UK money and lifestyle blog

Category: Business

Side hustle and blogger income report October 2019

Posted on 8:30pm Tuesday 5th Nov 2019

Welcome to my side hustle and blogger income report. This is the place to see exactly how much money I make from my blogs and other online money making activities in the UK. I share an online income report every month. It's somewhere for me to see how things are going with my self employment and also to hopefully teach others the various ways to make extra cash at home. If it wasn't for other bloggers posting their own income reports online then I may never have realised there were legit ways to make money from home. Now I've managed to turn my online side hustles into a full time job since January 2017. It's been almost three years and I've managed to make a full time living every month since taking that leap.

Of course I had been building things up for a long while before this. I didn't just start making a full-time living right away. I had been blogging since 2013 without even realising there were ways of making it into a career choice. In spring 2016 I accepted my first paid blog work and I've never looked back!

To understand more about why I share my income reports online then click to read my blog post why I publish income reports

If you want to learn more about how I came to be a full-time blogger after starting my online journey with an Etsy store then click to read the story of Lylia Rose

Otherwise, let's see how much money I made from home and online in October 2019 below!

Side hustle and blogger income report: how I made £3735.09 from home

I am a full-time blogger and that provides my main income, but I also love discovering ways to make more money online. I do several small side hustles each month and so the income I share here is from blogging, online side hustles, website testing, online selling, cash back and more!

Basically, I share all the income I’ve made at home, no matter where it’s from. Some is from my self-employment and some is from personal online selling of our pre-loved goods.

There are so many ways to make extra cash for free from home. I love to discover them, try them and share them on my UK money blog.

Bookmark my make money at home page to see the newest money making websites and apps I have tried.

In this blog post you will also discover lots of links to resources so you can make money from home too!

This blog post shares my total turnover for the month, before deductions. My average business expenses, tax, national insurance, pension and student loan payments are £830 per month.

Taking that all off reduces my income quite a bit on my quieter months, but it’s still an amazing income working from home and being the main child carer. We have two young children and I do all the school runs and after school clubs taxiing! Getting an employed job within the school hours would never pay me as much as I can currently earn by myself at home.

A popular blog post that covers all my money making ways for the last tax year is how I made £32000 from home in 2018/2019

Thanks for following my journey.

Enjoy :)

Green Jinn (cashback) £1.65

GreenJinn is a smartphone app which has digital coupons for Tesco, Sainsbury's, Waitrose, Boots, Superdrug and Ocado. The coupons are refreshed every Monday and you'll find food, toiletries and cleaning products. Find a coupon you want to use, take a photo of your receipt on the app once you've bought the item and within a day or so you'll get cashback. You can cash out to your PayPal account as soon as you reach £1.50.

Shopmium (cashback) £2.50

Shopmium is also a supermarket cashback app. They currently have grocery coupons for Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Morrisons, Waitrose and Boots. If you sign up by clicking my Shopmium referral link then you can currently get a free tub of Ben and Jerry's ice cream!

Learn more about Shopmium in this blog post: How to save money at the supermarket with Shopmium

ZIPZERO (cash towards bills) £4.01

ZIPZERO is a new app I have been trying out. It's a receipt scanning app, but with a twist. You add the bank details of your household bills and the money you earn can go towards reducing your monthly bills. I have managed to add Severn Trent and Virgin Media. You get 1% cashback on every receipt you scan. Once you have £1 available then you can use it towards your bills. I have paid £4.01 towards my bills so far and I already have another £6 saved in the app. I'm waiting to hit £10 and then I'll transfer it to one of my billers. You don't have to wait though, you can transfer money as soon as you have at least £1 available.

Curve referrals £5.00

Curve is a Mastercard that links to all your bank cards so you can manage all your bank cards in one place. It saves the hassle of carrying a bunch of cards around with you. You simply carry the Curve card and choose which of your own cards you want to pay with using their app. It doesn't cost anything for the basic plan. You get cashback at your three chosen retailers for the first three months and then you can make £5 every time you refer anyone. They get £5 too!

Get £5 free cash if you sign up to Curve with code FL2KH at https://www.curve.app/join#FL2KH

(The free £5 is applied after you've used the Curve card at least once - this is at no cost to you as you link it to your existing cards and are really paying with these!)

Read more here if you want to understand how it works: Get free cash with Curve

Shoppix £5.00

Collect tokens by uploading photos of your receipts and exchange them for PayPal cash.

Shoppix freebie! If you enter 52YFMN8U when you download the Shoppix app, we should both get 200 tokens when you snap a valid receipt and complete the profile survey! I say should as the refer a friend says it's closed on my app for the time being. Hopefully they'll open it again soon. I'm not sure if my code still works.

