How I Boosted My Writing Income by Focusing on What Fires Me Up

The past few months have been a blur. It all started when I adopted the word “Focus” for the year. I’ve been busy with my regular job and focusing on writing as a side hustle. I’ve been generating a lot of output until about mid-March when I started to “refocus” on the things that were working and cut out the things that weren’t working.

That “refocus” part is what I expected to happen after three months of writing my heart out. It’s when I expected to see some good or bad results around income and traffic on my web properties.

The initial results of my “focus” year are very promising. My results are paying off in spades both creatively and in cold hard cash. I’m earning more from my writing, affiliate links, and ads than ever before.

How did I do that? Simple, by writing on things that get me hard, get me excited, and get me fired up.

I did it by breaking through my self-imposed limitations and not thinking of myself as a “nature/doomer” writer. I did it by reinvigorating my blog Neural Market Trends and writing about Startup stuff. I did it by creating a side blog where I track the markets, coin collecting (numismatics), and interesting financial things, and I did it by writing on Medium.

The income I’ve earned across my web properties isn’t much, it’s less than $300 per month combined (for now) but it’s more than I ever made writing for the past 15 years online! It’s not hard, it can be done, but it’s very tricky and fickle.

The reality is you need to build an audience, you need the eyeballs. Then you need to engage on multiple channels. If you got all your eggs in the Medium basket you are taking on way too much risk. If Medium goes tit’s up, then you lose your main income.

Multiple channels for writing are a must to protect your own ass and you need to monetize every damn thing you’ve written. That’s where affiliate links like Amazon come in or even Google Ads if you’re running your own self-hosted site.

Speaking of self-hosted sites, you need one. You need to write there. You need to build your audience and capture them via email newsletters. It’s your email list that’s key to building income.

Writing online for financial freedom is possible. I can see it by my fledgling metrics, the next trickis to start hyper-scaling it all.

Stay tuned for more.