I thought I was brilliant earlier this year for buying some Bitcoin on Crypto dot com and using their Earn program earning 5% interest delivered weekly over 3 months.
With a typical investment portfolio, you wouldn’t receive such cleanly valued deposits of returns, so in a way, this experiment taught me something powerful about investing. Ignoring the drop in prices, meant I was able to see my Bitcoin and Ethereum actually grow. The weekly payouts made the experience much more visceral. So I got to thinking about how much an investment portfolio really is worth.
In 2 years, I have built a Content Portfolio of about 10 articles (out of 36 published) that earns as much as $1000 invested at 5% per year.
In 2 years, I have built a Content Portfolio of 10 articles (out of 36 published) that earns as much as $1000 invested at 5% per year.
I like to think of simple frameworks to help me track my success over time at things. It gamifies my goals to keep me working towards them.
Here's how I arrived at this conclusion:
Representing investments by the income they earn.
While it’s easier to look at total values, and focus on building net worth, a more accurate way of evaluating investments is by the income they generate.
$1,000 invested at 5% will earn you $50 per year. That is $4.16 per month.
In 2021, from old articles posted on Medium (most written over a year earlier), I earned an average of $8.71 per month. Now, this is quite variable, but over time, it’s continued to pay out a recurring amount every month.
Even ignoring the outlier months in January and February, my content earned about $3 per month.
From new articles that I’ve been posting daily as a part of #ship30for30 and those older articles, I’ve earned about $6 so far in 2022.
What about compounding?
Great question. Well, let’s look back at those articles from over a year ago.
My top-performing articles ever in descending order left-to-right, top-to-bottom.
What might not immediately be obvious from these charts is large percentage of the income per article actually comes in the long tail of each chart.
Plus, whenever a new article does well, old articles get a spike in traffic.
As I’ve started to write more consistently, my old articles get more views as well. So, in effect, so long as I’m actively contributing to my library, I will continue to see more exposure to my articles. Incentivizing consistency.
Prior to writing regularly again, I was already receiving 1–11 new followers per month. This is likely what sustained my article growth despite not publishing for some time.
Since writing again regularly, this number has jumped to 18. In my peak publishing, this number increased by up to 51 per month. I’m confident I could do the same again. Meaning if I keep up this relatively low-effort writing routine, I could be compounding on both read time, and new folks who see my writing.
So if this trend holds, even an audience will see compounding growth.
Am I saying to stop investing, quit your job, and become a full-time writer?
Absolutely not.
Look, this isn’t about life-changing “passive income”. This is just a simple system for gamifying the habit of writing, with the added benefit of a small variable income stream that could match or add to that of investing.
In fact, writing has been so unprofitable and variable I don’t think I’ll ever become a full-time content creator.
But when considering the other benefits of writing online, such as:
Improving my confidence in my areas of expertise and interest.
Teaching others lessons I’ve learned and helping them get ahead quicker.
Connecting with interesting people online who read my work.
Writing is already clearly worth it.
This framework of gauging each article as a small investment helps me to prioritize my writing above other activities. If writing could earn me as much as my investments in 2022 (ignoring the massive crash 😅) then I should dedicate at least as much mental space and time towards my writing as I do to investing and finances — a few hours a week, an hour a day.