Because of the ongoing global health crisis and shuddered economy, of course, things are down across the board. But there have been quite a few surprises. Namely, overall, my investment portfolio has seen a surprising surge this month despite the economic issues, and my various income projects are starting to healthily diversify.
First and foremost, let me elaborate on that last point there--one thing I've noticed this year, in an increasing trend, is the diversification of income from my various projects. I have, not one, not two, but three new sources of revenue this month. One is an existing project that's starting to show returns, and two are new-ish projects.
But, enough preamble. Here's the final numbers for this month:
As you can see, I actually generated more revenue this month than last month, despite the lockdown.
Quite a lot of interesting stuff happening here, so let's break this down, project by project. (Use the 'Type' column to reference project numbers)
ISP0 - Durham 3D Printing (My online 3D Print shop): Split between the three sales channels, I made $111 in online 3D Print sales (Meaning I physically 3D Print the item and ship it to the customer). None on Bonanza; about an equal split between my Shopify storefront and Ebay.
ISP12 - Flipping: Flipping certainly didn't take long to become my top earner; although I should caution this number reflects gross, not net (so it is not accounting for cost of items flipped). I continue to follow the 'Two Headed Hydra' approach; when one item sells, I put up two more, allowing for a growth rate directly tied to my success with this endeavor. As I'll get into later, I'm starting to adapt this process to other projects.
ISP1 - Flipsky Affiliate Marketing: One of the three new revenue sources I mentioned. As I talked about in a previous blog post, I developed a social media bot that runs on my desktop, that posts to Twitter for me on a regular schedule. One of the things I did, is apply to the Flipsky affiliate program (they are a well known maker of DIY Electric Skateboard parts), and created a post schema that will hunt for any tweets mentioning electric skateboards, and post one of a series of randomized posts with an affiliate link to their electric skateboard parts. And you know what? In only a month of doing this, I've already made two affiliate sales, although only one has qualified for earnings. I made $25 CAD this month off one affiliate sale! I will certainly be taking a closer look at this particular project soon and seeing if I can grow it and expand it, maybe to other social media platforms. Right now, my bot posts to Twitter and to Imgur.
ISP4 - Nicehash Cryptocurrency Mining: Nicehash continues to be a consistent earner; netting me about $254 in mined crypto this month. It actually edged out a slightly higher profit than last month ($231). With the impending bitcoin halving, I'm hoping that there will be a boon in the crypto market and I will see profits rise next month even more! I currently have six GPU rigs and one ASIC running; I have the capability to run one more mining rig (I just haven't started assembling it yet)
ISP4 - Bittrex and Binance Automated Trading: As mentioned in earlier posts, I have instances of a homebrew crypto trading bot running on these two platforms. Binance saw a minor profit in trading, whereas Bittrex went upward and then in the past few days saw a loss. I'm up by $4.59 on Binance and down by $2.39 on Bittrex. It jumps around on trading strategies quite frequently; and is too sensitive to pump n' dumps--I'm wondering if only one month's worth of history is too little for stable strategy/trading pair selection. I'm considering extending it to three months' worth of testing history; which will stabilize it, but also make it drastically more ineffective at picking up macro market changes. Always a tradeoff I guess.
ISP9 - MyMiniFactory 3D Printable Models: One of the three new projects I mentioned. Essentially, I'm selling 3D Model files I've created for the purposes of 3D Printing. Not for anything egregious; my current spread is around the $2-$5 range (with one or two exceptions). Now, the actual single sale I've made from this was actually last month; after my previous blog post (as I did not post it at the end of the month, but a week beforehand). One digital model sale made me a cool $6.31, although no such luck for the entirety of April. Although, my offerings on this platform are slim, I need to beef up my available model catalogue (more on this later on in the post).
ISP6 - Dividends: Here's a weird one for you. I started off the month with more dividends being added, and then--when I just updated this sheet prior to writing this post--I actually lost some money out of my unallocated cash from dividends out of my account. I know for sure I didn't buy or sell any stocks, nor move any money to/from the investment account--the only theory I have right now is that I am inadvertently enrolled in DRIP for one of my stocks, and it got reinvested.
