The Road to $5k Per Month Challenge — February Updates
Charts & stats galore
In case you missed it, here’s last month’s $5k per month challenge update. But I’ll give a shorter recap below.
My goal is to make a consistent $5k per month by the end of 2024.
I’ll do this with:
- Medium
- Digital products
- Affiliate marketing
- My mini email newsletter
January’s Results
Just a quick recap of what I did in January…
- Writing through Medium: I had 1,819 followers and earned $580.10, which was slightly more than December.
- Mini email newsletter: I had 436 subscribers.
- Affiliate sales: I made $428 in affiliate sales.
- Digital products: I made $147.74 with digital products
Overall, I was able to earn $1,155.84 for the month of January. Not too shabby!
February’s Results
This month was a little down for me in all areas, but I still think I did OK. I know every month will be different. That’s how the digital life goes…
Reads & Views
Here are my reads and views for February and for January as a comparison.
I wrote my little fingers off in February (I wrote and published 33 articles), but nothing really popped this month.
Followers
I gained 419 followers and 11 email subscribers this month. Again, this is down quite a bit from January.
However, I’m appreciative any time someone follows me to read my absolute nonsense. If I gained 1 follower, I would be excited!
I’m up to 2.2k followers:
Earnings
Yup! Earnings were down too. But I’m certainly not complaining. I earned $503 for doing something I enjoy so much. Hell yea!
Newsletter
My newsletter growth has been pretty stagnant. I had 436 subscribers last month, and here’s where we are now:
(P.S. I complained to ConvertKit about this dashboard. This is the first thing you see when you log in. If you’re growing but not as much as last week or month, it shows these down arrows. I hate it!)
I am happy to report that I had my first paid sponsorship this month, so that was pretty exciting! I made some extra bucks from that.
Affiliate Sales
I had a pretty big affiliate sale go through last month, and I earned $428.
This month I earned $94.
Digital Products
I created my first ebook to sell last month called Medium Money: The Simple Guide to Writing Articles That Pay You.
Last month I earned $147.74 (after fees and affiliate payouts).
This month I made 12 sales for $231. A couple of people also gave me money for my free affiliate marketing e-book, which was so nice! That earned me $6.
After fees and affiliate commissions were paid out, I earned $157.56.
Here’s the total for my digital products so far:
You know…that’s not too bad considering they didn’t take me long to whip up.
Total February Earnings
My monthly January earnings (for comparison): $1,155.84
February total earnings: $779.60
I definitely did not hit the goals I had hoped to hit. For instance, I wanted to earn $700 from Medium. I also had a goal to increase my overall earnings, but obviously, they went down quite a bit.
But…I don’t have control over everything.
For instance, on Medium, I can control a few things:
- How much I write
- How many people I interact with
- How much I promote my articles
I don’t control what Medium shows to people and when. So I can only do what I can do.
I can try to increase the number of articles I write, but there were days when I wrote and published three articles on the same day, and that didn’t move the needle much.
(Note: writing this much isn’t a necessity. Some days I just get on a roll and have ideas coming out of the yin-yang!)
Sometimes getting in front of people is just luck.
I also can’t control whether people buy affiliate products from me. I just add them where it makes sense and sometimes people grab them, and sometimes they don’t.
I can control:
- being consistent
- creating more digital assets
- connecting with more people
- using other platforms to promote myself
Those are the things I’ll be working on in March.
What’s Next?
I’ll draw up some plans for March soon, but here’s what I’m thinking so far:
- Get to work on the ebook that’s a part of Jamie Northrup - Minimalist Hustler’s Medium-Newsletter-Book framework.
- Continue posting Medium articles daily-ish.
- Go back to reading, commenting, highlighting, and clapping on at least 10 stories on Medium per day. (I stopped tracking in February, and it could be part of the reason why my stats decreased. We’ll test it out again in March.)
- Post more consistently on Twitter/X. I have let this one completely fall off my radar. I still think it has potential as a way to promote myself.
- Hit these two goals.
- Come up with a new digital product to sell. (I was going to create one last month, but here’s what happened.)
- Earn $700 on Medium.
- Get to 500 newsletter subscribers.
- Have the most fun ever!
Final Thoughts
My stats are down for February, but I’m still happy about what I’ve achieved for the month. (Including publishing my 200th article!) I get to write on the internet and make money. That’s so satisfying!
But…
At the same time, I’m dissatisfied because I want to expand and grow.
March will be a great month to do that, and I’m excited to see where we are at the end of it. As always, I’ll keep you posted!
How did your February go? Let me know in the comments!
About the Author
Hey! I’m Christina, an introverted book nerd on the outside, and a raging metalhead on the inside. 🤘 I’m a married mom to two teenagers (and 3 cats and a dog). I love Vegas 🎰, the band Chevelle 🎸, and murder mysteries 📖.