SnapMyEats (Amazon vouchers) £5.00

I spend a lot of time snapping my receipts!! I have five receipt snapping apps that reward me for my receipts at the moment, as well as six cashback apps! SnapMyEats is a smart phone app that rewards you with Amazon vouchers for taking photos of your food and drink receipts.

You can get a maximum of £5 in vouchers for snapping 15 food and drink receipts in one month. Sometimes they offer bonuses too.

I take the first 15 photos and then Ben has the app too and he takes the next 15. This means we both get £5 each in Amazon vouchers each month, so £10 in total in our household. You can't take photos of the same receipts, so if more of you have the app in your household then make sure you aren't snapping the same receipt twice.

Learn more in my full SnapMyEats blog post here: SnapMyEats review – earn Amazon gift cards with your food receipts

Checkoutsmart (cashback) £5.70

This is a supermarket cashback app. Find coupons you want to use in a supermarket (online and in-store) and then upload your receipts to claim the cashback.

This is an app from the cashback site Quidco. You can receive up to 100% cashback on selected items from major supermarkets and Ocado. To avoid a cashout fee, just wait until you have over £20 to withdraw.

Related blog post to save the most money when shopping in-store: 5 ways to get more money out of every in-store shopping trip

Publisuite referrals £7.21

This is from referring people to Publisuites. It's a platform to get sponosred blog posts and social media posts. I've had paid work from the platform and their referral programme lets you earn 5% of the income of anyone you refer.

If you are looking for paid blog work or paid social media work then sign up by clicking here!

Read my full Publisuites review here: Make money blogging with Publisuites

Prolific £11.42

I complete studies online at Prolific to help academics with their research. Some are random games or challenges. It's not like boring survey websites! It’s anything from a few random questions, to concentration tests, to views on food packaging!

Learn more: Make money at home with Prolific

Intellizoom £11.70

I get paid $5 or $8 per test with Intellizoom. It's a platform that offers website testing, surveys and online tasks for payment.

Read more here: Make money online with IntelliZoom

User Testing £15.00

User Testing is another great place to do website testing. There are loads of tests every day, but it depends on your availability and demographics to which you are able to complete.

Learn more: Make money online testing websites and apps with UserTesting

OhMyDosh! £20.02

This is a website with lots of ways to make money. There are 'get paid to' offers such as signing up for free trials, cashback offers, surveys and a great referral scheme too.

Facebook Marketplace £25.00

I just sold two items on Facebook Marketplace this month:

£10.00 Bundle of Ben's old university text books
£15.00 Kids garden slide

It's a great place to sell unwanted goods, especially household items. There are no fees so you get 100% of the sale price. The only bad thing is the time wasters!

Top Cashback £33.49

A great cashout from Top Cashback this month. I still have over £130 pending too as I got a great payout for signing up to a new savings account. Hopefully that will all clear soon.

Here's what my cashback payout was for:

£10.60 - LV= (European breakdown cover from our Europe trip in the summer)
£1.85 - Halfords (bubble seats - travel seats for our kids on holiday in a hire car)
Budget Air £4.04 - (Portugal flights - we're off to see Ben's brother next year as he lives there)
£0.23 - eBay (I'm always buying bits and bobs on eBay from toiletries to ink cartridges)
£14.27 - Travel Supermarket (I can't quite remember what this was for, but it may have been our travel insurance or something we booked as we have a London trip coming up and Portugal next year. It's a nice chunk of cashback anyway!)

We love Top Cashback and check it before buying or booking anything online to see if we can get cashback by using their link to go to the website instead. I also have a browser notifier that lets me know if a website I'm viewing offers cashback.

Learn more: Over £800 cashback in 2 years with Top Cashback

Personal eBay £54.99

Still selling on eBay! I sell the kids grown out clothes, toys and other bits and bobs we don't use.

Here's what I sold to make this:

£6.00 book
£10.00 coat
£3.89 food
£5.00 jumper
£5.00 dress
£8.00 car part
£8.00 book
£4.40 toy
£2.50 top
£2.20 top

Profit Accumulator referrals £75.73

This is from referring people to Profit Accumulator who I highly recommend for matched betting. I used them for 26 months and made over £5600 in profit in my spare time. Some people make this much in a couple of months!

You don’t need to understand how it all works as they have step-by-step guides that show you exactly what to do, even without any betting or sports knowledge. Believe me, I have no knowledge of either of those things!

They have a great referral scheme too, so if you love matched betting then you can make even more money by referring your friends and family.

Learn more: How to easily make money matched betting

20 Cogs £140.95

You may have followed my blog post about my 20 Cogs experience. It's a 'get paid to' website where you have to take part in 20 offers and you can make over £100! It took one month for all the offers to change from pending to confirmed and around 4 hours of my time to complete them all.

