August Online Income Report

Welcome to my first online income report! I decided to start sharing the income I earn online each month aside from what I earn at my full-time job to be more accountable for my goal of increasing my side hustle income this year.
I report my budget, and freelancing and blogging have become such a large part of my life so I figured I might as well share my income and my strategies to earn more from side hustling online.

I’ve definitely been inspired by income reports from bloggers like Alexa from Single Moms Income and Michelle from Making Sense of Cents to keep building my income streams and growing my income by my own means instead of waiting around for someone to give me a raise.

Hopefully, these income reports can inspire someone else to do the same.

It all started with freelance writing. I began in February of this year, and my goal was to earn at least $300/month. I quickly surpassed that and now I’m aiming to earn at least $1500/month by January 2016.

After taxes and other miscellaneous expenses, that would leave me with at least $1,000/month or $12,000 annual raise to help me meet my goal of paying off all my student loans next year.

So in August, *drumroll please*,

In August 2015 I earned: $765.65

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This is after PayPal fees but before taxes. This is also money that I received in August so a lot of the work was done in July.

Here’s how this total breaks down:

Freelance Writing: $580.59
Virtual Assistant Work: $120
Affiliate Sales: $65
Ads (Google Adsense): $0 (haven’t reached a $100 threshold yet)

As you can see, a majority of my income comes from freelance writing. I love writing and the clients I work with, but I would also like to diversify my income and seek out more virtual assistant opportunities. June was actually a super busy month for me along with July.

In July, I ended up earning $993.81 after PayPal fees, but I’m expecting work to pick up a quite a bit during the fall.

Of course, I have to pay taxes on the income I earn online so about 30% of what I make goes in a savings account awaiting tax time so I won’t have any unpleasant surprises.

Goals For My Blog and Online Income

Since my goal is to earn at least $1500 or more each month, I still have some work to do.

I need to pitch more: This is just common sense, if I want to earn more and land more jobs, I need to apply, pitch and remind people that I am actually hiring. This is especially a goal for landing more VA jobs. Some other bloggers and online friends have even taken the time to personally send me job leads or refer me to potential clients. I truly appreciate anyone who’s taken the time out to do that.

I need to do more guest posts on popular blogs and websites: No, guest posts don’t always translate into paid jobs but I still enjoy submitting them. Who knows, the more I put my work out there and disperse it online maybe one day someone will come across my writing and have an opportunity for me.

Build my blog’s traffic: Increasing my traffic is always a goal of mine. I’ll always welcome more readers; the more the merrier. Plus, if I want to continue monetizing my blog slowly, I need a growing audience. I’ve turned to Pinterest to generate better quality photos and schedule them more often. I enlisted help from Kristin, from the blog Believe In a Budget</strong for this. So far, she’s been awesome. Hire her! She knows Pinterest well 🙂 I’ve also been considering getting a Facebook page for the blog since I’ve been doing a pretty good job managing Facebook for a current client of mine. I also want to cater to my current readers by offering a survey for feedback in the near future, plus that giveaway I keep hinting to.

Diversify my income: Like I’ve said before, I don’t want to earn all my online income from one source. The things I love about earning money online is the fact that I can work at home during my spare time and don’t have to run out to a second to a job I can’t stand for extra money. I also like having the opportunity to earn money in a variety of ways and control how much money I can make. Over these next few months I hope to diversify my income through freelance writing, VA work, ads and affiliate sales and even selling items online.

I’m excited to see where this all goes!

Do you do anything to earn an income online?