing to see good growth here. I did not put any money in this month so the improvement here is all market growth. Hopefully next month I can throw in an extra $500-$1,000 to purchase more stock. There were a few stocks that bottomed out in early May that I wish I had the extra money to buy as they saw a solid rebound in May. I need to make sure I have money set aside for opportunities I see like this.
  • Cryptocurrency – Holdings: $6,033.52 (-9.92%)
    Last month I was happy to see things rebound a bit. There was not a lot of excitement here in May. I did sell off some of the GPUs from one of my Ethereum Mining Rigs and stopped mining ZCash altogether. I am continuing to mine with 375mh/s of power going to Ethereum.
    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.

May was a pretty good month. All of these revenue streams continue to grow organically. I have not partnered with anyone or attempted to collaborate with other creators yet. I feel that this is one of the next areas of growth for me. There are opportunities for growth in these partnerships. I have used my location as an excuse and I need to stop there. There are creators near me, I just need to find them and partner with the ones who make sense.

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

 

May 2018 Passive Income Report Jerad Hill May 2018 Passive Income Report Jerad Hill

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.

December 2017 Side Income Report

Posted on by Jerad Hill

Things are starting to get interesting as a lot changed this month. It is December, so most of my product affiliate links saw more action than normal but I also dove in head first into Cryptocurrency Mining. As I write this I am thinking back on what I was thinking when I decided to start investing in Crypto Coins and in Mining. I was a little scared, but I knew that I would miss the boat if I didn’t start right away.

In December I made a lot of changes to my investments. I don’t typically include investments as side income because I look at my investments as a long-term growth strategy. My strategy for buying and selling stocks is to continue to grow that portfolio into something I can use for retirement. The stock market has been good to me in 2017 but the growth is nothing compared to what has happened in Cryptocurrency in the last month.

I talked a lot about my mindset in a video I filmed on Building My First Ethereum Mining Rig, but I saw Cryptocurrency Mining as a less risky way to get into Cryptocurrency. If I was wrong, I could at least sell the mining rig or its components. Currently, I am posting weekly update videos to a new YouTube channel where I focus more on Cryptocurrency and Mining. It’s called AltCast. My goal is to talk about alternative forms of investing as well. Right now my topics are mostly Cryptocurrency and Crypto Mining.

I want to talk about the crazy things that have been happening in January so far but this blog is about December so I am going to try to stay on topic. You can follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. I will try to share as much as I can there as it happens.

Towards the end of the month, I filmed a course titled How to Build an Ethereum Mining Rig. I had built a few at this point and had been answering a lot of questions online. The course went live a few days before the new year so it only sold a few copies. I’m excited to see how the course performs through January.

Traffic to the YouTube channels continues to grow. State of Tech and the new AltCast got most of the attention in December even though I wanted to give Ditch Auto more time. State of Tech has seen some growth due to the mining specific videos I posted. I thought about doing more mining content for State of Tech but I didn’t want to get too far off topic so I created AltCast to discuss investing and Cryptocurrency.

With that said, here is my Side Income Report for December of 2017. I am looking forward to seeing where things go in 2018 as I continue to explore new ways to grow my personal income.

December 2017 side income total – $3705.40 (+16.98%)

YouTube

  • StateOfTech – $1351.56 (+21.33%) Subscribers: 24167 (+6.48%)
    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 we did add a bunch of videos right at the end of October that was specific to the Samsung Galaxy Note 8. Those videos tend to take off a few months after they go live.
  • Ditch Auto – $595.45 (+36.25%) Subscribers: 20692 (+7.28)
    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 – $36.07 (-0%) Subscribers: 4626 (+0.37%)
    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 – $840.51 (+45.15%)
    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 – $155.33 (+31.99%)
    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 – $74.00 (+100%)
    This is a new side income category. I have had this website live for a few years now but there has not been any paid courses on it until now. I expect a lot of growth here as I continue to produce content.

Udemy.Com

  • Paid courses on Udemy – $7.49 (-111.91%)
    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 – $645 (-34.62%)
    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 am excited about what 2018 will bring. I have a renewed vigor for improving my side income and a new goal I will announce with the January Side Income Report. I also plan to start filming some videos for my personal YouTube channel to discuss more on how I produce content that leads to the side income I am reporting in these blogs.

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

November 2017 Side Income Report

Posted on by Jerad Hill

As predicted, November was a bit better than prior months. This happens often during the holidays. The biggest boost I saw in my side-income during the holidays was when the Hoverboard got popular. There was a couple of months where I was getting $2,500 to $4,000 just from Amazon Affiliate links alone. That died off of course as does any fad. Going into this holiday season I do not have any content that is somewhat going viral to help generate revenue. I have a few ideas that just are not going to make it in time unless I end up with spare time in December.

One area that saw decent growth was the Google Adsense links. Due to my recent hire, a lot of content was created for two of my websites that I have brought new traffic to those sites. Though there was only a small amount of growth in regards to the cost of producing that content, that new content will live on for months and hopefully will return on the investment.

This month I started looking into Cryptocurrency mining. I am very interested in mining Ethereum (ETH). I will be building a mining rig early December so there will be a new category in my side-income report. I plan to track what I have mined, it’s growth and the fluctuation in the market. Should be interesting to follow.

So let’s take a look at the report for the month of November 2017.

November 2017 side income total – $3124.74 (+32.44%)

YouTube

  • StateOfTech – $1091.08 (+32.59%) Subscribers: 21135 (+4.86%)
    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 we did add a bunch of videos right at the end of October that was specific to the Samsung Galaxy Note 8. Those videos tend to take off a few months after they go live.
  • Ditch Auto – $412.74 (+21.94) Subscribers: 19238 (+5.71)
    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 – $36.02 (-6.15) Subscribers: 4592 (+0.20%)
    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 – $530.89 (+57.02%)
    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 – $112.49 (+48.73%)
    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 – $26.52 (+124.18%)
    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 – $915 (+33.0%)
    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.

Overall I am pretty impressed with this month considering the low effort. As I mentioned before, the holidays often boost these numbers. It is much more challenging to maintain these numbers during the rest of the year. I am sure December will be good and will probably be a decent month assuming the mining of Ethereum (ETH) goes well.

I plan to do some filming early in the month to try and get a few videos that would make sense for the holidays done, but I am not sure if I will have time. Hill Media Group is keeping me pretty busy going into December. Unless that lets up a bit, the December income report will just be true passive income.

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.