How Much Money I made in October
The month of October was a very interesting one. The weather couldn’t decide if Summer was going to continue or if we were going to jump into Fall. After launching our business in September, October was the month to start gaining momentum and most importantly some money. Let’s review how we did during the month October.
During October, we mainly focused on two things. Podcasts and Youtube Videos. I also spent a great deal of time on Twitter trying to organically grow my audience there. Let’s recap everything we did and then plan out what November is going to look like.
Youtube
We grew 35 subscribers and had a total of 117.8 hours watched. This is great, but not growing anywhere the speed we would like for it to grow. We posted a total of 5 videos and one of them has over 400 views! We updated all the titles in our videos to better align with what people are searching on Youtube. We also introduced a thumbnail template design that we used throughout our videos to make them more consistent. We updated our descriptions to be more informative and we also updated all the tags in the videos to better align with keywords that folks are looking up when searching for Scratch Tutorials.
I’d like to note that we did this for all of our videos. We currently have 47 videos published on our channel with 27 of them being related to Scratch. We published a few episodes from our podcast on youtube, but they just didn’t do very well. We decided to not post them anymore, but continue with the podcast. More details in the November plan below.
Here’s where we are at with respect to getting monetized on Youtube
As you can see, we are still ways off, but the journey is just getting started. Here’s our plan for the month of November
- Update all video thumbnails to have some sort of a custom thumbnail. We fixed the tags and descriptions in the videos to make maximize our chances of being searched, now we need to work on creating catchy graphics and titles so that folks click on our videos.
- Post a total of 10 new Scratch Tutorials. We are going to take advantage of the fact that we have the week of Thanksgiving off from work to work in a few extra videos.
- Try to collaborate with someone and make a video either in conjunction with someone in the Scratch community, or make the video on their behalf.
- Subscriber goal of getting to 250 subs and 600 hours of public watch hours.
Next up, let’s talk about the podcast
Apetech Podcast
I’m happy to report that for the first time in 60 days, we made some money!! It’s not much, but let’s review where we are at
So close to making our first dollar! This is super encouraging because after all the work we’ve been doing, this is the first tangible return we’ve seen since we started all of this back in July. We actually have something closer to .84 cents but I’m assuming the system shows you what you get to keep after fees. Nonetheless, this is very exciting and we continue to make podcast episodes around cyber security.
The podcast itself is doing pretty well. We’ve published a total of 8 episodes and have 114 plays. Here’s the plan for November
- Published 10 episodes
- Goal of getting to 250 plays in the month of November
- Find a guest to join us on the podcast and talk about cyber security
Competitions
Well that’s it for the creating part. We also submitted a tutorial for a competition that Facebook had. This was using their Spark AR Studio. If you are interested in learning more about that, check out our github link. There were a lot of people that signed up for the competition, but there were some very stringent requirements that you needed to complete. I’m not 100% sure that I met all the requirements, but I tried my best to make sure we followed the rules. The top prize is an Oculus Quest headset, so if we win, that could bring in some money. Results are published in December. . . keeping our fingers crossed
Ahh, my favorite social media tool. I spent so much time on Twitter this past month. I was interacting with folks and trying to grow my audience organically. I learned a lot about Twitter over the last 30 days. I’ve been using Twitter since January of 2009. Let me tell you, the power of Twitter is amazing if you are a business and have a brand. The community on there is remarkable. There are A LOT OF MEAN PEOPLE on there, but if you can get past all that negativity, the nice folks are extremely supportive. I’ve grown to build these interesting relationships with folks all over the world that I never would have otherwise created.
As you can see, I increased the number of tweets from September. Had about 30k more impressions and crossed over 1000 profile visits. Mentions were up almost by 100 points. I didn’t grow my following as much as I would have liked, but I’m slowly getting there.
The profile visits are important here because I have links to the things we are creating on my profile. When someone comes, there’s a higher probability that they’ll click on one of my links and will check out our work.
The goal for November
- Tweet 1000 tweets.
- Hit 200k Impressions
- Get to 500 Followers (443 as of this writing)
- Go deeper into the Scratch and Jira communities and interact with those folks
- I don’t actually know how to do the aforementioned, so I’ll have to figure that one out.
Overall plans for November
- 10 Scratch Videos
- 10 Podcast Episodes
- Published 20 blog post articles
- 2 Coding Challenges
- Published ebook on Jira Execution
- Start working on a Software As A Service product
- Read 2 books
- Find a very small ($100–$250) freelancing job using popular freelancing sites
Well folks, there you have it. We made a total of 73 cents. We didn’t really spend any money, but I really do need to pay that 800 California Franchise fee now. I’m also thinking of getting a computer for my wife because we have to consistently share the computer we have. We figured that if we buy it now, we can write it off on our taxes and get something cheap during the holiday specials.
See you all next month!
