- So if we add all of this up,
all of these different income streams,
that brings my grand total of income for the year to.
(upbeat pop music)
Welcome to the video where I tell you about everything
that I earned in the past year.
I'm gonna give you all the real numbers and a breakdown
of the 16 different income streams that make up
my like design education business.
So let's jump in.
So, and I'm gonna have to just look at my screen
every now and then here to make sure
that I'm reading numbers off correctly.
Over the past year, 75% of my total income came
from my main hustle, which is what I call my full-time work,
as creative director at ConvertKit,
so that's one income stream.
And then the remaining 25%, the other 15 streams
are what make up my side hustle.
And this, I split into three different categories.
We've got content creation, memberships,
and products and services.
Let's start with the biggest category
first though, shall we?
I earned £131,795 from my work at ConvertKit this year.
That is 4.3% more than last year,
and that's broken down into £118,994 from my salary,
and then £12,801 in profit sharing bonuses.
I didn't do any freelance work in the last year,
so all of this income here is everything that I've earned
from hands-on design work, so it's my design category.
But let's move on to the side hustle categories.
So the biggest one by far is my content category,
this makes up 90.3% of my side hustle income,
and I earned £39,299 pounds from my content efforts
in the last year, which is 12.7% more
than the year before, so yay.
There are seven income streams within this category.
And we'll start from the bottom with writing.
So this is a new income stream for me,
and it brought in just £863,
but I'm still super proud to have been asked
to write some guest posts for the SuperHi blog.
And I hope that I get to do more of it in the future.
Next up is speaker fees, which was £931 for two events.
I gave my self promotion for designers talk
at the Designer Boss Summit,
and then I spoke on a panel at the UX Hospital Conference.
Both of these were virtual events, and again,
I hope I get a few more of these next year
'cause speaking is really fun.
My affiliate commission income was down 43% this year,
and brought in £1,797.
So this represents income from me recommending Webflow,
Amazon products, sales of like the bundle
that was promoted at the Designer Boss Summit,
that I included my font Grayscale in.
Also, The Contract Shop, which sells contract templates,
Treehouse code school and Adobe.
As you can from this decrease in income here,
this is like a passive income stream that actually does
really suffer if you are not active with it,
if you're not actively promoting your links,
which I didn't do much of in the past year, so that's it.
If you wanna try any of these tools that I mentioned,
it would mean a lot to me if you can sign up
using my affiliate link in the description, but moving on.
My content hosting income was almost the same
as last year at £2,745.
This is income where I am paid to record content
for a brand's channel, which I do for Figma
and Webflow right now, and again,
I hope I get to do more of this going forward.
And then, my third biggest
content income stream was AdSense.
So this is ads on my YouTube videos,
and this earned me £4,179.
For quite a few years, I actually had ads turned off
on all the videos that I published 'cause I didn't like
that I couldn't control what products were promoted
on my content, and I still don't love that.
But in March, when I noticed that my side hustle income
was a little bit lacking, I decided to make use
of some of the AdSense tools to block a bunch of advertisers
that I knew I didn't want to be seen in my videos,
as well as blocking a bunch of categories
that I didn't wanna be associated with.
And I turned ads back on again
with those like stricter controls in place.
I really did take a lot of pride in giving you all
an ad-free experience, though, so what I'm doing now
is I'm only turning ads on after the video
has already been live for 24 hours.
So if you turn in early, you can get
that ad-free experience still.
And this definitely cuts down on like the income potential
from this stream, but it's a way that I figure I can earn
money from AdSense in a way that I'm proud of
and doesn't make me feel like a sellout.
Next up is my channel sponsorship with Figma.
My beloved Figma.
They've been supporting my channel for a few years now.
They pay a monthly fee to appear in my intro and outro,
and also in my channel banner as like a brand alignment,
brand awareness partnership between us,
and I earned £12,991 from this.
That was 31% less than last year 'cause I took a break
from uploading over the summer, and of course,
when I'm not uploading, I'm not gonna send Figma
through an invoice.
Then finally, in this very large category
is a different type of sponsorship, content sponsorships,
which is like the classic brand deal.
