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She's earning $3500/month via Upwork while traveling the world ✈️
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
$3500/Month via Upwork as a Digital Nomad
Built & Sold a Website for $89,300 in 2 Years
This Habit Helped Him Build a $38M/Year Company
$250,000/Year Online Trivia Business
From Working at McDonalds to 1.5M Followers in 18 Months
Success Is Inevitable If…
This Mental Health Blog Earns $3000/Month
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$3500/Month via Upwork as a Digital Nomad
Hollie Kingsland is a freelance editor and writer from the UK 🇬🇧
From her Upwork (login required), she has earned over $80,000 since starting out in 2020.
Though the early days were a struggle, she has since built a business that allows her to travel the world and work from anywhere 🏝️
She recently wrote…
I never expected to be using a platform like Upwork, nor did I ever really expect to become a freelancer – much less be my own boss – but life took an unexpected turn in 2020 when the global COVID-19 pandemic put a hold on my travels and sent me packing back to the UK without a job.
As it turned out, the pandemic provided the perfect opportunity to pursue an alternative approach to work.
Now…
After nearly three years of being a freelancer, I’m making a comfortable living and I have clients who value my contributions and expertise. I’m certainly not making millions, nor am I working three-day weeks.
I’m actually earning more than I did in my last full-time employment.
Via Hollie's LinkedIn, her last full-time employment was as an Individual Giving Officer for a company called Sense. A few months after she left, the job was advertised with a salary of £29,500 GBP (about $40,000 USD).
So presumably Hollie is now earning $3500 or more each month as a freelancer 🤑
How she got started…
In the early days, I was applying to jobs I was way overqualified for that were paying pennies… My first job paid me the grand total of $5… After Upwork’s fees and the exchange rate, I made £3.08.
Considering that was the first money I’d earned in six months, I remember feeling pretty chuffed!
The thing is that, for me, this approach worked. It enabled me to make valuable contacts, gather gushing reviews, and most importantly, it allowed me to figure out the whole Upwork ball game as quickly as possible.
However, she feels things are changing…
To find success on Upwork in 2023, you’ll need a bucket-load of patience, a willingness to invest in Connects to get your proposals seen, and the dedication to create an epic profile and submit stellar applications. But more than anything, you’ll need to be the real deal and have legitimate skills.
(Upwork Connects are used as a currency on the platform, to make sure people don't submit spammy applications.)
💬 In reply to a comment asking if one should pay for Connects, she says…
I did buy connects at the start. I thought of the expense as an investment.
Starting a business always requires some investment, whether that be paying advertising fees to market your services, paying a web developer to create your website or paying for a course to consolidate your skills.
Hollie's experience is similar to many others we've featured in this newsletter.
I'd say the recurring theme is: it's hard before it's easy.
Sounds like Hollie's first few months as a freelancer on Upwork were a tough grind, but her willingness to endure such tough times is what made her digital nomad dreams come through 💪
🔎 freelancing | permalink
Built & Sold a Website for $89,300 in 2 Years
Today's email is brought to you by Income School's Project 24 🤩
That's a highly-rated course to help you build a successful blog.
This week they're offering $50 off their normal pricing 🥳 which I already considered good value.
You can check out 30+ student reviews of Project 24 on my site.
Here's what one student had to say…
Following the teachings, I built a website in 1-2 years that sold for $89,300 after all expenses related to the sale and was making $3000+/mo in profit.
… The course material is good and precisely what beginner bloggers need to start producing a moderate income on their own.
This Habit Helped Him Build a $38M/Year Company
Nathan Barry is the founder of ConvertKit, an email marketing platform that earns about $38 million per year 💰
In a recent interview, Nathan was asked about the most important habit he's developed as an entrepreneur.
His reply…
Patience… someone described me as short-term impatient and long-term patient.
I've also heard this referred to as: impatient with actions, patient with results 😎
Nathan adds…
With ConvertKit it took two years to get to $2,000 a month in recurring revenue and then the very next year we went from $2,000 to $100,000
So Nathan had to be very patient during those first 2 years.
The key, he says, is to focus on the things you can control 👇
Say we're tracking revenue as our goal for building a software company, that's not actually within your control, that requires a bunch of [other] people to say yes…
… you have to set the goal at something that you can control.
Trent Dyrsmid, a good friend of mine, talked about his first business, he was selling IT services.
He knew the thing he could control was how many cold calls he made to pitch his IT services.
And so every day he had two jars on his desk. One had 50 paper clips in it, the other was empty. And he was done for the day when he had made 50 cold calls and he had moved all the paper clips from one jar to the other.
That's something you can control.
(Btw, Trent sounds like the real deal.)
What are the key tasks in your business that you can control, and can chip away at day after day? 🤔
$250,000/Year Online Trivia Business
🗂 From the archive, published April 2021…
Collin Waldoch started Water Cooler Trivia back in 2018 and has grown it to more than $20,000/month in recurring revenue 📈
As Collin explained in a recent podcast interview, the business is pretty simple.
He started out emailing weekly trivia questions to colleagues at his old 9-to-5, then did it via Mailchimp for his friends’ workplaces. He partnered with a developer to build the current version of it, and reckons the business could grow another 10-20x as is.
