Over the past 16 months, my income has jumped and stuttered, but there has been an undeniable downwards trend.
On some level I have been aware of this, but I had to read back through my old income reports to grasp just how much my earnings have degraded since I stopped publishing my income reports back in October 2013.
So where has it all gone wrong? In this post, I want to answer that question.
Failure Upon Failure
I’m actually somewhat reticent to go all-out with this post, because a lot of people will tell me not to be so hard on myself in the comments. You’re a caring bunch 🙂
But I think I have a different attitude to most when it comes to self-analysis. I don’t think I’m being hard on myself — I’m just being honest. I want to explore what I did and why it didn’t work in an objective manner. That’s the only way I can (hopefully) experience more success in the future than I have in the past.
With the above in mind, I want to explore all of the projects I spent a considerable amount of time on over the past 16 months and figure out where they have gone wrong. In doing so, I hope I can see how I can do things better in the future.
The following projects are listed roughly in order of how well they performed (from bad to good).
Free Online Dating Advice
This ‘authority site’ was borne out of a dated strategy I read on a now-defunct blog. It seemed to me like a great case study to feature on Leaving Work Behind, so I named the new project my One Hour Authority Site Project and made a start.
The project was a complete failure, which I finally admitted in August 2013, after I had created a custom design for the site and written (or commissioned) over 100 posts — not to mention the 10 related posts on Leaving Work Behind.
The experience taught me five things about blogging:
- I didn’t want to work on any project that had an over-reliance on Google
- Only write about what other people are writing/talking about
- Target a specific audience
- Create high quality content, then share it liberally
- Have a striking personality
At least, that’s what I thought. In reality, I has known all these ‘lessons’ already; I had just chosen to ignore them for the project.
Upon reflection, what the above taught me is that I romanticize ideas I like. I find ways to tell myself how they will work, rather than objectively analyzing them and making the right business decision.
Healthy Enough
And that takes me straight to Healthy Enough: a blog I was truly passionate about, even though it was doomed to failure from the start.
I pretty much hopped straight to Healthy Enough off the back of my failure with Free Online Dating Advice. I felt like I had the formula down this time — I had learned my lessons and would not repeat them this time around.
In fairness, I didn’t make all of the same mistakes again; for the most part I made new ones. Although I did experience some minor success in terms of traffic, I never truly committed to Healthy Enough in the way that I would have needed to in order for it to succeed.
Clear Blogging Solutions
This was the website I launched when I decided to outsource my freelance writing business. Although I still did freelance writing directly for existing clients for some time after I first made the decision to outsource, my intention was to build ‘passive’ income by sourcing new clients under the outsourcing model.
I quickly discovered why this wouldn’t work: my value as a writer was inherent to me. As soon as I removed myself from the equation, people were no longer willing to pay the rate I was used to.
I was inundated with enquiries from the types of clients I would have never previously considered. People who wanted to pay pennies for quality writing. It wasn’t long before I shut Clear Blogging Solutions down and went back to offering writing services under my personal brand.
Leaving Work Behind Community Forums
Out of all my projects, this was perhaps the most romantic and the least business-like.
I wanted to create a true ‘community’ for Leaving Work Behind, and a forum seemed like the most obvious way to do that. I didn’t give a great deal of thought as to how this would boost my bottom line; I just had some ambiguous notion that a greater community spirit would lead to increased income, directly or indirectly.
My lack of thought on this front was based upon the notion that I was no longer as interested in money as I was in being happy.
Today, the Leaving Work Community Forums are fairly quiet. The Leaving Work Behind Community Manager Jo does an absolutely wonderful job of keeping people engaged (you rock Jo!), and there is a small core of dedicated participants. However, I cannot say that the forums have ever really generated income for me.
Beginner Blogging
This is one of my newer projects — if you have been reading Leaving Work Behind posts recently, you’ll know all about it.
Beginner Blogging was borne out of the somewhat romantic notion (do you see a pattern here?) that I could create a beginner’s blogging guide that was better than anything else out there. That was all there was to it really — do what has already been done a thousands times better.