I earned £15,790 from these in the last year.
And I used to split this up
into whether it was a video sponsorship,
or a podcast sponsorship, social media post,
but lately, I've been doing more brand partnerships
that span multiple channels and like, you know,
a brand's contacting me for promotion on a few at once,
so I figure it makes sense now to combine the income here.
And this category in general was up 262%,
compared to last year.
That is because I took on more sponsorships
and I charged more than the year before,
and I'm really proud of all of the content that I created
with brands over the past year.
I'm still very picky with who I'm gonna align myself with,
who I'm gonna allow to sponsor a video on this channel,
but it meant a lot that so many great brands reached out
and wanted to work together over the past year.
So that was my content income.
And the next category is membership.
If you have seen my past income reports,
you will know that this category has been
in a steady decline for a few years now,
and yup, this year was no different.
I earned £1621 in this category over the last year
which was 43% less than the year before.
The biggest reason for this decline
is that I actually closed down my Patreon this year,
but I earned £1023 from it before it ended.
The Patreon we have for the Design Life Podcast
is still around, but I have no interest in it.
It has definitely dropped, so my share of the earnings
from that was just £460 last year.
Luckily though we've been able to land a few podcast
sponsorships so all of our editing and hosting cost
is still covered for the show.
And then closing out this category
I earned £73 from Twitch subscriptions
and £66 from YouTube channel memberships.
This YouTube Channel membership is kinda what I'm doing now
to replace Patreon as a way to support my channel,
if you choose to.
The membership is called The Coworking Club,
which is named after my live streams, and if you join it
you get special little star badge next to your name
and special emotes that you can use
in the live chat on streams and it's pretty fun.
And wanna say thanks to everyone who has supported
my channel over the past year,
whether it was part of that YouTube channel membership,
whether it was on Twitch, part of my Patreon
before I closed it, just yeah, thanks.
It means a lot to me.
Okay the last category before we total it all up
is products and services.
So we sold a few of our work in progress pins
through the Design Life store in the past year
and my share of that was £91
Then a new service that I started offering this year
is my marketing design job board.
So companies who are hiring for a brand
or marketing design role,
they can pay to get the job listed
and like sent out to my email list
and in total in earned £597 from this.
I would love to grow this more
'cause I think it's a great way to connect people
with companies and I'm vetting the roles
before I post them on the board as well.
So yeah check out the job board
if you are hiring or looking to be hired.
My font sales, sales of my handwritten font Grayscale
they were running pretty much on autopilot this year
and I earned £731 from it, which is definitely something
I would like to see grow.
But I do hope that new site design
is gonna help promote that a bit better
and maybe it'll get more sales this year.
It's still pretty cool to have made that
as you know fairly passive income.
And then lastly another new offering
and a new income stream for me is my mentoring sessions.
I have really loved doing these.
I only started them February but I earned £1186 from them
before the end of my 12 month accounting period
that I do these things for.
And I'm really proud of the feedback
that I've gotten from the folks who booked sessions.
I expect to and like hope that this will grow a bit,
this income stream over the next year.
Just because in the next report
I will have been doing it for a full year.
But I actually only take on 6 sessions per month of these
mentoring sessions and that's to protect my energy
so that I can make sure I'm actually able
to bring enough to each person, as well as to my job
and the team I lead at CovertKit.
So yeah I don't think this category
is gonna grow a whole lot.
So if we add all of this up,
all of these different income streams
that brings my grand total of income of the year to £175319
(cash register dinging)
If you are a fellow side hustler
I hope that hearing about my income streams
might have given you a few ideas of things you can try.
And if you're just here because you like knowing
how other people make their money,
then I feel you, I'm the same way.
And I hope you enjoyed this.
I'd love to know what the most surprising part
of this was to you.
I don't know was there an income stream
you weren't expecting or that was smaller
or larger than you were expecting
Tell me about it in the comment.
Let me know your thoughts.
And if you wanna get a closer look
at any of these charts and data
and like really dig in on this
then you can check out the full income report on my blog
which will be linked in the description
All thanks for watching.
See you next time.
(upbeat pop music)