My Quest For Creative Financial Freedom: How to Earn $10,000 per month? It’s Not as Crazy as It Sounds
Last week, we did the math on how to pay down $20,000 of debt in one year. The basic scoop is this: I need to be earning $10,000 per month by November to pull that off.
On one hand, that’s insane. I earned $2,400 in June - so I’d be quadrupling my income in four months or so. On the other hand, what if it is possible?
In this post we’re going to explore the reality of earning $10,000 per month. What are the options? Is it crazy, or surprisingly doable? I mean, it has to be doable, right - people do it!
Why I Don’t Pursue Passive Income
I’m not focused on passive income right now.
Don’t get me wrong - it’s obviously a great idea to set up income streams that don’t require any future work, so you can collect the money for the long term. It just seems like that was a big “bubble” of focus in the entrepreneur / online income blogosphere for the last decade, so most of the low-hanging fruit is gone.
There’s a big opportunity in a different kind of income. This income happens when you build a popular account in an emerging social media market. I think of it as “platform-based income”.
If you have a lot of followers on any platform, regardless of if it’s snapchat or instagram or Facebook or whatever, you can monetize it. Sponsorships are lucrative.
On a platform like Steem it’s even better - having a large Steem audience directly leads to getting paid by the site. I’m already earning 75% of my income from here!
This kind of income is not passive - one has to continue writing / creating content to earn more money - but with a sufficient platform, the job is very pleasant. Being your own boss, creating content for your large fanbase and earning a good living in the process - that’s the dream.
And while not fully passive, it’s flexible - one doesn’t need to be tied to a location or a work schedule. You can take days off whenever you want, or stockpile material and take a long vacation, etc.
Options For Earning $10,000 Per Month
Here are the results of my brainstorming session. This is where I wrote down every idea regardless of how crazy or unrealistic. Then we can prune out the best ideas from the batch.
(1) Mailing List + Sponsors
(2) Podcast + Sponsors
(3) Earn $300 per day on Steemit
(4) Sell an average of 2,000 records per month at $5
(5) Average 2,000,000 plays per month on Spotify
(6) Average 5,000,000 plays per month on Youtube
(7) Build base of 2,000 Patreon pledges paying $5 per month
(8) Dropshipping: Sell 1,000 product per month @ $10 profit, or 100 @ $100 profit
(9) Get a job that pays $120,000 per year
(10) Write 40k words per month as freelance writer, at average of $0.25 per word
Out of these, numbers 5 and 6 are essentially impossible in the timeframe allowed, and I wouldn’t want to do 8, 9, or 10.
Ideas 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7 are all reasonable - in the sense that if you heard about some friend-of-a-friend who did one of them, you wouldn’t think it sounded that crazy. This is a good way to reframe ambitious ideas.
If you heard “It’s crazy, my friend stated a patreon page and worked 60 hours a week at it, now he’s got 2,000 people donating $5 a month.” - that sounds like a thing that can happen!
What’s cool is that #3, earning $300 per day on Steemit, feels very doable in the long term. It might not be likely to happen by November, but on a longer timescale if I keep up my current work ethic and the value of Steem goes up over time - that seems quite possible.
The Plan for July
The immediate plan is to focus on two of the ten ideas: Earning $300 per day on Steemit, and/or generating $10,000 from sponsorships on a podcast.
Earning $300 per day on Steemit is a big goal, but not a crazy one. I know the top users here earn $500 or more per post, although the frequency of posting seems to slow down as users cross the $200 mark.
My goal is to slowly reduce my posting frequency as rewards go up - right now I’m aiming for 10 posts a week, It would be sick to average $200+ per post, with five posts per week.
I’ll keep pushing forward on Steem for the month of July and see how it goes.
The other idea is a brand new one - building a podcast and getting sponsors. I’ve already got a business partner on board for this, and it’s a novel idea. I’m really excited. I’m not going to explain it quite yet - keep an eye out in the next few weeks because I’ll spill the beans soon.
Personal Finance Update July 3 2017
Let’s wrap it up with the update. Here’s where I am at:
Assets:
Bank Account #1: Guilt Free Spending Account: $15
Bank Account #2: Business & Bills Account: $180
Bank Account #3: Emergency Savings: $108
Bank Account #4: Steem Power: 1,500 SP // $2,600
Miscellaneous Crypto Holdings: another $100
note: I am opening a savings account to put taxes into today. People keep asking me about if I'm factoring in tax, and I am going to be starting today. I'll confirm this happened in next week's post.
Total Assets: $2,903
Debts:
Credit Card #1: $5,540
Credit Card #2: $205
Money Owed to My Dad: $10,208 (lower than I previously thought)
Misc Personal Debt: $700
Total Debts: $16,653
Looking great! I need to pay off around $2,700 per month to get rid of the debt before 2018.
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Previous posts:
Last week's post: https://steemit.com/money/@heymattsokol/my-quest-for-creative-financial-freedom-pt-4-getting-ambitious-how-i-plan-to-pay-off-usd20-000-of-debt-in-6-months
First post: https://steemit.com/money/@heymattsokol/my-quest-for-creative-financial-freedom-pt-1-intro-explanation
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As always, I'd love feedback and ideas in the comments. Let me know what's in your head.
