How I made £10,000 in one month

As a freelancer, working from home, while caring full-time for a child.

I haven’t spoken about money in a while.

I shared this piece about how much money I had in my account in the Easter holidays and then I got my head down trying to change that figure.

Having spent the past few years mostly writing books - my own, and ghostwriting - I’d forgotten how it felt to have a surge of sales from my business.

With book advances you might earn several thousand pounds, but it will be spread across six months, or a year.

Plus, the ‘advance’ almost always arrives once you’ve started writing the book and often not until it’s complete.

So once your agent has taken their fee (15%) and you’ve paid tax, the monthly income is not enough to live off, unless you’re being paid hundreds of thousands (I’m not).

What I started doing was writing weekly articles on Substack and inviting my readers to support me by paying a small monthly fee.

And that was soon bringing in £1000/month. And then more. This supplemented the non-fiction/ghost money but I was earning enough, rather than plenty.

Right now, I’m the main earner. So I need more than ‘just enough’. And I need to earn it while looking after my son, almost full-time.

I launched a course on ‘how to make that dream come true’ - a coaching course, and made a few thousand pounds extra that month.

I was reminded of the power of online courses as part of your income stream.

But perhaps more importantly, I started seeing that most of the women who’d signed up to that course had quite a specific ‘dream’.

And that was: to be using Instagram differently, launching/growing on Substack, creating courses and getting more one-to-one work.

A new course idea landed in my mind: The Creative Way (to earn a living online).

And I invited all the women who’d joined the ‘dreaming’ course to join the new one, for free.

In The Creative Way course I wanted to show how I was sharing creative content - that I love writing and feel proud to share - on Instagram.

And how some of my community on Instagram were joining me on Substack (and kindly supporting my work).

And how I was then able to sell courses to both communities, as well as secure new coaching clients.

I put the pieces together. Launched it. Sold nearly 100 spaces (at £99 a pop). And, combined with a few coaching ‘power hours’, earned £10,000 in four weeks.

This is the kind of money I want to be earning every month. And so I’ve now come up with an idea for the next course. And there will be another, after that.

(I’m also continuing to check in with the women on The Creative Way, who I’m speaking with via email and in my Facebook group. It’s free to join that group, if you fancy it).

Want to know how I sold those spaces on my online course?