I haven’t been thinking much about making money these last two months.

But that doesn’t mean that I’ve abandoned my ‘turn R2R into a mega-income-making-machine’ plan (even though the ‘mega’ part of that has never really been the plan).

One of the big lessons that I learned during the first few months of trying out a few income methods was that I was most drawn to the idea of working with people one on one.

I’m less interested in making a product that helps thousands of people (although as I type that… it does sounds epically cool).

But I am fascinated by the challenge of helping someone figure out their own unique circumstance..

..how to help someone really connect to their money and turn it from a major stress to a major tool.

It might not sound as huge as it is, but knowing what kind of work I want to do is a MASSIVE piece of information in the process of building this business.

Turns out it’s hard to get what you want when you don’t actually know what you want….

….but it’s also a big indicator of how I want to be earning my income.

From realization … to laying the ground work

So. I’m interested in the one-on-one service side of the financial world.

Great.

Let’s make some money off of it!! Right?

That’s where I hit my first snag.

Now, in Canada there’s not a lot stopping me from going out there and calling myself whatever I want. 

I could be a Money Master, or Financial Coach, or a Dollar Guru.

I could market myself as a life changer and start doing the work of helping you make budgets and tackle your debt.

But I don’t really care if it’s technically legal for me to do that.

The last thing I want to do is add more bullshit to the financial services industry, especially when it comes to serving the community that I care so much about: freelancers and artists.

So that means that I need to become a legit financial planner.

I have already been working for the last year on some courses, but when I made the realization in February that this is where I wanted my focus to be… I stepped up my efforts.

If I wanted to make money as a financial planner, I needed to get that certification that would give me the knowledge and confidence to start working more with clients.

That’s when I disappeared into my textbook for 3 weeks, only to finally emerging again on the internet world after passing my second-last exam.

The last one (hopefully) is in June.

Why am I talking about all this?

Well… because earning income isn’t just about creating a product or service that people want. To me… it’s about building up the body of experience or knowledge to make that product/service credible.

And that’s a part of the process that gets glossed over in the whole ‘how to make money on the internet’ conversation.

Creating a product or a service isn’t step one.

Step one is becoming an expert in the thing that you want to sell people…. so that whatever product or service you sell is actually useful.

So… does that mean you didn’t make any money in the last 2 months?

I so did make money, don’t be a hater.

And in some really fun ways.

Here’s a brief survey of the last 2 months (and then I’ll break down some of the fun parts):

Breaking down the numbers:

March – Goal: 4 dollars

• Financial Workshops with Universities and Arts Groups: $600
• Coachings – $80
• Workbooks – $2.28 #moneymaker

April – Goal: 8 dollars

• Financial Planning Internship – $240
• Financially focused graphic design – $150

Earned: $1072.28
Goal: $12

That’s 88x more than the monthly goals (I need to brag in the early months… because this is going to get hard later on….)

Why I loved all the work I did over the last few months…

Seriously…. I loved all these jobs.

Financial Workshops:

I’ve been doing financial workshops with artists for the last year, and it’s so fun. I did two in March, one full-length in-depth session, and one much more casual chat.

I’ve talked before about whether income from ‘real life’ activities should be included in a piece on making money ‘from the internet’.

My decision is that I would have never gotten the work without my work on the blog. Much of the material that I’ve developed here is what I use to build workbooks for my workshops.

So in my mind it counts.

Financial Coaching:

As I said above, I’m not doing much of this yet… but I really am looking forward to doing it on a wider scale.

Working with people one on one is an incredibly rewarding thing.

Workbooks:

Ah my little workbook that could.

As I still have not been giving it much advertising (read: any advertising) at all… it remains the property of only the few people who find it on their own.

But I’m grateful for the few dollars it brings in a month.

If I only made a thousand different workbooks… my December goal would be simple….

Financial Planning internship

Guys!

Sometimes life is just so freaking cool.

Through a truly serendipitous series of events, I’ve wound up doing some freelance work for a wonderful financial planner I’ve gotten to know over the last year.

It’s exactly the kind of experience that I wanted, but had no idea how to get.

The work is super interesting, and I’ve had the chance to experiment with some financial planning software which gave me a full on nerdgasm the first time I played with it.

But above all, the opportunity to work with someone who I deeply respect and whose financial practise has many areas that I want to emulate is just an incredible opportunity for which I am very grateful.

It’s the kind of thing that’s worth much more than the income attached to it.

Financially focused graphic design

‘Graphic design’ is way too fancy a phrase for the images I make…

… but it’s the only term that I could come up with, and technically I guess I am designing graphics.

I mentioned in February that a few people had approached me about doing some image work, and honestly at first I wasn’t interested.

It felt like a distraction from what I wanted my main business to be.

But I do really like to fool around with pictures… so I thought I’d try it…. and what I learned is that it fits directly into what I want to do with R2R.

I started writing about finance, not because the internet needed another personal finance writer (it really doesn’t)… but because I thought I could take all the financial information and communicate it in a new way.

Through bumbling stories of my mistakes. Through really basic breakdowns. And through pictures.

Working on a few other blogs has completely inspired me to step up my image game.

Hopefully you’ll be seeing lots more pics AND infographics (infographics are my new FAVOURITE… here’s last weeks sweet housing graphic if you missed it) … and I feel like making these images could become part of my core business moving forward.

What did I learn:

• earning income is hard, but it’s way harder to actually build expertise about something
• don’t decide what you want until you’ve tried it… chase down every opportunity and then make your decision
• setting prices is still hard… even after doing it more often
• you have to sell a lot of $1 workbooks before reaching the minimum threshold for a Gumroad payout. #cantwaitforthatsweetpayout