This month, I had an article with a half-naked woman covering her cooch with a pineapple go viral-ish.
This was the article, and it has about 22,000 views right now - but that’s the early part of April talking too.
If you’re a reader of The Professional Generalist, then you’ve seen me link out to this one in a previous issue.
This article and one other one made up the bulk of the earnings for this month - so before getting into the specifics, let’s talk about how much I made.
Remember, this doesn’t include any wages/salary - just creative/coding work.
Not that it matters for this month because I got a big ole zero for freelancing.
And we’re also not just talking about money - we’re also talking about growth/views/followers, etc.
We’ll be covering Medium, Twitter, Gumroad, Freelancing, Substack, and lessons learned - so sit back and relax, and we’ll start with the fun one.
💰 The Money
After fees, this is what we’re looking at - and the strategy for yours truly is to have that Product Sales row go up eventually 📈.
✍ Medium
As I said, I had two articles that went viral-ish. I already gave you a link to the first one, and the second one was also in a previous email issue.
And here are some more open stats on followers, referred members, and people who’ve signed up for email notifications.
So here’s the thing, I’ve now published about ~150 articles on Medium, and for March, I posted 11 of them. Medium, like YouTube, is a numbers game, and here are my tips for it:
Don’t 👏 Write 👏 Shit 👏 You 👏 Hate 👏
I put a lot of pressure on myself in the past to write stuff that I thought people might like. And yet the stuff that has success is always the topics I’m interested in.
I didn’t post every day in March, and I won’t in April either - because that’s crazy talk.
Publishing quality things you want to create will ensure you get the number of articles optimized anyway.
Here are the specifics for those two articles.
And…
The cool part about this one was that it got “distributed” early and just sat there until mid-march when it took off. And the kicker is that it was published on my profile, not a publication - and I’ve been seeing this more lately.
Previously, you had to be in a publication to get people to find your content, but now, it seems like things are changing - keep that info in the back pocket ;).
🏷 Gumroad
I say Gumroad, but what I really mean is sales revenue.
Products are a new thing for me but honestly, if you’re a creator, getting out of the mindset of relying on YouTube earnings (Google Adsense), Medium, and other partner programs is the way to success.
Platforms are great for distribution but suck at making you a living in the short term. Any successful creator will tell you that they succeeded by building a business around what they do.
This means bringing value to the audience with:
Physical products.
Digital products.
Subscriptions.
Other services.
And I very much took this to heart. I’m developing a healthy obsession with making great products - and right now, those are going to be in the realms of self-improvement and productivity because that’s what I know the most about.
So I made two:
My Free Productivity Database that’s got about 40+ downloads so far.
My $15 Framework for Pursuing Life Goals because we have a zillion confusing options pulling us in every direction.
And I’ve got a loooong way to go here - I could have titled the book better, made a more effective funnel, and promoted it more effectively, but this is all a learning experience.
For this month, the framework/eBook has made about $35, while the database has made $13 (it’s free, but people can choose to pay whatever they want).
The top lessons I learned here:
📧 Free products are excellent. I now have 40 emails from people I know that are 100% interested in productivity.
📣 Marketing starts very early. It’s about how you structure the product, the title, the images, as well as how you promote it.
💰 Feedback is worth its weight in gold.
Twitter has just been such a surprise.
Who knew talking shit on the internet could reach that many people. I mean, we all did. But it’s different when it’s you, and you can see the crazy numbers.
And although I didn’t make money from this directly, I got hits to articles, email subscriptions, learned a great deal, and made some excellentt connections.
All with genuine outcomes.
I’ve seen concise ideas in Twitter circles and expanded on them with articles that have made me hundreds.
I got insider scoops on crypto-assets like ETH that earned me $500 (so far).
I met some interesting people who’ve taught me cool business models, shared valuable tools, etc.
So I’ll need to find a better way of displaying the direct benefit, but the stats look good if we’re just talking numbers.
📧 Substack
If you just read this email through your inbox, there’s a chance you might not know what Substack is (or that I’m sneakily sending this to you by using it.)
For the uninitiated, Substack is an email publication platform. Meaning I have a publication, this one you’re reading, and it gets sent directly to your inbox. But it’s a bit more.
You can also view them online as part of the platform or on the Substack app, which extends the functionality with comments and likes.
Creators like me can make a free/paid/combination version of their publication, too - and if I think of some valuable add ons in the future, I’ll make a paid version too.
I did a fun thing with my email list this month…
I deleted about ~800 emails because they were inactive or not interested. This made no change to my views/opens. But it made my open rate go up (obviously).
Here, the lesson was “focus on the people who care.” And on that note - Substack tells me this email is getting too long. So I might need to cut it short and talk about freelancing another time.
This is the first time I’ve decided to get these open emails happening, so I promise I’ll be more concise next time but hey - you can’t tell me some of it wasn’t interesting right? 😉
Let me know if you like these open stat kinds of emails.
And if you want to have a chat, you can find me on Twitter @sahkilic.
Ciao,
✌ Sah
Also, no link dump this week but I wrote an article about this strategy I’ve been using to deal with procrastination over the last 4-5 years - hope it helps.