Side-Hustles From Scratch #17 — A Minor Setback and Shifting Focus ...

Intro

Another Thursday and another progress update. No miracles, just real, slow progress. Get future updates e-mailed to you every Thursday by signing up for my mailing list.

And if you missed the previous updates, here is a complete list for you:

Hopefully, in a year or so, we can look back at this list as a roadmap to a successful side hustle.

Update #17

When I began the series I started with 3 side hustles: Affiliate marketing, Print on Demand, and a Faceless YouTube channel. While doing all of this my main focus was growing an audience here on Medium. And that has been going quite well.

But along the journey, I abandoned YouTube for a while simply because I didn’t have enough free time to manage everything. I want to focus heavily on growing a YouTube channel in 2023. But it’s always better to begin early. So I will try to find the time to get back to working on YouTube starting now.

When I started creating content online my original handle was @moneycanworkforyou I wanted to focus on covering topics like investing and money-making. But along the way, I decided that I don’t want to limit myself to just these topics and changed my pseudonym to HungryMinded.

I used to create faceless youtube videos like this one:
video here

And it did pretty well for a video like this on an unknown channel. If you are interested in how I made it, I wrote an article where I cover this in detail.

But now I want to try something a bit different. I want to give a shot at using my real voice. As well as shift my focus to covering a wider spectrum of topics.

So I have created a new YouTube channel.

Hungry Minded - new channel

Subscribe to the channel to follow along my journey and support me :)

Now about the setback.

Affiliate marketing is great and I see a huge potential to earn more using this strategy. But this I’ve had a minor setback. A recent commission got retracted because the user decided to cancel his subscription to the service I promoted and ask for a refund.

It’s a bit sad, but it is no big deal. I knew this could happen.

Earnings

Total: $59.42

Breakdown:

Print-on-demand: $0.61

Affiliate marketing: $58.81

This Week:

Affiliate marketing: -$36.48

Accomplishments

Series started — April 21, 2022
First photos accepted to Shutterstock — April 26, 2022
First video published on Youtube — May 5, 2022
First sale on RedBubble — May 10, 2022
First referral on Medium — May 12, 2022
First actual affiliate sale 34$ — August 7, 2022

Affiliate Marketing

This week has been one of the worst for affiliate marketing as one of the commissions got retraced, and I didn’t get any more commissions.

screenshot by HungryMinded
But as I have said before, I do see a potential to earn a lot using affiliate marketing in the future. I don’t want to overdo it now in the early stages of my content creation career. And I want to keep it highly relevant to my audience.

For now, it’s all about building an audience. And it is going pretty well so far.

Print-On-Demand

I am a little bit frustrated with the results of this one. And so far I don’t think it is worth the time I’ve been putting into it. At least in the form, I am currently doing this. Uploading my designs to Redbubble.

I have uploaded 60 designs. And have made just one sale. But I have had a lot of fun making these designs and I have learned a lot.

I think Redbubble is too saturated with competition for new users to get noticed easily. But I will keep uploading my designs at least until I get to 100.

So far my most viewed design according to Google Analytics has been this Party Lemur:

Jungle Party Lemur Essential T-Shirt by HungryMinded

When I started creating these designs I used only Photoshop to create them. But lately, I have been using Midjourney AI and it has been a lot of fun. If you want to check out Midjourney yourself, here are some tutorials to get you going.

Start Creating Images With Midjourney Now