SHP #17: A July Challenge from Threads
Because why not?
I'm a side hustle hoarder. Here are the side hustles I'm currently hoarding 🤣:
Several websites spanning personal finance, online presence, coin collecting, making money online, and weight loss
A number of domains
130+ stories on Medium
Followings on several social media sites
Two YouTube channels, neither monetized
Pinterest boards
Several Facebook groups, one with nearly 23k members
A mailing list of 300+ wonderful subscribers
Two newsletters (one daily, one weekly)
A website design and maintenance client
A reselling presence on eBay
Accounts with sporadic affiliate or referral income
And a piano student with leads on others
A few dozen musical arrangements and compositions
The boldface pieces are what I'm focusing on now, mainly around the currency collecting community I've built.
So I signed up for this newsletter from a guy on Threads …
His name's Adam Dukes.
I signed up for his email newsletter, watched his video, solid guy.
He posted this, and I responded:
Next day he drops this challenge on my head:
I'm going to go for this. (Can’t say I didn’t ask for it, haha!)
Here's my one rule for how it will go down:
I'm going to do it selling my own products.
Time to get scrappy and show myself that I can do this.
I'll be shipping a set of templates that I talked about last week. I'm happy with how it's progressing. I talked about it in last week's SHP.
I'm excited about this. If you want to be the first to know when the templates are ready, then comment "templates" and I'll make sure you know!
Learn from one Side Hustler's Progress!
Let's go!
1. Monetizing a YouTube channel: One short
I posted one short to my Cool Serial YouTube channel.
This makes 111 videos on the channel. Some statistics:
67 regular videos and 44 shorts
842 subscribers (+5 from last week)
147.6k views and 4.5k watch hours (lifetime)
The watch hours for the past 28 days are "less than usual" which isn't surprising because I haven't been posting much.
Continuing to add CTAs to videos
I have an ebook on Fancy Serial Numbers for Fun and Profit that sold a few dozen copies a few years ago. The sales had gone away for a while because the sales plugin had started to get a bit flaky.
(No sales yet from this but the more times I add it, the more likely someone will be to click. That's just numbers.)
I'm continuing to add calls to action (CTAs) to my videos, and I've developed a template to add it to new videos.
For the coming week: Two more videos and two more shorts.
2. Solid Cash Tips newsletter
I use Kit (formerly ConvertKit) to manage my minimalist Solid Cash Tips newsletter.
Issues 179 to 184 went out each weekday and Saturday. All of them went out at 8:40 AM.
Here they are if you're interested.
Solid Cash Tips continues to be consistent.
It's one of a few things I'm holding onto for dear life to as I build systems to put content out consistently.
The open rates are still a bit less than I'd like. For the past month or so they've been remarkably consistent, between 11% and 15%. Mark Thompson set a goal for me to get that number more like 30%, which he says that I can do by getting subscribers that are more aligned with my messages.
It's also a bit concerning that I've gotten only one new subscriber in the past two and a half weeks.
For the coming week: Get out an issue every weekday again and Saturday.
3. Creating long-form content: Four posts
I got four long-form articles out this week. I had planned for three.
Two weeks in a row I'm an overachiever here.
Here they are:
My Medium earnings have been laughable, but that's not surprising.
The pillars on my main blog:
Spend Less
Make More
Live Well
I've created two Medium publications, Side Hustle Progress and Less Spendy .
I'll re-publish posts from my websites to these two publications.
For the coming week: Get out three long-form pieces.
Post more on Threads
I'm finding Threads to be a happening place.
I'm spending a fair bit of time there just commenting.
I've already gotten more traction on Obsidian there than on Medium.
Summary of how I did, and what I'm going to do
For the past week, a little bit better follow-through:
Post two more YouTube videos and two more shorts. PARTIAL (one short)
Get out an issue of Solid Cash Tips every weekday again and Saturday. DONE!
Get out three long-form articles. DONE PLUS (four!)
I'll look to do the same things this week, in addition to working Threads.
What other things would you like to hear about? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for subscribing and reading!
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