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I have an audience for my side hustle... and prestige.. but no $$$

I think I might run out of steam with all these side hustles at some point soon.

Looking back, none of them really made me any money. My blog is getting over 1K views per month and with ~6 articles featured on Hackernoon but its not translating into any kind of cash flow. None of the games I made brought in any cash except for 1 and it stopped selling after a month. My book on Amazon has been in the top 100 sellers in App Development on Amazon for several weeks but so far I have made less than 100 dollars in 3 months. It's really weird to feel like you've gotten recognition for all these things but actually made virtually no money off of any of them. Like I didn't stop to think about it until now and I'm like ????

To be clear, I'm super GRATEFUL for all the people who read my stuff, responded, bought my book, its amazing for my self esteem its just funny I guess how none of it actually translates into money.

Making money hasn't really been my aim so I am not SUPER discouraged but I am also kind of surprised that what I would have considered success 6 months ago actually doesn't translate into any cash. Maybe I need to just make an app or something and writing isn't the way to go? OR I am just really really bad at marketing.

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    It's a slow grind to build up an audience and figure out the right product and critical problems to solve. Most products & successful founders years down the road when asked what was the one thing they did that made things click don't have a concrete answer -- it's the slow drip and constant iteration that leads to success but that's also precisely what makes our monkey brains go crazy.

    Don't beat yourself up -- in my experience the main difference between successful founders and unsuccessful ones is persistence.

    More concretely to your situation, it sounds like you're focused on some of the hardest things to monetize - blog posts, books, podcasts are all great for content marketing and building a personal brand over a very long time unless you get super lucky or have an existing following.

    My advice would be try experimenting with different proven business models that can work when you don't have a large following. Def still do the all the content marketing things you're mentioning -- these are long-term plays imho. But maybe try out a SaaS product in the meantime by focusing on a solving a critical problem for a niche market that you really understand & care about.

    Hope this helps 😄

    (this reply is way longer than I anticipated lol)

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      Hey the longer the better as far as I'm concerned! I could use the advice, haha. Yeah my monkey brain is definitely going crazy because a lot of assumptions I had are kind of going out the window. I do think I have that key ingredient of persistence though.. even when I'm frustrated I have trouble tearing myself completely away from my endeavors.

      I have seen a lot of people echo the sentiment about blog posts being particularly hard to monetize. I thought books might be a little bit better but I guess they are hard too. I think you definitely have a point that a SaaS product is likely to perform better monetarily. For some reason I have a much easier time coming up with blog post ideas than app ideas.. but I am going to TRY.

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        Best of luck 🙏

        If you wanna talk through SaaS ideas sometime, feel free to hit me up via https://saasify.sh

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          Looks interesting. Makes me want to try this route.

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      ^^ This. Agreed that blog posts, podcasts, books are hard to monetize unless you already have a decent size following and already have backend products you can sell.

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    Hey, @nprimak! Fellow indie game dozenaire speaking here. As in I made dozens of dollars back when I was learning to code and building flash games 🤣

    How big is your email list? That's really the crucial factor for early sales in both books and games. I didn't have an email list at all when I was making those games, and it was a critical flaw.

    If your email list is over 1k subscribers and you aren't able to get at least a $1k-$2k in sales, then the problem is likely either the offer or the copy.

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      Yeah I could definitely improve my email list. Though I did find a strategy for growing my email list pretty quickly, it was mostly through giveaways of my book. Not sure if the people who read my book are the same audience as those who might want to play my games. I don't want to manage two e-mail lists. It's tricky having a range of interests and trying to merge them together somehow while still having something that serves a niche. I guess maybe if I wrote a book about game development it would all come together better and I could do some cross-marketing.

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    Are all these inter related allowing you to build from one to the other at least in terms of crowd? or totally distinct?

    For the blog are you collecting emails or some contacts? is it a niche that leans itself well to providing a product/service on top?... Not all niches are the same, general ones might be worth only 0.04$ per 1,000 visitors others might be 80$+... but still content itself is more of a traffic middle man than a primary product you can make money easily on...

    in the top 100 sellers in App Development on Amazon
    Do remember this is a non linear curve, the top one could make more then 10x or 30x over the 2nd place etc... or lets say going from top 100 to top 80 could be moving from 300$ to 1,000$ lets say.. also as per other comment, maybe up pricing by 30% for a week and see how that changes things...