It turns out that this has been done really well. Here’s my favorite amongst the ones I’ve found. Upon reflection, thinking that I could take this market on and emerge wholly victorious was either ignorant or arrogant (perhaps a bit of both).
Do I think that Beginner Blogging can offer huge value to people looking to get into blogging. Absolutely. Can I market it as well as other people doing the same thing? No. And therein lies the issue.
I’m not saying that Beginner Blogging won’t succeed, but I am saying it’s another example of a romantic notion gone wrong.
Paid to Blog
This was the updated version of my original freelance blogging guide. I decided that I wanted to turn it from a PDF into an online course (i.e. a website). Why? No obvious reason. I think I just liked the idea of it. Probably a romantic notion 😉
I spent a whole load of time (and money) creating a website for something that already existed. I updated the guide at the same time, but I could have just released a new PDF. Re-releasing the product generated some extra income for a while, but since then, sales have trickled to a slow pace. I don’t think creating the website really helped me in the long run.
Paid to Blog Jobs
This was (and is) something I truly believe in.
In short, Paid to Blog Jobs is a premium membership site that brings together the best freelance blogging opportunities from across the web.
We pull from over 50 different sources — my researchers and I spend a good 2+ hours every day putting together the listings. Not only is it a huge time saver for our members, we also find jobs that most freelance bloggers would never see.
Beyond that, the site offers a huge (and growing) database of paid guest blogging opportunities, as well as free pitching guides.
Paid to Blog launched earlier this year and has generated a decent amount of income since. However, I think it has a great deal of untapped potential.
Leaving Work Behind
Put simply, I wouldn’t be where I am without Leaving Work Behind. It is the basis of everything I have done online since I started down this path in May 2011.
It is the reason I landed my first freelance writing client. It has referred the vast majority of Beginner Blogging, Paid to Blog and Paid to Blog Jobs sales. It has generated plenty of affiliate income in its time.
But what is it today? At the moment, it’s a place where I talk about my business (like I am right now). It has a fairly hefty archive for people who are looking to succeed as a freelance blogger. Beyond that, it has no clear focus, nor does it directly generate a great deal of money right now.
Freelance Writing Business
Freelancing is the only thing I feel 100% capable at making good money from. I feel like if I wanted to get back into freelance writing, I could make a start right now and have my earnings back near to where they were before in a matter of months.
For example, if I could earn $150 per hour as a freelance blogger (which I have done in the past), four hours of writing per day for 48 weeks of the year equals $144,000 per year. That’s a pretty tasty amount of money.
But I stopped freelancing for a reason: I was burning out on writing about topics that I didn’t always have a great deal of interest in. I also wanted to get away from the time for money deal — even if the money was really good. Finally, I didn’t really know if I wanted to write for the rest of my life.
What Next?
It all comes down to this: I need to make more money and I need to stop pissing around.
I am talking about my livelihood here. This isn’t a hobby and it’s not a part-time gig that I don’t have to rely on. My business is a huge part of my life, and for me to be as happy as I can be, it needs to grow.
It might be more acceptable to take certain liberties with my business if I was making outrageous amounts of money, but I’m not. I can’t afford to take liberties.
I’m in business to make as much money as possible within the bounds of what I want to do and who I want to be. I’ve lost of sight of that, and that’s why my earnings have been on a downwards spiral.
It wasn’t my intention to provide myself with a solution to the issues I face in this post. I just wanted to serve up a no-nonsense analysis of what I have been doing in order to give myself the necessary slap around the chops.
I am so fed up of saying that “things have to change” — I am painfully aware and hugely guilty of announcing big new things on this blog which ultimately come to nothing. But things do need to change. Rather than wasting time explaining why or how, I think I’m just going to get on with it.
The proof will be in the pudding. I’ll make more or I’ll make less. I’ll be more or less satisfied with my work. Those are the only things two things that really matter. I need to put everything else aside and focus on them alone.
Photo Credit: StockMonkeys.com