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My changing income: what a difference (ish) three years makes!

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@revisesociology
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I haven't analysed my income sources in way too long, so this is WAY overdue.

NB this is mainly because my income as gone UP over the last year and months and so I haven't felt inclined to worry too much about it, but now that it's levelling off and maybe declining a little bit in recent months (not too drastically, not enough to be a concern) I thought it was worth a review.

As is my historical tendency I've opted to NOT disclose my earnings and instead just look at the proportions of incomes from my income sources.

NB I now have FEWER income sources than in the past!

I'm not too please about this, it makes me feel a little vulnerable, but now my only income sources are:

  1. Advertising revenue through the main blog
  2. Resource sales through the main blog
  3. Chatbot revenue through the main blog...

And to make matters worse, ALL THREE of these run through the main blog! The resource sales at least COULD live without it, but the lions share is certainly directed through the blog!

The breakdown is as follows:

Advertising Revenue...

This is now two thirds of my income. I work with a company called Ezoic who simply post ads on my blog and I get a 90% cut of the revenue.

It's a very good deal, I have to do nothing other than keep the blog up to date and the money just keeps ticking over, it's nice!

Resource sales

These are revision resources, and so more seasonal than the blog income, and I'm happy to see these have kept up a reasonable pace of sales.

They do need updating, however, and this is going to have to be a major focus for the back end of 2023 and into 2024.

I've decided to NOT raise the prices for several years, but this is also something I may have to revise soon as well.

The chatbot

I've lessened the amount of time this spends on my site as I don't really like the concept of people being able to pay for assignments - it saved my skin during Covid, but now the exams are back up the resource sales have kicked back in so I only have this up during non peak exam times.

I could earn more but I'm happy to take a hit on this, also I don't like the bounce rate it creates either!

Building resilience for the future!

I've been feeling a little uncomfortable with the lack of resilience in my income for a while now, I really feel like I need to add in an income stream that is completely separate from the blog, I'm just not sure how HARD I should go into this...?

I am willing to spend £10K on another Masters to retrain in.... something and maybe look to go back into the labour market - I'm thinking that another 5-8 years part-time before I fully retire would actually be GOOD for me in many other ways besides just my income being more diverse.

Or do I need to spend that much on training? I might be able to pick something up a bit more low key...?

I'm a little uncertain, but I think I need to DO something else to be earning money!