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

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1 year ago

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:

Trying Popular Online Side-Hustles From Scratch View list 18 stories

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

Goals For The Week

Overall goals:

Get back into making YouTube videos.

Affiliate marketing:

Look into some new possibilities for using affiliate marketing to generate income.

Print-On-Demand

keep uploading more designs

In Future updates:

  • A transparent look at my progress

  • I will share what I have learned

  • I will share other valuable sources of information

Here is a list of all articles in the series:

Trying Popular Online Side-Hustles From Scratch

Feedback

If you have any suggestions or questions or want to share your thoughts, leave a comment below.

Before you leave

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This article was originally posted by me on Medium

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Comments

It's great to follow your journey on YouTube, please keep on updating us on this front.

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