Well, January was an adventure to put it mildly! It did not go to plan at all (the plan being to get back to my desk on the 1st and work as hard as possible) things were scuppered slightly by me catching COVID and being ill from the 30th December through to the 14th January.
When I say I got next to nothing done I really do mean it, a lot of my time was spent sleeping and the rest of it was spent shuffling around the house it a complete brain fog – luckily my freelance clients have all been really understanding but it’s meant playing quite a bit of catch up this past fortnight!
I didn’t hit the goal I had set myself to earn £2,021 but I’m going to let myself off the hook for that this month, we survived COVID and came out reasonably unscathed so I’m happy with that.
I managed to bring in an extra £1660.87 in January. It’s important to note that this is before deductions – I pay tax on all my side hustle/self-employed earnings so put away around 25% a month to go towards my tax return.
Freelance Services
Blogger Outreach and Project Co-ordination – £157.92
This was my pay for work completed in December, it’s not as high as previous months but that’s the joys of being freelance over Christmas when everything shuts down for a week or so. This month has seen us going over a lot of plans for growth and some big projects which will actually mean my job role will change quite a bit over the coming months but I’ll explain more about it at the time.
Social Media Community Management – £240.60
We’ve had another great month for growth in the group I manage for this client, I’m putting it down to people still wanting to get on top of their finances this year (It’s a budgeting/money chat group) and we’re building up a really nice and friendly community which is brilliant and exactly what I set out to do.
Blogging Income
Affiliates Earnings – £242.20 – What Is Affiliate Marketing?
I had a really good-sized payout from one of my regular affiliates this month which made up for some slightly lowers earnings from the others. I’m slowly starting to add in a few more affiliates scheme into my rather small collection, I’ve got wind of a new affiliate marketing tool though that should help to do this too. I should get to start beta testing it soon so if it’s good I’ll be sure to do a write up on it!
Paid ‘guest posts’ (aka Copy and Paste posts/Link Insertions) – £179.14 – Getting paid for link placements and ‘guest’ posts
Things have been a lot slower on the guest post and link insertion front this month – it’s not a surprise, I did expect things to slow down in either December or January, just crossing my fingers for it to pick up again in February.
Brand Ambassador – £750 – Easter Crafts & DIY’s over on CraftHustleDirectory
This is my last month as a Brand Ambassador for the time being as the budget for the client is being reshuffled ready for marketing plans for the rest of 2021 – It’s not the end of the world though as I have some exciting news off the back of it that I can share very soon! It’ll mean a big chunk of income lost for the next few months but it also frees up a lot of time for me that I can spend tackling some blog admin work I haven’t gotten around to yet.
Matched Betting
OddsMonkey Free Trial – £55.23 – Starting Matched Betting with OddsMonkey
We started Matched Betting again! I saw ‘we’ as it was actually something that Dean was challenged to do by OddsMonkey! I’m working on a sponsored post with them about how easy it is to start matched betting and we thought the best way to prove it would be for me to get Dean roped in and make Matched Betting his side hustle. I’ve already done a bit of matched betting in the past so I don’t have access to the sign up offers but because Dean is brand new to it it makes him the perfect ‘case study’ as it were to show what can be made profit wise and with how much time.
I sat and watched Dean go through the free trial offers so that I could write it up for this post and we’ve now graduated on to working through the premium membership offers. The free trial offers netted us £55.23 which we put back into our post to help us work through the next lot of offers.
OddsMonkey membership – £35.78 – Our Matched Betting Profit Tracker/Diary
We’ve been doing this for maybe 15 mins at a time across various evenings the past week, it really doesn’t take long at all to place the bets but we’re usually betting on events that take place the following day or evening so it takes a bit of time to move onto the next offer. The more you do it the easier it is so I’ve got a reminder set on my phone to check our accounts each evening to see which bets have settled and what we can move on to.
Plans for February
I’ll be honest – I don’t really know at the moment! Things are still up in the air with our house purchase so until that has got a completion date I feel like I’m a bit in limbo.
I don’t want to plan any big projects at the moment and I’m desperate to get caught up on my list of random little annoying back end stuff that needs doing on my websites. Even with the Brand Ambassador work ending this month and freeing up a big chunk of my time, I still have a lot of client work to be getting on with so I think it’s probably a case of trying to be as organised as possible with that get other bits done around it as and when I can.
I’m not going to set myself an earnings goal for February as I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself (sounds odd coming from me doesn’t it 😂) February is more about building processes and routines that will set me up for better time management and earning potential going forward.
Get your copy of the Side Hustle Income Tracker
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Once you’ve done that you’ll get an email with a link in to go to the download page, click on that and they’ll be there ready for you to print out.
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