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You’ll always be s**t at the start but, the more you stick at it, the better you get.

Welcome to week 5 of my £1 a day challenge. This week I focus on building my newly created website to start building a presence online. I want to make a positive difference to peoples lives and creating content is the way to put myself on the map. Then I can start looking into ways to start progressing into profitable business. I hope you find value in the lessons I’ve learned over these past 7 days.

Day 29: Affiliate Marketing

Once again I loaded up Swagbucks to complete today’s £1 a day challenge. Unfortunately I got refused for all the well paying surveys so I decided to come back later. This time there were more surveys on offer. Some paid relatively badly but I took what I could get in the end. 

After 4 surveys, 2 search rewards (around 100 minutes of work) I earned 134 SB’s (£1.05).  

Currently still in lock down here due to the COVID-19 outbreak I have a lot of time to move my business forward. As My website is now live, I’ve been spending a lot of time creating and preparing content to add. 

The eventual plan with this content is to start adding affiliate links. This requires me to contact a company to recommend some of their products in exchange for a small commission if somebody buys through my link. I will test out this system here on this site through my book recommendations. Then I will branch this idea out to other websites I could create, specifically for affiliate marketing. This is one of my passive income ideas and will be the first one I will try to execute in the coming weeks. 

As always, I will keep you updated what I learn from this and the best strategies that work for me.

Day 30: 100 SB Survey

Today’s activity on Swagbucks went great. My morning searches checking up of the stock markets earned me a 24 SB reward. Afterwards, I took a survey 100 SB survey taking less than 5 minutes to complete. Along with one search reward later on in the day, I passed today’s £1 a day challenge goal. 

Today’s earnings were 134 SB’s (£1.05) for barely 15 minutes of work. The rest of today was spent creating and optimising articles for google’s search engine.

Day 31: Creating Content And Levelling Up

Today’s day in lock down once again consisted of creating more content for the Money Your Concern website. If I can get enough content onto the website soon, I feel like I will be more likely to be accepted into affiliate marketing platforms. 

Meanwhile in Swagbucks, I have now been levelled up to level 4 (amethyst) on their loyalty scheme. This has awarded me 3x double survey points and a 100 SB rebate upon my next Swagbucks withdrawal. 

Today I used a double point survey to make 200 SB’s £1.56 for barely 5 minutes of work. After 2 search rewards and a few failed survey points, today I have profited 215 SB’s (£1.68).

Day 32: Website Improvements

Once again I logged onto Swagbucks early to get on with improving the Money Your concern website. There’s so much more to it than I initially thought. I did a bit of research looking for some extra tips for improving a new website. Here’s the list of new tasks I’ve found…

1. Set up google analytics- to track the views that come in on my site.
2. Upload a security plug-in for an extra barrier against hackers.
3. I need to check out the performance and upload speed of my site.
4. Then go about what needs to be done to speed up my site.

Firstly though today, I focused on completing my £1 challenge. Thankfully, I still have some double point surveys left over from my level-up. This helped greatly in gaining me enough Swagbucks after one 30 minute survey. 

Along with a couple of search rewards, today’s earnings were 192 SB’s (£1.50) for around 45 minutes time spent on Swagbucks. 

Progressing on to my website tasks, some aspects were easier than others…

1. Google analytics was fairly easy to set up. There are plenty of Youtube videos detailing what to do. I followed one of these using the Monsterinsights plug-in and this was all set up within 5 minutes.
2. Again, the process of adding security was as simple as following another Youtube video. I uploaded the iThemes security plug-in, which was easy to use and fast to set up.

The next job was a little more tricky…

3. The site recommended for a performance check up was GTmetrics.com. Here you type in your website name and it gives a free scan of your site for flaws in its upload performance. Unsurprisingly, many flaws were found with my site.
4. The good thing about GTmetrix is that it lists off all of the things you needed to improve. Firstly, some of my image sizes were too large for the actual size on the website. It took me a while but in the end I managed to work out how to change the sizing and replace the images. Unfortunately the other issues involved coding. I’m not confident in this area and therefore decided to leave this for now. After rechecking the performance, the website speed had improved somewhat.

However, I did find out there’s a plug-in called WP Rocket. This does all of the coding work for you. Unfortunately, you need to pay for this service, so I decided to leave this until I get more visitors to the site and more performance optimisation is required.

