Backend SQL and PHP developer with an infusion of technical writing and entrepreneurial dreams. Working towards paving my own way in the creator economy with lessons learned and more importantly, those yet still to come.
Goal setting and side income...
Some housekeeping.
I originally had 2 different forms for this email list before re-branding it to the current iteration. If you signed up here or here and no longer wish to receive these emails, please opt out at the bottom of this newsletter. No hard feelings at all.
I believe goal setting is essential in order to track progress or regression.
My short-term goal is to consistently make $50/month combined from any of my side hustles.
Seems reasonable right? Not too overly ambitious.
I'll publish the results at the beginning of next month, in the first week's newsletter (if all metrics are available).
So far, here are my side hustles:
- Adsense from my Digital Owl’s Prose developer blog
- Medium partner program payout
- Kofi shop sales and/or donations
- Any freelance technical writing or developer work
Some other services I have considered (and even advertised). If I were to get any work from any of these, they would be included as 'earners' also:
- Building Carrd landing pages and single-page sites
- Building WordPress landing pages
- Building ConvertKit landing pages
- Building WordPress contact forms
- Email writing, setup, and integration
- Technical writing and editing
My biggest challenge with taking on any active work is that I'm already working a 50+ hour/week job. I define active work as any work I'll need to do after hours with a hard deadline or milestone.
However, passive work - the work I'm already doing every day after hours (E.g. writing blog posts, newsletters, and creating digital products) - fits my workload tolerance better.
The passive work is by far less pressure and moves at an easier pace since there are technically no clients waiting on me for any products or deliverables. This is why something like the Medium partner program is so nice (only if the platform hadn't turned into such a dumpster fire here of late).
Passive products and projects allow me to do the work once and reap the benefits over the long haul. They just aren't making me that much money upfront.
And, that's okay too.
Perhaps I should double down on something like an email course, video course, or live stream that requires a little more user engagement upfront, therefore yielding some immediate monetary value.
I have enough material for a paid email course on MySQL database programming. I just need to take the time to put it all together.
What ideas do y'all have on a price point for a 5-day email course of this nature? I'd love to know your thoughts
Reply and let me know what you think.
I'll wrap up here for now.
I enjoyed these 3 reads this week:
- We Paid Over $5000 For Link Building – What Happened?
- CT No. 122: How often should you publish content?
- My Journey into Tech: A Self-taught Developer
(Cover photo credits: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)
Hi! I'm Joshua Otwell.
Backend SQL and PHP developer with an infusion of technical writing and entrepreneurial dreams. Working towards paving my own way in the creator economy with lessons learned and more importantly, those yet still to come.
Read in browser I've noticed an interesting metric that I believe deserves some attention (from me at least). In 4+ years of weekly blogging on my Digital Owl's Prose developer blog, I have approximately 180 readers who receive an email every time I publish an article. To be fair, this isn't necessarily the same thing as an email list but, is instead a WordPress(dot)com thing. However, in 6+ months of publishing my weekly OpenLampTech Substack newsletter, I have amassed approximately 132 (at...
Some housekeeping. I originally had 2 different forms for this email list before re-branding it to the current iteration. If you signed up here or here and no longer wish to receive these emails, please opt out at the bottom of this newsletter. No hard feelings at all. Read in browser I notice 2 specific skills that have stuck with me over the last couple of years that are intertwined together: Writing Programming and Code Writing about programming and code Oops. Yeah, I know. That's 3...
Some housekeeping. I originally had 2 different forms for this email list before re-branding it to the current iteration. If you signed up here or here and no longer wish to receive these emails, please opt out at the bottom of this newsletter. No hard feelings at all. "Skills pay the bills…" That is the jest of it at least. However, are self-taught or self-realized skills also valuable? Sometimes I feel I need some form of validation for the skills I've learned on my own as a self-starter or...