In this post I’m going to be discussing my full 2021 earnings, from the methods that made me thousands to the methods where I lost money. Hopefully throughout the methods you’ll be able to find something for you to try in 2022 to generate some profit. If you want my opinion on what you should definitely try out then be sure to read/watch my guide on How to Make Money Online in 2022. LINK THIS.
2021 Earnings
Introduction
Below you’ll see a screenshot image of the full spreadsheet from my 2021 earnings. By the way if you want a spreadsheet like this yourself to keep track of your online earnings, then be sure to go to our spreadsheets page! The spreadsheet is split into two sections, the first being actual earnings – this is income I can actually spend. The second segment is investments, these are my long term investments, and if they go up or down, it doesn’t really impact my month to month spending.
Income
Student Loan
Now the student loan amount is something I get as a result of me being at University, if you look closely at the table you can see the amount actually dropped from August to September as I went into my final year. The student loan itself is there to help me pay for food and accommodation while I’m at Uni, it’s also tied to my parents income.
The student loan gets split into three payments per academic year, however I split the whole amount into 12, just to make my finance spreadsheet a bit easier to understand. If you want to learn more about the student loan process in the United Kingdom then be sure to give my video HERE a watch!
Total – £8,578.00
Referral Codes
Next up on my spreadsheet is referral codes. Now for obvious reasons I can’t disclose exactly how much each company pays me through referral codes, but I can tell you exactly what referral codes I use, in-fact you’ll see most of them in my descriptions.
When it comes to referrals the amount is never guaranteed, you can see in November and December I did quite well, however I already know in January it has dropped back down to £200~ I wasn’t too displeased with this actually happening. One thing I pride myself about on YouTube is that my income doesn’t come from spamming referral codes or through spamming adverts, I actually earn my money through the ways I teach my audience.
In the months when I do make more money through referral codes or affiliate links then I always look to reinvest the money back into the channel, you’ll learn more about that later in the post specifically with the OHM investment.
Total – £2,619.20
Lionbridge
Lionbridge is a site that allows you to access a small amount of work from home roles. I’ve managed to be lucky enough to get accepted to a role at Lionbridge since May of this year. It doesn’t take much time and doesn’t take much effort – £10.55 a day for around 30-60 minutes of work.
However, the issue with online work from home roles like this is they’re not guaranteed to last forever, something I found out 5 days into 2022, when my contract suddenly ended as a result of lack of work. I’m not too concerned, I’d still 100% recommend looking on Lionbridge and giving their opportunities some consideration, personally I’ve already applied for a few more roles on their site.
If you want to learn more about Lionbridge then please go give my video on them a watch HERE!
Total – £1,774.18
Amazon Warehouse
This is a bit of a strange one, it’s clearly not an online income, similarly to the student loan. When I started YouTube back in 2020 I had a part time job at Amazon that I started in 2019, and continued till April 2021, it was something I didn’t really enjoy – I made good friends and had a laugh but the work wasn’t for me. That’s why I started to look for online opportunities.
At the moment I don’t have a video about what working for Amazon was like, mainly because I’m looking to work for them in future when delivering after University to help gain some extra money, and I’m worried after my video that won’t be possible….
Total – £1,760.31
YouTube Income
In May I was lucky enough to get approved on YouTube for adverts on my videos, something that really made me feel quite proud. I’ve got a lot of videos on my channel about how to start YouTube, and how to go about deciding what to do. It’s always something I’ll recommend. The best thing about YouTube is you can make videos around something you’re already doing, just as I did! I knew leaving Amazon I wanted to go into online work, so I thought to myself why not record and upload my journey.
There’s no reason you can’t take something you enjoy doing now and turn it into a channel, yes it may take a while to get monetized or it might not even ever bring in money – but it’s worth a try, if it never brings in money it’ll definitely connect you to more people!
What I recommend to everyone is quite simple. Pick something you’re passionate about and enjoy doing. Record yourself doing it (as long as it’s friendly enough for YouTube!) try it for a few months, if you don’t enjoy it then stop – at least it’ll have been worth the try!
Total – £873.97
Matched Betting
Matched betting is something my friends and family HATE hearing about because I don’t ever shut up about it! As soon as people hear the word betting they instantly stop listening, however, when it comes to matched betting the income is actually guaranteed! If you’re someone who has never gambled in their life and doesn’t have a single online account for betting, then trust me, look up matched betting, or head to the section on my site here and get started there is literally thousands you can make in the next few months!
Without going too in-depth, it is essentially taking advantage of the sign up offers from bookmakers, once you’ve ran out of the sign up offers, they even email you more offers to get you coming back. There’s several people I know who make comfortably three figures a month from matched betting.
Personally I know I don’t do matched betting enough, and that’s something going into 2022 that I’m going to change!
Total – £612.70
Appen
Appen is a site that is quite similar to Lionbridge that I mentioned before, however with Appen there is more opportunities available, some of these can last a few weeks, some only a few hours, and some are even full time roles! The potential earnings are quite large, but it can be quite a complex site, as a result I’d recommend giving the below video a watch if you want to learn more about the site!
Total – £333.05
UserTesting
The love I have for UserTesting is probably unmatched, you essentially run through a few tests on a website or an app, these can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes. Then a week exactly to the minute you complete the tests you’ll get $10 into your PayPal account.
