A handful of posts and a handful of visitors

Essentially this is an income report, but I like the term “Progress Report” as I’ve seen Nick Loper use over at Side Hustle Nation, as that leaves room to discuss more than just income.  Especially since my income from this endeavor was roughly nothing.  In fact it was negative if you include expenses.

So why post this?  For one, I want a clear reference point in a year to post a hopefully much more successful 2020 in review.  In addition, I think this could be helpful for those seeking to also start sharing their knowledge online, even though it shows a net-negative.  The quite prolific Dilmer recently posted an income report for his just-starting channel.  He isn’t earning a ton, but I appreciated his sharing. Not despite the low income, but because of it. 

Thirdly, I have a self-motivational reason to post this.  At the end of the post I list my 2020 goals. I believe writing them here, and posting them on the internet will help tie me to them; help me actually chase down what I intend to achieve this year.

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Start, Stop, Start Again

Technically I started this site back in 2018, but was stalled until the middle of 2019.  Between late November, 2018 and early January, 2019, I put up four posts. How to post to WordPress and Jump to Frame in 2D Unity being the two of interest.  Then I took a break as another side project stole all my free time (freelance mobile game creation). By mid June that was done. I was back to the blogging, getting my fifth post up in late July.  This is when things became a little more serious (only a little).

Throughout the sputter of posts, and the break, I did no marketing or other work on the blog.  For Q3 and Q4 my goal was to build a foundation of tutorials. I didn’t want to start getting the word out too early as any traffic I managed to attain wouldn’t stick.  So I was just slowly working on posts, and in the second half of the year I put up a total of 8 posts. Not an amazing number, but with as much work as each post took, a number I’m happy with.

Asset Store & Github

In addition to posting tutorials, I shared some via Github and the Unity Asset Store.  I posted one Unity project to Github, and put one asset in the store. The project was a shader baseline project. It contains a sample scene and some starting-point shaders for the built in render pipeline.  Nothing fancy, just a useful project to reference when starting a shader writing session of your own.

On the Asset Store I posted one shader graph node.  It’s free, and does a conversion from Polar Coordinates into Cartesian.  It’s useful because Unity provides Cartesian to Polar, but not the reverse.  More than the use though, I wanted to post it as a test-bed of the Asset Store process. I’d never published anything there before and wanted to familiarize myself with the process on something easy.  This asset was explained within my custom shader graph node tutorial. The store item doesn’t provide anything beyond the tutorial, other than a convenient wrapper for the content. 

Socializing Media

With most of the foundation in place near the end of the year, I started exploring the best platforms to learn about and share tutorials.  The two winners in my view are Reddit and Twitter (I’m @GameDevBill on both). Both have lots of good tutorials being posted, and a surprisingly positive community. I expected negativity in both places, but when it comes to this kind of work, there isn’t.  If you start getting political, or somehow controversial, hate starts flying. But if you just show what you’re working on, both platforms are quite supportive. My first real tweet was in October, and my first Reddit post in November. I’ve been fairly light on both platforms so far, because I still don’t have much I feel like sharing.  Regardless, both have helped me start to get a hint of traffic.

Traffic Growth

Which brings us to traffic numbers.  Up until late October, I had nothing but google search traffic and a few dozen visitors a month.  In November, with just a hint of social media presence, I managed to clear 300 visits. Still nothing in internet scale. 

Income

Now for what’s supposed to be the most exciting part: The income. In 2019 I made a whopping $9.36 in affiliate income.  That’s before expenses. After expenses I’m several hundred dollars in the negative (business startup costs and hosting mostly).  I’m ok with that. This endeavor for me is a fun side-project. I don’t expect it to ever return huge profits. I would love if it could return some profit, just so it doesn’t continue to drain. But I’m not shooting for retirement money from it.

I am also ok with it because this has been a really fun half year.  I’ve enjoyed writing and sharing my knowledge online. Even if this doesn’t become a “successful hustle”, it’s already a successful pastime that has been quite fulfilling for me. 

2020 Goals

As I stated at the beginning, I want to list some goals here to help motivate me to stay on track this year. I’ll be open to pivots, but in general, this is the direction I’m headed. I don’t specifically have an income goal for 2020, because that’s not something I can actually control.  I only want to have goals that are within my circle of influence. I also am not too worried about this making money right now. I’d love it if the affiliate links could cover my expenses, but am not focused on this area right now. So here they are.

Posts

I aim to put up 24 posts this year.  That’s a clean two per month average.  Not as many as the internet likely recommends from a blogger, but it’s something roughly achievable. That’s not to say I aim to actually post two per month. I will likely not be all that consistent as some posts require a ton of work in Unity ahead of time.  So pace, consistency, or frequency isn’t reflected here. Just 24 total in 12 months. 

Asset Store

I’m very interested in growing my presence in the Asset Store.  Mostly in the form of free assets tied to tutorials. Similar to what I’ve already published.  My goal is to make 3 more free assets this year. I’d also like to post at least one for-sale asset.  I have several ideas, but have not yet figured out which one is best. I only have a goal of publishing one this year because I have no real sense of that space.  Something that merits a price tag will also require a good amount of work. Perhaps more than it’s worth. So the purpose of this goal is to find out.

Games

Lastly I have the goal of releasing one Unity game on Android.  Nothing too fancy. I have a couple prototypes I’ve been playing around with, and I’d like to make one of them real.  I figure if I’m going to talk about making games on the side I should make one. I’ve done many for my various day jobs, but it’s been quite a few years since I’ve released one on my own.

Wrapping up and looking forward

All in all, I didn’t really enter this year with a plan, so it’s hard to evaluate how i did.  On the one hand, I’ve learned a lot about how hard it is to create content, and what’s involved in actually getting it out there. On the other, I think I could have put out a lot more content with a more focused effort. I have dozens of ideas for new posts in my head, and am excited to start putting them together.  I’ll likely always have more ideas than time, but that’s ok. Better to have too many ideas than too few.

Here’s to hoping you and I both have a more productive 2020.

Do something. Make progress. Have fun.

Cover image art thanks to Lewis Zhao on Unsplash