Read my review and journey of 20 Cogs here: Make money online with get paid to website 20 Cogs

Or sign up to 20 Cogs by clicking here!

Blog posts £3,310.72

This is my main passion and most lucrative way of making money from home. I won’t go into how to do it here, but I do share this information regularly on my blog. You can find lots articles in the blogging sections in my top menu. Here are some quick shortcuts:

I write four blogs which really helps to increase my blogging income each month. Since last year I have really niched down on this blog to make it mainly a money blog. My other favourite topics are now on their own blogs. These cover travel, healthy living, home and garden.

Of course I still cover these topics on Lylia Rose too, but mostly with a money angle.

I love to blog so that’s one reason I set up more blogs, but also to try and increase my income. If one blog can make a full-time living, then what about four blogs?

Of course there’s still only one of me and only so much time, but if I can build the other blogs up then there’s a good chance I can really make a great wage permanently. That’s the plan. I could employ my husband and we could be digital nomads once the kids turn 18! That’s my secret plan…

Anyway. Lylia Rose, this blog, is my main blog and makes the most money. Then my newer blogs top up this income.

I pretty much have two pricing structures. A new blog post or an edit to an existing blog post. A new blog post could include a sponsored blog post, brand collaboration, product review or hosting a giveaway. These are all one price and I always charge for my time and resources.

It really bugs me when digital companies approach me to work for them to increase rankings or visibility for their client, yet they don’t want to pay me. It’s my services that are helping to get them the results for their client and they are being paid, so they should pay me.

I see it every day - bloggers being asked to work for free and it’s so frustrating. I also get several requests per day myself! I’ve spent over seven years working hard on my blogs and business, working up to seven days per week, working past midnight, constantly learning and growing, constantly increasing my metrics… I shouldn’t give all that effort away for free, or be expected to.

I value my time and the years of effort I’ve put into my brand. And if you are a blogger reading this, you should too.

Anyway…

Here’s what I made from each blog in September:

lyliarose.com - £2685.67
healthyvix.com - £360
wood-create.com - £180
travelvixta.com - £85.08

Lylia Rose is DA37 and gets the most work, mostly because of its high DA. The other blogs have DA scores of 22, 23 and 28 and so they get a little work each month. My aim is to get them all into the 30s and if you want lots of paid blog work with companies that rely on DA scores then getting into DA30 should be your aim.

Of course a lot of companies use other metrics such as DR, TF, CF, SEMrush traffic and all sorts to determine whether to work with a blog or not, so it’s important to try and build them all up. It takes time, years in my experience, but it’s definitely worth it if you have the determination and passion to blog for a living.

I’m by no means technical and a lot of the SEO and rankings that I mention above are complicated! There’s a lot of information online though and plenty of bloggers that write about their own experiences so you can always find tips easily online.

It’s very overwhelming if you’re a beginner, but just take it one step at a time, and most importantly, expect it to take time. Everyone in the blogging and digital world is always learning new things every day. Success in any type of business doesn't happen overnight.

Just learn as much as you can each day, implement what you have time to do each day and never stop learning!

Helpful articles if you want to monetise your blog:

Make money from your blog with Awin affiliate marketing
Make money from your blog without ads
4 ways to find paid blog opportunities

How to improve your domain authority (DA)
Make money blogging with Get Blogged (even as a new blogger)
Make money blogging with Considerable Influence

Make money blogging with Press Loft
Make money blogging with Bloggers Required
6 secrets to make more money from your blog

6 handy tax tips for bloggers
All make money blogging blog posts

How I drive traffic to my blog
10 ways to make money blogging
Everything you need to stay organised and productive as a professional blogger

Is it really possible to make money blogging?
5 reasons to use Awin as a blogger
What is Awin?

Make money blogging with Encatena

More blogging advice:
5 tips to overcome writer’s block when blogging
Where to find free stock photos for blogs

Make Pinterest marketing a breeze with a free month trial of Tailwind app

Bloggers share the blogging advice you should ignore
Bloggers share their best photography tips
Bloggers share their favourite blogging quotes and mottos

OCTOBER 2019 GRAND TOTAL £3,735.09

Freebies

Curve - Get £5 free cash if you sign up to Curve with code FL2KH at https://www.curve.app/join#FL2KH

Shopmium - Sign up with my Shopmium referral link and you'll get a freebie like Ben and Jerry's ice cream!

BeMyEye - Get a £1 BeMyEye bonus for your first mission in store! A really easy way to make money in your free time. Use code 0rg1zy when you sign up by clicking here

Click here for more free money offers!