Day 33: A well Earned Break

I used the last double points bonus for my survey today. I wish all surveys could be like this…

Once again, I chose the highest paying survey. Luckily I got accepted and within 20 minutes, i’d completed my £1 a day challenge task. Along with a couple of search rewards, today I earned 169 SB’s (£1.32).

Afterwards, I Worked on improving a few post drafts. I then took the rest of the day off. Although at the moment I am super driven to get my online business life underway, I am also aware too much work at one time can lead to burn out. So i’m allowing myself some time to do and not think about anything. 

Just a shame we’re still in lock down. I could have gone surfing!!

Day 34: Stick At It And You Will Get Better

I wish today I could say something more exciting happened. But today was simply another day of completing my £1 challenge early via Swagbucks and then proceeding to writing up as many post drafts I can for the Money Your Concern website. Whilst we are currently in lock down, I feel this is the perfect time to get creating content as much as I can so if there comes a time of struggle and I’m too busy to write posts, I’ll have some left over to keep the website valuable.

A bit like keeping an emergency fund of cash…

So today, I logged off early again to Swagbucks. Within an hour I had completed 2 surveys. Along with a couple of search rewards, today I have earned 143 SB’s (£1.12).

The post writing also seems to be going OK. I feel like it’s becoming more fluid and hopefully easier to read. Seeing this is a great motivator for me to keep creating more content. I suppose that’s why it is important to stick with things. You’ll always be s**t at the start but, the more you stick at it, the better you get. I hope I continue to improve in my investing, business as well as my writing. 

With this lesson learned, I will make sure I do stick with this challenge, no matter the hardships to see how successful it will make me.

Day 35: Find Your Passion:

Another day of working hard creating content for the Money Your Concern website. I really want to set a good example for this website and for myself. It’s really important to show my true intentions early. I want to add value and to help everyone who enters this website to gain knowledge and skills to work towards becoming financially free themselves. This is my priority, and I think once I’ve set a good example, it will be a lot easier to monetise this site and future ventures I have down the line. 

I’ve definitely also found the right sector to base my business on. I am passionate about investing. I can’t help myself. I’m currently writing up a 3 part series for teaching beginners the basics of successful value investing. (Find the first post here). Initially I intended for the posts to be no more than 500 words long each so they’ll be easy to follow and remember. However, I couldn’t help myself but geek out and give all the added info I could within the boundaries of for a beginner. Each post ended up being more like 1,500 words each!!

I hope when you go for your own business idea, I hope you dive in and choose something you are truly passionate about too. Hopefully you enjoy the 3 part series on value investing. I worked hard on them and I hope it helps enhance your knowledge in stock market investing.

From creating content to Swagbucks struggles…

After writing up a couple of posts this morning, I logged onto Swagbucks to complete today’s £1 a day challenge. Unfortunately, today was a strange one. There was literally only one survey to choose from. I’d never seen it this bad before. So I completed this survey and decided to come back late to hopefully find more opportunities.

Later this evening I returned to Swagbucks to once again, find only 2 surveys up. I failed at one and completed the other. However, with the day growing short, I was running out of options. The discovery section showed no good deals either. 

Luckily I had a 100 SB rebate reward left over for my next withdrawal. So I used this and withdrew £25 from the SB’s I have accumulated. Including this, the surveys and a couple of Swagbucks search rewards today I have earned 179 SB’s (£1.40) for around 1hr 30mins work.

Week 5 complete…

This marks my 5th week completed of the £1 a day challenge. Although so far I haven’t progressed monetarily, I can look back to see I have a website. Something I am proud of and something I will continue to work hard with to ensure that I succeed. I have already made more progress in online business over the past 5 weeks than I have over the past 2 years. 2 years which I had spent contemplating and working on ideas but never taking action due to fear.

Now I have something I am passionately working on and it gives me great hope and promise for my financial future. All you have to do is take the plunge and start in the smallest way possible. This website is here to help and serve you to ensure you can achieve the same hope and direction as me. 

By the way, don’t forget to check out the personal Finance and Investing sections of this website too. These sections will fill up with plenty of bits of knowledge over the weeks and years to come to inform you on how you can best deal with your money for a successful financial future.

Thanks for reading. Talk soon.

Harry