How I Earn Income

This post is about how I make a living from my work.

The way I earn may seem simple at a glance. It'd be easy to breeze through this post, and not grasp the implications of this important shift in how money comes to me across the Internet. Pay close attention to each word, and hopefully it'll make sense by the end. Perhaps then, you'll be ready to experiment with implanting a similar system for your own work.

I earn a living in a decentralized way. This means that many people pay small amounts in order to support my work.

Earning this way is location independent, meaning I can earn from clients living anywhere in the world, while I'm working from anywhere in the world.

Evolving Your Digital Work is my base source of income right now. The letter earns $25 x subscribers every month. My readers come and go over time, but a core group is always there as a stable base for me to work from. With this math, I only need 333 subscribers to break $100,000 a year.

When I want to earn more, I launch a new service (like Taking Your Book to the Web), product (such as a new book), or 1-on-1 consulting.

Earning in a decentralized way is a shift for me. When I had a job at New York Magazine from 2006-2009, I earned from a centralized source. This meant that I always knew I'd earn a set amount every two weeks. If I was a good employee, maybe I'd get a raise once a year. Earning from one centralized source meant that when I quit New York Magazine and moved to Portland in July of 2009, I had to start from zero. All of my eggs were in one basket, so when this income went away, I was left with nothing.

After starting from zero income in the past, I decided that I didn't want to depend on one centralized source for income anymore -- instead, I wanted income to come from many people.

I no longer have to start over from zero. Even as my topics shift over the months and years, many of my readers have chosen to stick with me. Others leave, penalty-free, when they feel the time is right.

My readership shifts over time. This allows me to untether from old products, in order to evolve into the future of digital work.