It’s day 8 of Blogvent, where I blog every day in December!

This year, I put more effort into tracking how much money my side projects, contract work, talks, and other “non-day-job” projects made.

Why?

I mostly started because I was a part of a cohort of folks in a group called Big Cash Money (also known as DiscoLink Club, which sadly no longer exists) run by Saron Yitbarek, in which we had weekly check-ins about how we were making money in our day jobs, our side projects, our contracting gigs, everything.

The group was so refreshing, particularly because money is still a taboo subject! We would all talk about our goals and struggles regularly, and it was nice to have a private space to do that, (mostly) guilt-free. Ryan, the professional coach in the group, was great at yelling at us (lovingly) to push for more money and be less afraid to price things better.

Though the group doesn’t exist officially anymore, it was a really good mindset shift for me to work on. Tracking money, and actually putting more value on my own time, was really helpful for me in helping re-assess my own goals, and where I was putting my efforts.

How did you do it?

I did it in an incredibly manual way, with a plain ol’ JavaScript array of “activities” for a given month, and had a monthly goal number I tried to hit. I put it all in a CodePen template, so I could access it on any device I was using, without having to set up an actual database or anything!

My arrays literally looked like this (this is an actual copy and paste from one of the months I tracked):

//...
[
  { name: "Newsletter sponsorship", amount: 1000 },
  { name: "W-9 Crafter sales", amount: 317.95 },
  { name: "GitHub Sponsors", amount: 26 },
  { name: "Stack Overflow newsletter", amount: 250 },
  { name: "Newsletter sponsorship", amount: 2575 },
  { name: "Twitch subscribers", amount: 86.78 },
  { name: "Newsletter sponsorship", amount: 1102.5 },
  { name: "Redbubble sale", amount: 1.69 },
  { name: "Udemy sales", amount: 3.58 },
];

(by the way, if you’d like to use the template, you can click the “use this template” button at the bottom to clone it to your account, update your goal amount, and then activities in that top array)

As you can see, it was not a particularly fancy setup, and the ranges of what money I actually made per line item were pretty wide. Some months consisted of a bunch of small things that made me less than $30 each, and some months I had a healthy newsletter sponsorship pipeline and contract work and conference talks that added up to much more.

The goals I set each month didn’t really have any rhyme or reason to them, except I knew some months would be more busy than others. So, those numbers ranged from 4 to 5 figures, depending on the month. I rarely actually met my goals, BUT it was really nice to have them written down, just to kick myself into gear a bit more often!

Will you do it again next year?

I can’t actually decide. I did find value in tracking things better (and I’m sure it’ll be helpful during tax season to have a more proper setup, too, rather than just piles of documents to sift through), purely to give myself some more visibility into how I was spending my time.

Tracking things lead me to cut some projects that were costing me a lot of time for little to no money (like Jumblie), and putting more effort behind larger projects (like my newsletter). Having actual numbers attached to decisions like that make it a lot easier to find a good balance!

All this being said, the main negative thing in this was just… the mental overhead. Thinking, “oh, I should track this,” for every single dollar I made, even when it was literally less than $2 from a sale, made it a… less enjoyable experience. A lot of this is my own fault of course, for trying to diversify how and where I make money (I love the concept of passive income and should blog about that at some point) instead of putting more of my eggs in fewer baskets.

I’m also very aware that I’m privileged to even be able to make money in different ways, and there’s a weird guilt there that Ryan tried knocking out of me (almost successfully, but it is very strong). I’ve worked hard to be able to earn sponsorships, viewership, readership, a whole fleet of ships. And yet… talking about wanting to earn more and be better at earning more makes me feel like I don’t deserve it sometimes. Eh. I probably need more coaching.

Anyway, all this being said, assessing how and where I’ve made money has been a really good exercise this year. I’m brainstorming how I can continue, without the mental overhead, and also refine how my time is spent more and more.

Extra resources

If you want help with money and side projects and all that jazz, here’s a few things that might help!

• My CodePen tracker template that I talked about above
• Ryan Cox Coaching
• Keenesse Coaching & Consulting
• My speaker rider
• DiscoLink Club AMA videos
• Low Energy Leads newsletter
• MRR Meter Generator

See you tomorrow!