February Income Report
February was a short month, but a lot gone done and I witnessed incredible growth. As I get closer to making a major pivot in my life, the month of February has shown me that I have my head on right and marching in the right direction. (Get the pun?).
I had kicked off January with trying to build out 18 sources of revenue. My wife and I have added some detail to how that plan will work and have begun to make solid progress towards standing up each source of revenue. While we haven’t built out all 18 sources yet, we made some great progress in February and will continue the momentum into March. The objective is to have at least 9 of these sources all stood up and running by the end of March. But enough of the future, you all are here to see how I did in February.
YouTube
One of my concerns last month was that we just weren’t getting views on our videos. We had developed a new format and people just weren’t watching. One of my plans was to try to create videos that were a little more trendier. And we did just that. We posted a few videos that have done extremely well, and I’m satisfied with the way we are turning this ship around. We are going to continue doing more of those trendy videos along with our traditional Scratch content. We’ve also folded in Micro:bit to the mix so we’ll be posting technical tutorials on Micro:bit as well. We even got a video to beat our best performing video from 7 years ago. In addition to all of this, I also launched a new channel dedicated to gaming related things. I’ve been feeling a lot more creative and I caught the Pokemon bug early on in the month. Apetech Gaming is our new channel and we’ve been passively trying to grow that channel as well. It’s not growing fast, but I also have just started defining the vision for the channel. Expect to see great things here in 2021.
Goal for February was 350 Subs and we hit 385! We had a goal of publishing 70 videos and guess what. We actually hit our publishing goal as well. And finally, watch hours. The goal was to have 900 hours and we are sitting at around 910 hours. Overall, we hit or surpassed all of our February goals!
Strategy for March is going to be similar to February, but a little more thought out. In February, we were trying things out while in March, we are going to hone in on what is working and make it better.
Subscriber goal is 400, want to hit 1000 watch hours and will publish 10 more videos getting us up to 80 videos. If you haven’t subscribed, feel free to check us out on YouTube!
Podcast
Momentum on the podcast continues to amaze me. I FAIL to meet my goals each and every month, but the results continue to impress me. I had a goal of publishing 10 episodes and only got 5 out. I have a new strategy for the podcast as I’m now starting to see trends in the episodes that do very well and the ones that do not. I’m going to abandon my Season 3 strategy that never launched and go in a new direction. It appears that topics that aren’t so technical in nature, but more relevant to people’s every day lives tend to do much better. As a result, I’ll be publishing 8 episodes in March aimed at discussing interesting topics related to cyber security as opposed to teaching material. I got 477 downloads which is 70 more over the course of the month and I’m about to hit 5 dollars in earnings.
The goal for the podcast is to publish those 8 episodes and get to the 600 downloads mark. I’m also starting two new podcasts as I want to talk about different things and my wife and I feel that they deserve their own podcast. I know I shouldn’t be diluting myself too much, but I have a weekly and monthly plan which will help me stay organized and focused. Let’s see how it goes! Don’t forget to check out the podcast!
Blogs
My wife and I had a realization that everything we are building out has to revolve around blogs and writing. As such, we have started doubling down on our blogging and writing initiatives. Last month we formally launched apetech.blog and we continue to make progress towards improving that service. We have decided that our technical content will be hosted there and we will be publishing content related to: STEM, Technical Program Management, Cyber Security, and most recently, Weekly Recaps. We also plan on adding Coding in Python content in the month of March as well. For medium, the plan to write on diverse content has been okay. The numbers aren’t record breaking, but I’m writing about things that interest me and really pushing myself creatively. Money on both fronts isn’t good though. We made a total of .03 cents during the month of February which is 10x less than January. Over on apetech.blog, I made 1 cent from ad traffic so that total is up to .04 cents.
But, since my new strategy is to write and write and write and write, I’m confident that the numbers are going to start turning for us in March. I’m gong to focus on hitting my goals for March before folding in new strategies in April. Stay tuned for a lot of written content!
Goals: 12 Medium posts and 36 apetech.blog technical posts. Again, we have a schedule and the topics are mostly all defined already. We just need to focus and start writing. All of the writing we do here, will then feed into all of our other strategies.
Twitter has taken a bit of a back seat for me recently. I had a goal of pursuing the 1.80 strategy from Gary Vee, but let me tell you. It takes a lot of effort to interact with a community that much. February was perhaps my worst month on Twitter. I only posted 475 tweets compared to my average of 800ish. But I did manage to get 10 new follows bringing my total up to 516 followers! Goal for March will be to hit 1000 tweets and get to 550 followers. I’m still building in public and I will be making more time to engage with the community.
Tik Tok
And because I wasn’t paying attention to my Twitter strategy, I was off creating TikToks. I officially have 73 followers on the platform and have 759 likes. Compare this to the beginning of the month where I had about 13 followers and 220 likes. I’ve been experimenting a lot with my content and still haven’t really found my niche. I’m going to continue experimenting in this space, but will pivot just a tad. Last month, I tried creating 6 videos a day which was very mentally taxing. This month, I’m going to focus on creating 1 video a day, for 31 days and see how that goes. My goal is to hit 100 followers and crack 1000 likes. I published a total of 55 videos in February but wasn’t consistent. I’m going to see if consistency matters.
Freelancing
This space continues to get interesting for me. I’m going to be getting paid for my February projects this month and I just picked up another project to train a company out of Texas on Cyber Security topics. This space is where I’m making the most amount of money and I’m still debating internally if I want to double down on this or focus on the more passive income streams. Doing well here will allow me to make significantly more money than my wife and I currently do in our 9–5 jobs. It’s something we continue to explore and as we get more clients in the future, I think I might have to pivot to focus on this space a little more. But, what I don’t like about this space is that I can only make money while I’m awake and working which is why I’d like to focus my time and energy on the sources of income that allow me to make money while I’m sleeping. But, like everything else in life, it’s all about balance. I’ll continue to monitor this space but for March, I plan on getting at least 2–3 more projects and see if I can’t bring my total up to 2500 dollars.
Books
No progress here, but still continues to be an area of focus. Still have the 3 books I’m working on and hopefully I can dedicate some time each week to write a little bit on each book.
SaaS
No progress here either. But, I do believe this is the future of Apetech so I need to start figuring this out.
Courses
Since these are tied to my books, no progress here either.
Flipping
I’m going to try selling my stuff. I plan on utilizing OfferUp, Facebook Marketplace and Ebay. I managed to take a few pictures of some products I want to get rid of and posted to OfferUp only. Haven’t received any offers, but I really want to document how I’m doing this and share it either on TikTok or on YouTube. So, I’m kind of siting on this while I figure out my path forward.
Total: $4.68.
Didn’t grow so much, but I expect to get paid in March for my February efforts so that amount should grow to about 1400 dollars. Exciting times ahead and I have A LOT planned for March. Spring is in the air and momentum is building up. Major life pivot is about 32 days away. Expect great things from Apetech in the very near future!
