- Let's talk about money today.
In this video, I wanna reveal to you
everything that I've earned over the past year
as a designer and as a creator,
and tell you about the different income streams
that led to me doubling
my side hustle income over the past year.
Now, we are gonna talk real numbers in this video,
starting with this one, right here, £168,000.
This is the amount that my business brought in
over the past year.
And in this video, I'm gonna break down the income streams,
both passive and active that led to this number.
If you are a designer or a creator yourself,
then I hope that you find this video useful,
and maybe it'll give you some ideas
of income streams that you could explore for yourself.
And if you're just here 'cause you're nosy
and you wanna know what I earn
and where I got my money from,
well, I think you're gonna enjoy this too.
Let's get into it.
(upbeat music)
I've been writing a yearly income report
on my blog for the past few years.
And I started out just reporting in percentages,
showing like which percent of my total income,
the different income streams made up.
But, as time's gone on, I've gotten more
and more comfortable sharing real numbers,
and this report is definitely
the most transparent I have ever been.
A few things to note before we get into it.
All of the reporting that I'll be sharing
is done in pounds because that is the currency
that my business accounting is done in,
but I will put conversions for US dollars on screen
for anyone interested in that.
And what I'm sharing here is gross revenue.
So we're not talking taxes and things like that,
I'm sharing everything that my business brought in
for the year, although I will go into some details
of the expenses that I have
for my content production a little later on.
Okay, let's get into it.
So overall, my income was up 25% on last year.
So there's some good growth there.
I earned £126,420 from my work
as creative director at ConvertKit,
which is what I call my main hustle,
and then £41,580 from all of my side hustles.
And it's that side hustle income that is up 112%
on last year, which I'm really proud of.
So I split my income into four main categories,
design, content creation,
community memberships and products.
So let's go into each one.
(dinging)
In the past, I've dabbled in doing some design freelancing
on the side of my full-time work,
but I didn't do any of that in the last year.
So this design income that you see represented here,
the entirety of it comes from my work at ConvertKit,
where I am the creative director
in charge of our brand team and marketing design.
My salary accounted for £106,496
and then the remaining £19,924
in this category was profit sharing bonuses.
So twice a year, the team at ConvertKit
get to share in a portion of the profits
that the company has made over the past six months.
It's really generous bonus system, as you can see,
'cause it ends up with this kind of money sometimes
when the business is doing well.
I talked more about this in a video
that I made about the bonuses
and benefits that I've had throughout my design career.
So if you wanna watch that,
I'll leave a link to that in the description,
along with a video about my design salary history.
So overall this income category was up at 9%.
On last year design income was, thanks to a raise that I had
because the market rates changed for my role.
And also this was the largest profit sharing bonus check
that I've ever had too.
Content income is where I think
things get really interesting though.
And as you can see, this makes up
almost 90% of my side hustle income.
And this is also the category
that grew the most in the last year.
It is up 174% on last year's content earnings.
Within this category, there is a bunch
of different income streams.
And this is one of the reasons I think,
that I managed to double my side hustle income
in the last year was from adding a bunch of new streams.
So let's go into it.
51% of my content income or £18,837
was from the channel sponsorship that I have with Figma.
So you would have seen just a few minutes ago
at the side of this video,
a powered by Figma in my introduction, there's a link
to Figma and the description of all of my videos as well.
They support the channel, they don't have editorial say
in what I make or when I make videos
or how often I talk about Figma or anything like that.
Although it comes up a lot
because I use it for my design work, but yeah,
they're here supporting the channel
and I'm like an advocate for Figma.
So this has been a really great sponsorship to have for me.
And I think it's been working
out well for Figma as well, super grateful for it.
So if you haven't checked out Figma yet
for your digital design work, the rest of the income streams
in this category are all a lot smaller
compared to this one as you can see,
but we've got AdSense making up 14.7% or £5427.
Now I haven't actually had pre-roll ads
on my videos since like 2016.
So this here is just income generated from very old videos
on my channel and I'm not gonna lie,
seeing this number has made me consider
if I should turn ads back on again, because like you know,
this is a pretty meaningful amount.
And imagine if I added in all of the videos that I've made
in the like nearly five years since then, but for now,
all of the reasons that I turned ads off are still true.
I like to have complete control over the brands
and companies that are represented alongside my videos.
So yeah, we'll keep them off for now.
I earned £3123 from affiliate links.
And the majority of this came from Webflow and Amazon.
And this is very passive income really.
I just try and like use my affiliate link
every time I'm going to talk about a certain tool
that I'm part of an affiliate program for.
And the Amazon affiliate income mostly comes from
this page on my website where I've linked
a bunch of screen printing equipment.
I did two video sponsorships in the last year.
So the channel sponsorship with Figma
really allows me to instantly decline pretty much,
most video sponsorships that come my way.
It takes a lot of effort to go back
and forth with the company to work out okay,
what's their tool or product?
Is it a good fit, could I use it?
What I want to recommend it?
How much would I charge for this?
Do you have budget for this, et cetera?
It's a lot of back and forth.
And so my policy for sponsorships
is just to instantly decline,
if it's not a product that I already use, know and love.
I had two sponsorships come into my inbox
in the past year though that we're a really good fit.
So I took them on
I did one for.store Domains,
where I talked about designing a sales page for my font
and getting it live on CharliMarie.store.
And then Hotjar, which is a website analytics
and heat maps tool, sponsored a video
where I actually investigated the conversion rate
of that sales page and made some improvements.
