I have an idea.
Each year, I want to share my current 10 income streams and what I’m building during the year.
First things first.
Should you have a lot of different income streams and businesses?
Probably not.
It’s best to focus on one and then slowly grow.
But more than ten years ago, I started with a few side hustles.
Now I have lots of different side hustle income streams.
My media brand (including this site) is the largest portion of that income.
So let’s look at my 2023 income streams and what I’ll work towards.
I hope you can take away some ideas for your business ventures.
Smaller but more fun income sources
Credit Card Income
Recently, I applied for a new business credit card.
It has no annual fee, and we’ll make a $400 statement credit when we spend $3k in the first 90 days.
We intend to put our Do Some Good publication ($6k) on this credit card, so that’s like getting a $400 discount on that one product.
We’ll do this several times throughout the year as credit card offers come our way.
Money-back apps
We’ve been a user of Rakuten (formerly eBates) for a long time.
We use a chrome extension and activate it when buying something we’re already buying.
They’ve paid us close to $2k since starting to use it — all for clicking a button and buying through their link.
Selling Stuff
In a given year, we’ll sell $500-$1,000 worth of ‘stuff’ that we no longer use or have come across for free.
We can turn this into cash with a little bit of simple hustle.
The easiest way is via Facebook Marketplace (specifically a buy/sell group targeted in an area like your local neighborhood).
Real Estate Income
We have a single long-term rental fully outsourced to a management company.
We have an Airbnb.
As I’m writing, the management company is marketing this as a fully furnished long-term rental, as we plan to take a year break from Airbnb (customer service gets tiring).
There’s a home we have seller-financed to an individual.
He owes three years of taxes and hasn’t paid us in months.
Also, the home’s roof had to come off completely.
It’s challenging, but we’re trying to work through it.
It will all work out one way or another.
Hopefully, he gets the taxes paid and gets caught up with our payments.
Otherwise, we may have to take legal action.
And if we ended up owning the property again, we would pay to tear down the home and sell it as an empty lot.
Real Estate Renovations
We’re always looking for renovation deals.
We’re renovating a personal home we will move into in the next few months.
It’s the home I grew up in, which makes it special.
My father was getting older and was living in the home by himself.
So we purchased the home from him and agreed to build him a guest house.
We just completed the guest home.
This guest house was our first full-build project (exhausting).
And now we’re in the middle of the renovation.
We’ll see how it goes.
Hopefully, smooth sailing…
Real Estate Commissions – big 2023 plans
I’ve had a real estate license for more than a dozen years.
Last year I didn’t complete a single transaction.
No worries.
My goal isn’t to show houses.
I don’t have the time, nor do I intend to dedicate the time.
Two years ago, I got serious about SEO.
I thought I knew a lot but was only scratching the surface.
In 2023 I’m ready to use my knowledge.
So here’s my plan.
I intend to turn our local media brand, The Mobile Rundown, into a real estate powerhouse.
My team will create posts on many real estate topics in our area.
Then I will use IDX Broker to showcase real estate listings in our area.
Once the website traffic increases, so will the leads being collected.
Then I will develop a system to communicate with these leads.
I’ll pass the leads to a real estate agent that I trust to assist them in buying or selling.
That agent will pay me a referral commission when they can complete a transaction.
I can grow this to a 6 figure real estate referral business without me ever having to show a house.
My goal is to be in the lead generation business.
It is affiliate marketing, except for me to make money, I must have a real estate license.
This sets me apart.
I have all these skills — SEO, affiliate marketing, and a real estate license.
This plan will take at least 12 months to get fully ramped up.
I will spend lots of resources on my team building out the pages.
And then, I’ll have to build out the CRM process once I get leads.
I’m excited to report back to you!
Online Business Income
The online sector has been the most significant growth area over the last year.
I now have a team of 7-10 working on our media brands.
The team includes writers, video editors, web developers, & SEO helpers.
This is a significant change from 2 years ago when it was only me with some part-time writing help.
I’ve been able to grow this segment of our income from $5-12k per month and plan on continuing to build this portion out.
Websites
There is diversification even just in this arena.
For example, I’ve created multiple websites (currently six).
Only three make money as of today.
And then, within those websites, I’ve chosen to use both ad income and affiliate income.
And as they grow, I’ll further diversify into physical products and selling to an email list.
Related Reading: Watch Me Build My Website In Public Here.
YouTube
In 2022, my YouTube channel became monetized.
I’m now able to make a portion of the income from ads that are showing on my channel.
It’s currently a small amount of money, but it’s another income stream to toss in the bucket.
Overall, they start adding up!
Other Income Types
We are still seller financing a business for a young lady. She only has a few more payments left, and then she is done!
We have a print publication called Do Some Good that highlights area non-profits.
It’s an enjoyable project that is now in its 5th year.
My wife Mandee plans to focus her full-time efforts on the Do Some Good brand in 2023 — more to come!
The stock market.
It’s boring, but I mention it because we’re invested via our IRAs.
If you’d like my simple rules of personal finance, I wrote about them here.
Projects for 2023
I’ve got to figure out how to utilize my email lists.
They cost me a lot of money to manage, and I make very little revenue from folks on my email lists.
I also want to expand courses and possibly write some books (I have enough content and experience for this now).
But, these take time.
I’ll probably need to bring on another team member to help relieve some of my work so that I can focus on creating these.
There is always so much to do.
And so much that I could do.
I make sure that all of my projects are connected now.
If I decide to work on something new, I want to be sure that it helps support or further build out a current brand.
Previously, I only sometimes did this.
If it sounded fun, I would give it a go.
Now, although I still aim to have fun (otherwise, what’s the point?) I want to be sure that I can manage.
Manage the growth, manage the failures that come, and make sure all projects are connected.
We’ll see how I do in 2023!