    I'd more try to have a look at things that work and see how they can be rethought to something that's more valuable
    So let's say the book, got 300$, that's better than the 0 of most projects, can we build on top of it?

    • Can we become a factory of small books? (think of outsourcing as part of the factory)
    • Can we make a bigger, more comprehensive book that's 3x more valuable?
    • Can we make or reuse some of the book to make it appeal to another group of people?
    • Can we bump up marketing for the current book?
      ...
      Find a way to assemble a picture where the current working things are seeds for something way larger.
    1. 1

      I am trying to tie them together but it's difficult. Trying to blog about game development so that including the games I built on my website makes some sense. And cross posting to Gamasutra as well as more traditional tech blog websites. However I have also blogged a lot about what its like working in the tech industry which doesn't tie in as well. Trying to veer away from that more for future posts but that type of content does seem to draw a lot of attention.

      You are right that it is non-linear, and some categories are much more competitive than others. I could certainly write more books, I have a couple ideas swirling in my head about future books already. I do fear that doing that would mean that my blog would be set aside for too long and become stale. But maybe thats okay. I also recently put my book on Gumroad where I was thinking about offering 3 or 4 different price points. The first is just the book, then there could be the book + worksheets, then could also be book + worksheets '+ video and finally book + worksheets + video + 1:1 portfolio review with me.

  4. 1

    Have you ever thought that perhaps you're spreading yourself a bit too thin and that's why you haven't achieved much in terms of traction? Going deeper on fewer things may help to finally get to that revenue level / traction you're seeking.

    Outside looking in here, but the games don't seem like they'd be relevant to your blog or book (unless they were perhaps both focused on game development, but even then, who cares to play a game by an author as you are learning to build the same game?) so I'd probably drop those / not worry about them. Take that extra chunk of time and focus it on generating blog content that's relevant to your book and CTA/upsell the hell out of your traffic.

    Your blog traffic as a whole isn't a whole heck of a lot, so I'm not not too surprised on the lack of revenue there, but also, what revenue channels are you pursing? Perhaps they aren't a good fit for your audience or perhaps the traffic is low enough that it's going to be hard to see anything meaningful in terms of revenue.

    1. 1

      Thank you for the detailed and thoughtful response!

      I have definitely thought about how I am spreading myself too thin. The game stuff is the hardest for me to give up on because I really enjoy making games. That is why I tried to write more blog posts about game development so that I can connect those two interests.

      My goal looking forward is to maybe create some videos about how I make games and write more posts about the games I have created to tie it together even more. I thought that by keeping my blog a bit broad as "creative coding" it gives me freedom to write about games, art and learning to code while also being creative. But I have just finished porting a game over to mobile so I think I can dedicate some time to just blogging for a while. It's just hard to give up game development completely.

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        May as well lean into it then :)

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    1,000 views per month is an awesome achievement. Generally, if you want to make more money in your hustle, that means one or more of these three things needs to happen:

    1. Get your existing customers to buy more.
    2. Raise your prices.
    3. Get more customers.

    If you had to pick one to focus on that would have the most immediate result, which would that be?

    Cheers,
    John

    1. 1

      Thank you!! To address your three suggestions

      1. I guess my existing customers mostly are those who bought the book but once they buy the book there is nothing else for them to buy, so this one is out until I make more stuff

      2. I did bump my prices a bit but for the length of my kindle book charging $5 felt reasonable. It's $10 for the paperback. I guess maybe I should bump the kindle price to 10 and make the paperback 12 or something, I just felt like nobody would buy it then because the book is pretty short. This is certainly the easiest option though.

      3. I am working on a lead generator that should help get me more email subscribers. I did a big sales push when I released the book but then I ran out of places to post it on. I don't want to just spam the same places over and over with my book. That being said, I'm sure there are ways to get more customers that I haven't thought of.

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    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

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      Yeah this makes sense. It is true that there are tons of people blogging about tech and its very saturated. Over the last few days I've been thinking about offering a course for helping women in tech with imposter syndrome. However instead of building the course I'm thinking to create a landing page where people can sign up for updates. That way I can gauge interest before actually investing a ton of time in it.

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