So those are both really good sponsorships,
but looking at this number,
earning £2920, I feel like honestly
there's creators at my level
charging like three times that for a sponsorship.
And so I know I should probably increase my pricing on this.
And that's something that I will try to do in future.
Next up is content hosting,
which is a fairly new income stream for me.
So this is where I film videos
for someone else's YouTube channel, usually a company.
I did a 2021 design trends overview video for Webflow.
And then with Figma, I have started
a Coffee with Charlie series,
where I interview designers
and talk about their design systems
and the challenges that they've had in building them.
These are really fun to make
because my role in these videos is hosting.
So I'm the one who conducts the interview
records the footage, and then I send that off
to the company to edit themselves.
So yeah, content hosting £2796,
that number was hard to read for some reason,
is what that makes up and it's been a fun new income stream.
I've included speaking in this content income as well
because giving a talk is basically
like presenting content live, right?
And despite it being a year where in-person events
were canceled, I managed to earn £2356 from speaking.
I was a guest in a live stream for Webflow.
I did my self promotion for designers talk
at the UX Hustle Conference
and also at Figma's Europe Config Conference
and then some design YouTube friends and I got together
and we put on our own event that we sold tickets to.
It was an event called Content Creation For Designers.
And once we split the ticket sales five ways,
it worked out to be £341 each.
So not like a huge moneymaker or anything
but it was a really fun thing
to put on and work on together.
And then the last little slice, the last 3.9%
of this content income category
is podcast sponsorships for Design Life.
This is not something that my co-host Femcare
and I had done in the past,
but we took on two sponsorships this year
and my share in them came to £1442.
So we're already up to like eight streams of income now
and there's still two whole categories to go.
But I think this just goes to show
how some of these income streams,
although like individually, they may not look like much.
They all add up to like come together in the end.
The next category is community memberships.
And this is the category of income
that honestly shrunk the most in the past year.
It is down 22% to £2833 total.
And it's down because honestly I did not focus on it.
The income in this category comes from my Patreon,
the Design Life Patreon,
and also Twitch subscriptions, which is new.
I am super freak and thankful to anyone
who has joined my Patreon
or stuck around over the past year.
It really, for me exists now as like a tip jar,
a way for people who enjoy my content
to show a little support if they feel so inclined.
But I find the idea of making extra content for Patreon
really overwhelming, like it's enough just to make content
to upload publicly on my YouTube channel,
my blog, the podcast, et cetera.
Like that's enough on its own,
let alone thinking about making extra for Patreon.
So that's the approach that I'm taking with it now
and we're doing the same thing for Design Life.
So understandably, both of those, you know,
not growing a whole lot these days, but that's okay.
The Twitch income though is kind of exciting.
It's only £97 that I've earned from Twitch,
but it's cool that I've already had people
supporting this new live content that I've been trying.
That's been a fun new addition this year.
The last category that I have to talk about his products.
And this is by far the smallest category.
It's just £1845, but it did grow 121% on last year.
And most of this £1828 I believe, came from sales
of my font, Grayscale.
This is a digital product that I launched
a little over a year ago.
So all of the like launch week sales were included
in my previous year's income report.
So this money here represents sales of my font
that have continued to come through over time.
It's earning me around £100 a month
pretty consistently now, which isn't much
but my biggest struggle with products in the past
has been consistency in sales past a launch.
So I'm really, really proud of that.
And I wanna make more fonts and keep this going.
Now, a big thing that led to me
being able to earn so much more
with my side hustles this year,
I believe has been the amount that I've invested
in outsourcing for them.
I've written a blog post all about this
that I'll leave a link to if you wanna read it.
But basically, I outsource video editing, podcast editing,
content management and admin, so that I have time
to continue making my content,
like doing the important parts, like the strategy
and the filming and the teaching,
alongside my full-time job.
So I spent £8303 on video production in the last year,
£3377 on VA services to help me
with uploading content, bookkeeping, content promotion
that sort of thing, £3320 on podcast editing.
And yeah, paying for other people to do all this stuff
is seriously what has allowed me to build up
all these different income streams
because it's just sped up and made
my content production process more efficient.
So it's a lot of money to spend,
but it's a worthy investment for me into my side hustles.
Then I also spent £2439 on software subscriptions
in the past year, which really makes me
want to like dive into that more
and check on it and make sure that I'm actually getting use
out of all the software that I'm apparently paying for.
And then at £1305 on equipment,
which was mostly my streaming setup
that I invested in this year,
including this microphone right here.
So there you have it, and here's my overview again
of how all these different income streams fit together.
My side hustles equated to 25% of my overall income
for the past year, which is pretty cool.
And if you wanna read this report in more detail,
check out the link to my blog in the description,
as well as links
to all of the past year's income reports as well.
If you wanna compare and contrast
between them and get all nerdy like that.
I hope that you found it useful to hear about
all the different money-making things that I've been trying.
And I wanna thank you as well for your support,
because just by watching this video and, you know,
watching the other videos, you are making it possible
for some of these income streams to exist.
So thank you for your support and for sticking with me.
If you have any questions for me about any of the numbers
or the categories that I've talked about
please leave them down below in the comments.
I'll be happy to answer them.
And I'd love to hear too, if there was a part
of this that surprised you the most.
Let me know about that in the comments below,
and let's have a chat about it.
If you are new to this channel,
please consider hitting subscribe.
I am a big fan of transparency and talking
about money wherever I can, but usually my videos
are about design and the design process.
And I like to be very transparent about that as well.
So yeah, hopefully you'll click subscribe
and I'll see you in a future video.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time, bye.
(upbeat music)