ISP2 - RedBubble: The third and final project I mentioned that was a new source of revenue--this one being the existing project that's been dead for a while. I gave it some love this month, uploading a few designs; and low and behold--I got, not one, not two, but three individual sales from Redbubble this month! The amount is not that much, only $19.37; but it shows that there is promise in this platform for me! I will be dedicating more time to this project in the future (which I'll discuss later in this post). I'm putting up a combination of digital designs and photography.
As for all my other projects, they either exhibited no growth or are otherwise discussed below.
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Similar to my Flipsky affiliate marketing on Twitter, I also do the same for Binance, which gets a lot more hits in terms of tweets found to reply to. I luck out if I get one or two esk8 posts to reply to every fifteen minute cycle; whereas references to Binance max out the rest of my allocated tweet rate for the Twitter API. This month, I've accumulated five more referrals, putting me up to a total of 20 referrals; but no new earnings from them this month. I'm starting to come to the conclusion that the binance referral program really isn't getting me anywhere; so I might seek out an alternative affiliate marketing program to replace it with (or just cut it out completely). You win some, you lose some, right?
On Youtube, I'm still not at the monetization threshhold; but since my blog post last month, my growth rate has had a fire lit under it's ass. I'm up to 678 subscribers, a very healthy 9.8% increase from my blog post last month! My subscriber-to-views ratio is up significantly (averaging about 2-3 per 100 views, rather than the prior 1 to 100), as well as my overall view count/impressions. I think I was correct in guessing that as soon as the warmer weather hits, things will improve. My quality of video has improved too, so that's certainly not hurting things. Really going to drive hard to get up to 1,000 subscribers over the next month or two. This is important, as at this point, I am eligible to be monetized for advertisements. Here's my SocialBlade stats for the past two weeks, as of writing this post:
And the last thing I wanted to touch on before moving to the Investments part of the post, is my further useage of the 'Two Headed Hydra' growth strategy.
I've started to apply it to my RedBubble, Shapeways, and MyMiniFactory projects. This lets me more easily prioritize and streamline work across my various projects, to make sure I'm dedicating time to ones that are showing growth & earning potential.
First, I reach a stable base pool of offerings. I have 100 listings now available on Shapeways, which I hit this month; this will be my base pool of things for sale. I'm working on hitting 50 on Redbubble (35/50 currently), and 50 on MyMiniFactory (21/50 currently). Then, whenever I make a sale, I will upload two new items for sale on that platform. For me, this seems to be a very effective strategy for fire-and-forget platforms like the three mentioned--where, once you upload an item, you don't have to do any additional work for it.
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Finally, we move on to the Investment part of this post; where we track my investments and how far along I am to that lofty $2m FIRE goal.
Da numbas:
I'm up by 19% this month. Wat?
Crypto, especially, has been one big growth factor. A combination of manual algo trading on Coinsquare, overall crypto values being up, and a fresh influx of crypto from my Nicehash mining. My stock portfolio is up slightly, from last month, too. I broke back above the $5k invested mark. That's nuts.
My manual algo trading is done by my homebrew trading bot giving me trade advice via email (or via the app's GUI when I'm at home), and me manually placing the buy or sell order on Coinsquare. Just so you know I'm not mistaking higher fiat value for success in the algo trading, I'm tracking the base value BTC I had deposited into Coinsquare compared to what the current value is.
That's just trading growth; and accounts for all BTC deposits and withdrawals (of which, there's really only the inbound Nicehash deposits once a month). And this is just this one month.
If you find these posts helpful, and you are interested in cryptocurrency, try signing up for Binance! It's a widely-known cyrptocurrency exchange (think stock exchange, but for crypto). It's free to do so, and by using my referral link we'll both earn 10% of any trading fees you pay.
https://www.binance.com/en/register?ref=WZKZ16ZW
See you next post!
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