Can you believe it’s been 10 weeks? I’ve been side hustling for over 2 months now! It’s crazy. It’s been a lot of fun to be honest even if I didn’t make that much money at all. I’ve put a lot of work in and gained tons of experience and I know it might be cliche to say this but that’s been a lot more rewarding than any money I’ve made. I do hope that I will be able to turn this into steady income soon though! Anyways, on to the update!
What I’ve been up to
General updates
Next week there will not be a weekly recap because I’m taking the week off! You guys enjoy your break as well :)!
Blog updates
My first monthly recap for the side hustle project is out! You can read it here.
I only made one pin for my pinterest account. I kind of don’t have motivation to work on making list pins every day or even every other day but I figured posting one pin was better than posting nothing. I do get more outbound clicks with list pins though so that’s a bit motivating. I think if I was able to post list pins on a daily basis I would probably see a big improvement so I might try something like that soon.
Outfit side hustle updates
I have been on a content GRIND. I made ten more posts this week! I hit my goal from last week so now my website is fully setup content wise. It feels nice to get past the initial content grind knowing that I don’t have to make as much content per week as I did in the last two weeks.
I mentioned before that I am manually working on a newsletter. I got really stuck trying to figure out how to send automatic welcome emails. Also legally you’re required to have an unsubscribe feature which is an additional pain. So I’ve decided I want to switch to a an actual newsletter plugin. I settled on MailerLite because it’s free for the first 1000 subscribers and it had good reviews on TrustPilot.
There was a tiny problem though- it’s apparently also legally required that you have an address on your newsletter. Obviously I don’t want to put my real address on my newsletter, but virtual mailboxes or PO boxes cost money :_(. WHY DOES EVERYTHING COST MONEY. Anyways, it’s lowkey expensive.
I could hypothetically use substack but it’s not as professional looking for my blog. I don’t know, I’m kind of at an impasse here. I think I probably will end up getting a virtual mailbox but I’m not sure if I should do that before or after I launch my blog. The cheapest option I found is $7.98 a month, which is not bad. I’ll update next next week with what I decided to do!
Insights and takeaways
Money money money
So let’s recap all the things I ran into that you have to pay for unavoidably or eventually. Domain, hosting, newsletter service, virtual mailbox address. Easily $50 a month if you’re running things on a small scale. I guess the takeaway is that you should be prepared for random costs that will crop up, especially if you’re trying to run a blog as a business and not for a hobby. I’ll keep track of the cheapest options I find here.
Legal issues
There is a bunch of legal things that you need to do related to blogging. I’m quite paranoid about accidentally breaking the law but I also have no legal expertise. I read this article which was kinda useful but if I end up growing more though I will definitely schedule an appointment with an actual legal expert. Anyways yeah definitely keep that in the back of your mind when you’re doing anything related to money at all!!! Getting sued is not fun.
Stats
This Website
Hehe I got the biggest spike of my blogging career.
All time stats last week vs this week:
Traffic sources:
Outfit Website
All time stats last week vs this week:
Traffic sources:
I’m having better luck with social media with my outfit website.
This Website Pinterest
Stats last week vs this week
I’ve been gaining followers, but my monthly views keeps dropping. The outbound clicks are doing better since I started making list pins though so I think I’m on to something with that.
Outfit Website Pinterest
Huge improvement here!
Outfit Website Instagram
Medium
Medium has been pretty stagnant this week for some reason.
Email subscriber count for both websites
This website: 4 (1 is me) (+1 subscriber this week!)
Outfit website: 2 (1 is me)
Affiliate marketing earnings
Nothing to show this week 🙁
Money/Time Stats
Total money spent this week: $0.00
Total money spent: $18.05
Total money made this week (on hold): $0.00
Total money on hold: $13.32
Total money made this week (paid out): $0.00
Total money paid out: $0.00
Total hours spent this week: ~ 21 hours
Total hours spent: ~ 190.5 hours
Hourly wage [(Total money paid out – Total money spent)/(Total hours spent)]: -$0.095/hour
Those are all the updates for the week! I hope this was informative! Let me know if you have any comments, questions, or concerns in the comment section below!
Leave a Reply