Companies like Nike, Lyft and Amazon avail of the service, using it for “asynchronous team building.”
I like that concept: team building exercises that don’t require everyone to be in one place or on a scheduled call. Ideal for a remote working world 🌎
How else could you help companies practice asynchronous team building?
From Working at McDonalds to 1.5M Followers in 18 Months
Sheehan Quirke is the guy behind Cultural Tutor on Twitter (most popular tweets).
He went from working at McDonald's 🍔 with 0 followers to over 1.5 million followers in just 18 months 🚀
Chenell Basilio breaks down the story…
[Sheehan's success is] not due to a bunch of growth hacks. His content is a masterclass in the power of focus and creating truly unique content.
Sheehan writes about culture and how things change over the years.
He tweeted in June 2022…
Six weeks ago I quit my job and set myself a challenge.
Start a Twitter account. Share the things I care deeply about for at least 30 days. See what happens.
And today I've hit 100k followers. Thank you. To all of you. Truly 🙏
Off the back of that success, Sheehan was thinking to launch a paid newsletter.
Chenell explains…
David [Perell] got on a call with Sheehan and told him it was a terrible idea to create a paid newsletter because it would slow his growth a lot.
He eventually asked him to become a “Writer in Residence” for Write of Passage instead. David would pay him a salary to keep writing every day.
Sheehan took that offer 🤝
It's unclear how much he's getting paid, but it's safe to say it's a much better gig than working at McDonalds.
Btw, we covered David Perell’s story a while back…
Back to Chenell's profile…
[Sheehan] was trying to post insightful ideas with minimal context. And he was posting A LOT.
He was trying, but he wasn’t pulling the threads out long enough to tell a true story.
And then, on his 38th day running this account, on only the 72nd tweet he’d written, he had his first massive, mega-viral post.
Sheehan was basically throwing a lot of stuff at the wall. He had a lot of misses, but he kept going.
And eventually he broke through with that viral post 🥳
Chenell's takeaway…
If you spend more time creating something than anyone else will, your work is going to stand out.
No one wants to sit down and do deep research to find out why Lionel Messi is wearing that specific shade of blue on his jersey, but a lot of people want to know why.
Chenell's work is another example of diving deep.
She spends dozens of hours researching her subjects and pulling out insights.
I reckon there's plenty of opportunity for other people to do this in different niches.
What if you studied the top creators in your niche and shared the rare insights you dig up? 🤔
Success Is Inevitable If…
A couple of quotes from Tim Grahl’s book, Running Down A Dream…
Success is inevitable if you keep moving.
The only way you truly fail at a marathon is to stop taking the next step. Sometimes you’re running, sometimes you’re walking, and sometimes you’re crawling. It doesn’t matter. If you’re moving forward, you will succeed.
I ran a marathon many years ago, hit the wall around mile 21 😩 and had to walk for a few miles. But I kept going, and eventually finished.
Similarly…
Sunday marked 13 years since I quit my job and started working for myself.
I was pretty naive in the beginning, figured this entrepreneurship thing would be a piece of cake 🍰
As it turned out, it took almost a decade for my business to earn $10,000 in one month (reports).
Three years later, my monthly average is $25,000 – on track to crack $300k for the year – and I reckon I'm still just scratching the surface.
I haven't run the whole way. I've walked parts of this journey, crawled others 😮💨
But I've kept going, kept moving forward.
And that, more than anything, is what has helped me succeed.
This Mental Health Blog Earns $3000/Month
🗂 From the archive, published March 2023…
Hugo Huijer started Tracking Happiness back in 2017.
He now earns $3000/month from it 🤑
We generate most of our revenue from display ads, but I’m constantly trying to diversify this. Most recently, we’ve launched our first digital course, which is the first step in diversifying into an income stream we have 100% control over.
Hugo's background is in "offshore engineering," and mental health stuff was just a personal interest. He started his blog to share what was working for him.
😔 Not many people read his posts initially…
For more than a year, I wrote about whatever I thought was interesting. This resulted in (literally) over a hundred articles. These articles were not targeted, unoptimized, and didn’t answer any questions someone might have. And therefore, there was no traffic.
Same for me when I started blogging way back. I wrote about whatever I wanted – mainly travel, productivity, lifestyle design – but I struggled to build an audience.
What changed for me was the same thing that changed for Hugo…
Only when I learned the basics of SEO and keyword research did I see Tracking Happiness as a business (as opposed to just a hobby).
Check out the top 3 pages on Tracking Happiness (according to Ahrefs) and you can see how they are monetized with Mediavine display ads 👇
The cool thing about monetizing with display ads – as opposed to affiliate marketing – is that you're not limited to targeting keywords with strong buyer intent.
You can write about any topic in your niche that people are searching for.
As long as you rank well and get decent traffic, you'll make some money from site visitors clicking on the ads 🥳
🔎 blogging, display ads | permalink
…
Thanks to Fardeen Khan for helping me write and research today's newsletter.
Hasta la próxima, rock on with your legendary self 💪
Niall Doherty – Canillo, Andorra
eBiz Facts (follow on twitter)
P.S. Be sure to check out Project 24, a highly-rated blogging course that's offering $50 off the normal pricing until Nov 27 🤩
See my editorial review and 30+ student reviews here.
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