If i managed to reach 50 bucks per post mark, that would ultimately mean i just earned my living on Steemit. But my country is not expensive. And i dont need much...and most importantly my debt is 160 bucks...which is like 1000 less than yours...every well payed author is a part of a trail...So either you have to be adopted by a trail or you need to find friends (investors) that would agree on helping each other all the time. Because followers here (mainly after the HF) dont mean much...i mean we all have 300+ and the amount of regular upvotes i recieve is less than 10 (and some of them are not even my followers:D)
Are you so sure that followers don't mean much? I've seen my income go up considerably as my follower numbers improve, and based on looking at other accounts, most of the highest earners have at least 1k, usually more like 2-3k+ followers.
Sure it enables your post not to permanently disappear after 35 mins. Also I’m not saying the followers are not helpful. All I’m saying is that their importance is overrated. Highest earners are part of a trail and people want to vote on them before the trail hits so they earn as much curation reward as they can. Before the HF hit @gavvet had me in his trail. That basically meant that he enabled me to make Steemit my living because I was around the 50 bucks per post at that time. His trail only gave me like 30 bucks, and that meant that the other 20 bucks were by the rest of the supporters. Then HF hit he decided to not to lower the % he’s voting with and dropped me and I was back to 0. For me the difference between 0 followers and the 300 I have now is like 1 dollar. Almost none of the followers is constantly voting for me…and why would they? I earn 10 bucks per post AT BEST and that is not lucrative curation reward. All I’m trying to say is that the followers those guys have most likely happened by them earning one following whale that continually supported their work, or by being added to the trail. Then their post rewards jumped up AND SUDDENLY it was more lucrative to vote for that author. People then follow him so they could snipe the vote of the whale/trail. After I was dropped by the trail those 20 bucks (PRE HF!...that would be around 80 now) did not stay when the trail disappeared. I again struggle to have 10 views and at least 5 votes… You see where I’m going now I guess :). I also don’t think that quality of my content would significantly drop. To be honest I think it’s the opposite even if only slight. The quality doesn’t really matter. As long as you are liked by valuable voter, what I described above is the fact. That is at least my opinion I may be wrong, but I think not because I WANT to make my living here and I’ve done my research. Wow that was long…:D
This is really useful info, thank you! To be honest I haven't even thought about voting trails in a long time, this is a big oversight in my Steem strategy.
What really surprises me is how much minnows focus on curation rewards. They are tiny!! I just try to vote for the best content to support the stuff I like, such as your comment right now.
I hope a grassroots strategy is possible... if enough Minnows support me, all those 10-20 cent upvotes can add up!
I’m really glad that I was able to help you and that you value my opinion! To an extent I agree with you, but to understand why they do it I think we need to admit that Steemit is not utopia but rather recreation of the real world…people are stupid bitches(the majority) and selfish lol…this place is no exception…I have done a research (no need to read it really it’s a bit off topic…also a funny thing connected to the previous comment – I try to save people’s money and receive 0.20 buck for it if it wasn’t for randowhale :P) today and I realized that even I would receive much more curation reward if I pursued the valued posts…right now I have like 2 Steem/week doing the same strategy as you, but I believe I could increase it to at least 3…it’s a little, but now if I was a stupid bitch I might be inclined to do so:P. What you suggest would be nice, but the code would need to be changed in order to motivate those people not to vote for the highest posts… and that is unlikely:/
Yea but dude earning ONE extra steem is so not worth spending your time worrying about curation rewards.
If you are able to average one more steem PER POST, which is doable I think just by working on having good headlines / images (for example) - that would be like 5+ more steem per week!
Well now you might want to read the research I have done. It will explain why doubling my curation reward will actually be enough to gain 8 Steem per week, which is more than the 5 you suggested :P. I know that in long run it will not help, you know it too, but obviously most of the users don’t :). And they are not even using the explained strategy:P
How can this be turned into a business plan for Steemit? Or is it purely luck?
Another option is trading: day, swing or mid term. Long term trading can be considered as Investing. However, if you have amazing trading skill, it is quite possible to make $10K out of $25K trading account. However, trading is very risky and takes time & effort. I had invested $20K and lost all of them in trading cryptocurrency. On the flip side, I could have earn $100K (I have made 2000 LTC two times). But I would say, I have learned a lot about all kinds of trading and in future, can make big bucks out of it. My story!.
I have some loans just like you, but I keep learning trading in simulator.
Blessings to your Journey, I believe you can do it!!
thanks man
You can do it!
thanks
You could work some faucets to increase your crypto holdings and then leverage various methods to increase holdings for free. Its pretty easy to find decent faucets for dogecoin, and I recently found out that poloniex has pretty good lending rates for doge. .1% or more a day adds up over time if you keep re-investing. Keep hustling!
Eh, this sounds SUPER low reward though. How much can you earn from a faucet? It would need to be possible to earn at least $50/hour for any strategy to make sense in a $10,000/month mindset.
Thanks for reading!
Hi @heymattsokol, great post and so honest and transparent! I've been doing a similar kind of figuring to get myself into a better financial situation and your post really inspires me to go through the exercise of brainstorming again because I may come up with some insights I didn't see 6 months ago. Anyway, thanks and I'll read on to learn how things are shaking down for you.
Hi @natureofbeing that is awesome! I definitely recommend doing the process of goal-setting, then brainstorming. It's a really powerful combo. Thanks for reading :-)