Road to $5k Challenge (July 2024 Updates)
Medium earnings, Gumroad sales, affiliate sales, and much more!
The Road to $5k is a series that I update monthly on Medium, and now I’m bringing it to Substack!
There goes July. It was nice knowing you!
It’s all good because August will be a fantastic month. I feel it in my bones.
Let’s see how July went…
In case you missed it, I have a goal of reaching $5k in a month by the end of the year.
So far, this is happening through:
Medium
Substack
digital products
my mini newsletter
affiliate marketing promotions
Amazon KDP books (yes, it happened in June!)
I plan to add:
another monetized Substack (in the works)
more digital products to sell on Gumroad
Quora (I’ve already been a member, but now I’m learning how to monetize it)
Let’s do a quick June recap…
Quickie June stats
You can read June’s full report here.
Writing through Medium: 3.1k followers, and $734.92 in earnings
Mini email newsletter: 568 subscribers
Affiliate sales: $241.60
Digital products: $118.95
I made a total of: $1,095.47
July’s Results
Let’s first take a look at July’s reads, views, followers, and earnings from Medium.
Reads & views
Here’s a recap of June’s reads and views. This was fueled by a boosted article.
Here are July’s reads & views.
I don’t look too deep into these stats until I do these reports, and I’m kind of shocked. Somehow these stats are better than last month.
The boosted article was still going fairly strong at the beginning of the month, but I didn’t think it would be enough to keep the reads and views up this high.
Followers
OK, I’m one of “those” number people. I am just seeing that 3,333 people follow me.
No one else follow me, please. I love this number!
(Just kidding. Let’s get to 4,444!)
My followers seem to be settled in right around +225 to +250 per month. You can see how much more they were flowing in during December, January, and February.
But those were different times. (Or so I’ve read.)
Earnings
My earnings were “boosted” by the boost last month, so my number isn’t as high. But it’s still pretty good!
In fact, I just realized July was my second-highest earnings month.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens next month when the boost completely dies down.
Will my earnings also die down?
Check in on September 1 to find out!
Mini newsletter
My newsletter had a little surge in July, thankfully! Here’s what my subscriber count looked like in June:
And here’s where it is today:
I got a nice boost when
shared my affiliate marketing ebook in his newsletter.However, I ended up disconnecting my ebooks from my newsletter. I noticed an uptick in unsubscribes, and I think it’s because those people weren’t expecting to land on my newsletter list.
Instead, I added a note in each of my book’s download pages letting people know they can join my newsletter if they’re interested:
I also added a link in my Substack, but it’s not doing much:
Makes sense since Substack is already a newsletter.
Affiliate sales
I made a few sales last month, but those won’t be paid out until later.
In July, I was paid $30.59 in affiliate sales.
(Note: I sometimes make affiliate sales through Gumroad, but those go with my Gumroad earnings.)
Total: $30.59
Substack earnings
Substack is a new one for me because after not liking it and deciding to quit, I then changed my mind and went back to it.
I have 2 paid subscribers so far.
Total: $53.10
Amazon KDP
This is another new income stream for me. I finally got my Medium Money book published on Amazon!
It has made five sales so far, but I don’t know when I’ll be paid out on those. I’m assuming some of those earnings will make it into next month’s stats.
Gumroad sales
Last month I made $149 in ebook sales.
This month’s stats look like this:
That was a nice mini-explosion!
I also recently let people know I was looking for affiliates to help me sell my Medium Money ebook. It got a lot of interest, and I’ve already seen some sales come through!
Total Gumroad payments (for sales activity June 15 — July 19): $281.21
(This is after paying fees + affiliates, including any affiliate sales I made through Gumroad.)
Total July earnings
(Note: I had to adjust my Gumroad numbers for all the months, so these may look different than my previous reports.)
January = $1,008.10
February = $1.045.69
March = $664.55
April = $1,111.32
May = $713.60
June = $1,095.47
July = $953.89
This month saw less affiliate sales, but decent Medium earnings.
Next month I should see more affiliate sales, and my Gumroad payout should be higher since I made a good amount of sales this month.
But…I’m still only hovering around the $1k mark.
I’m going to have to think about how I can bust through that plateau and get to the next level.
Time is ticking…
What did your July look like? Was it better than you expected? Worse? What will you do differently in August?
Did you know I also share short lists of links to everything I learn about creating $5k+ per month in this mini newsletter? → intellectualists.com
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