It has been an exciting and tiring month. I took October ‘off’ from side hustle work as much as possible, I only did the work that I have regularly contracted in and didn’t pitch for anything new, I also took a bit of an accidental social media hiatus – doesn’t sound too exciting/tiring so far right? Well…
We ended up making BIG steps towards getting our mortgage sorted this month, which is something we have been working towards for years so a lot of time has been spent emailing our mortgage broker, solicitor and scheduling surveys, signing paperwork.
I got offered a new job role that I’ve taken on as a part-time freelance role for the time being, I was extremely flattered to have been offered the role and even more pleased that we were able to come to an arrangement where I could do it part-time for now – I’m going to try to fit in around 12hours a week to dedicate to it.
I hired a new freelancer this month (which takes the Musha Media team up to 4 people now including myself!) to help me with some research ideas and social media scheduling which has been great and saved me a lot of time this month.
I managed to bring in an extra £1,337.01 in October. 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.
Fiverr – £23.86 – How to make money on Fiverr
I have a love/hate relationship with Fiverr at the moment, jobs only seem to come in on there when I’m having a particularly busy few days and I can’t drop everything to get a Fiverr job out in 36hours (you set your own turn around time but people prefer a quick delivery). I actually turned down two requests for jobs on there this month as the time it would take away from other projects versus the money I’d make from them wasn’t justifiable…which probably means I should up my Fiverr prices more than anything. I’ve currently got all gigs on there paused and I’ll reassess what I want to do with them in November.
Freelance Services
I’ve changed how I’ve laid this out since last month as people wanted to see a better break down of where the money actually comes from. I didn’t do any of my usual freelance work this month (Etsy SEO/Website building/product photos) as I had already told these clients that I was taking some time off.
Social Media Community Management – £238.60
This is a new freelance service I offer and basically, it means I set-up and run a brands Facebook Group for them. I admin the group fully, schedule posts to promote engagement, respond to comments and vet new group members.
Blogging Income
Last month I had a lot of questions on Instagram asking me to breakdown exactly how I make my money through blogging a bit more, this probably isn’t the best month to show it as I’ve not done any sponsored work but I’ll keep it in this format from now on in the hopes that it makes it clearer when I do!
Affiliates Earnings – £221.74 – What Is Affiliate Marketing?
This month I had payouts from the 2 matched betting companies that I receive most months and a surprise payout from the web hosting company I use – The payout times from them are around 90 days so this would have been from affiliate links that we’re clicked around June/July time so that was a nice surprise.
Content Placement (aka Copy and Paste posts/Link Insertions) – £102.81
I’m working on a blog post to fully explain what content placement is and how bloggers make money from it but in a nutshell – companies email you asking if you will host pre-written content from them on your blog (that includes a link back to something they are being paid to promote), you negotiate a price and they send you over a google doc that you literally ‘copy’ the content from and ‘paste’ into a blog post it’s a 15-minute job at most. Link placements are even quicker, you usually get an email saying ‘we’d like to have this link inserted into this post on your blog’ you negotiate a price and then spend a few minutes placing their requested link into that post by creating a sentence or two to make it flow naturally.
There is a lot more to it than this technically and there are certain rules/regulations to go along with it but that’s a Blogging 101 kind of answer for now.
Brand Ambassador – £750 – Christmas DIY’s over on CraftHustleDirectory
This is my big earner each month at the moment, it’s also the task I spend longest on – it takes all month to test the tutorials and complete the posts but I enjoy it so much that it really doesn’t feel like work! I essentially get paid to craft, write and film TikTok tutorials (TikTok is far harder to use than I expected, people make it look so easy!)
Plans for November
Well as I’m writing this we’re potentially awaiting the announcement of another full lockdown so I guess my plans should be to just try and get through the next few weeks?
I don’t plan to pitch for any work, I’m going to try and work on finding a good balance with my new freelance role and everything else that’s going on. Hopefully, we can get things really rolling with the mortgage/house buying process too. Ideally, once we have bought the house I’ll be looking at leaving my full-time job to go fully self-employed (which is what makes it all the more exciting!) so I feel like trying to organise side hustle and freelance stuff as much as possible now will stand me in good stead for when that happens 👍
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