Now some people have trouble with UserTesting, either the country they live in doesn’t have many tests available, or they can’t even get past the initial test on the application. I’d definitely say though, give the website a try, as you can see from THIS video, I tried doing UserTesting as a 9-5 job, and the earnings can be quite large!
Now that my lionbridge income is going down, I’ll 100% be moving a large portion of my time over to UserTesting.
Total – £300.81
Prolific
Prolific is a survey site, now it’s not the same as the other survey sites you’ll see out there. Prolific is centered around University studies, meaning the majority of the surveys you do normally involve tasks, and can be quite interesting. It also means the pay can be quite healthy looking.
A brilliant feature of the site is that it tells you exactly how much of an hourly wage the survey roughly works out as being, it’s so handy it basically allows you to work out if it’s worth doing. Again this is another site I’ll be putting alot of time into now that Lionbridge has gone away from my income.
Total – £147.55
Football Index
I’m not going to focus in on Football Index too much, because, well, it doesn’t exist anymore. The majority of the money I made came through referral codes, I got £10, and anyone who signed up also got the £10. Easy as that!
Total – £38.11
Betfair Trading
Now Betfair trading is an interesting one. I upload betfair trading weekly to my channel and in addition to this I put alot of my time into learning strategies. However, as you’ll see below despite doing this from February I’m only a small bit in profit. This is because most people who do betfair trading go in with quite large stakes and in addition to this I’ve lost a large amount this year doing videos showing people purposely what happens when things go wrong – something betfair traders on YouTube like to pretend doesn’t happen.
Football + Tennis
Over the course of 2022 I’m going to be increasing the amount I focus on Betfair and really start to take it seriously, potentially I might even earn more in January of 2022 than I did in the whole year of 2021. Watch this space when it comes to football and tennis trading, I’m 100% going to be focusing on this over the next year!
Total – £15.58
Horse Riding
Our first loss to report from 2021. It’s Horse trading, now this is something I will not be focusing on in 2022. In my opinion you can only really make money on horses through matched betting, don’t get me wrong if I suddenly find a strategy that proves me wrong I’ll try it and show you. For now though, Horse Trading is right at the back of my plans.
Total – -(£9.00)
Dropshipping
This was a very short experiment on the channel, but not to worry it is something I’m going to try again in 2022. Now dropshipping only failed for me in 2021 because my Facebook ads account got banned, in 2022, I’m going to focus on other methods of dropshipping and see how that goes. I still own the domain name I used last time, so I’m really looking forward to getting back into it.
The domain might end up getting used for dropshipping or affiliate marketing, it depends how I feel when I get around to it, but trust me, both are going to be getting tried a lot during 2022!
Total – -(£18.92)
This Website
Finally we have this website. Quite simply it’s because at the moment of me typing this the website isn’t actually live. I’ve paid for the domain and a few years of hosting. Hopefully once the site is live and has a few adverts floating around we will be able to break even on hosting and domain costs – that’s the only aim of this site.
If it earns more then I will not complain, but the only aim of the adverts on here, is to cover the running costs of the site.
Total – -(£47.57)
Investments
The investing side of my 2021 isn’t great, as you’ll have seen from the main image, however, I’ll still go into it a little bit here. If you want more information around any of the specific investments then there is a video on my YouTube channel going in depth with each of these! And in time there will also be a post on here for each of the investments too!
Trading 212
Trading212 is probably my only stable investment, the rest is going to be crypto with a mix of NFT’s, and don’t worry, I have no idea how crypto’s or NFT’s work either! My Trading212 portfolio is quite simply just large companies I can put my trust in – of course one day they might still end up going down the drain but I’m happy to keep my money in there.
At the moment I’ve only got an initial £600.00 invested. So when you see here below that I’m at £109.79 for the year that means the current value of my trades is £709.79, just to avoid any confusion.
My plan in future is definitely to invest more of my income, but for the time being I don’t generate enough income to even save money, which at the moment I would prioritize over investing. I’m fairly happy as it stands however with this investment, hopefully in the next few months I’ll be able to add more funds to this account!
Total – £109.79
Binance
Now this is an interesting one. It all comes from THIS video. After a few months of holding some crypto that just didn’t seem to be returning anything, I decided to try something random, so I grabbed a random number generator, got 7 random numbers then I went down a list of cryptos to them numbers and bought £15 of each, so here we have around £105.00 invested – roughly. Yes – these random cryptos have gained me more profit than Bitcoin or Etherium, I truly don’t understand, and will never understand crypto!
I obviously wouldn’t recommend doing this yourself unless you have a couple chunks of £15 spare, if you do, then why not!
Total – £63.62
Etherium
Etherium hasn’t done amazing in 2021, but it’s already had a poor start to 2022. As always with crypto, it’s quite volatile, very volatile, but we’re just going to cross our fingers and hope. When it comes to crypto and all my investments, my plan is to just leave the money there. We will only ever withdraw the money either when I’m old and grey, or when the money becomes too good to turn down, I’m talking 6 figures. If neither of them happen, then the investments stay where they are!
Total – £10.86
Trading 212 – Dividends
Dividends don’t come often from my investments and don’t amount to much, you’ll see from the spreadsheet the majority of it actually came from a Tesco reward dividend and not a normal dividend, next year this amount is probably going to be less than £5, but hey! Any income is better than none!
Total – £9.18
Blockfi – Dividends
Blockfi is a service that allows you to basically get month on month interest on your crypto, I’ve got my Eth and Bitcoin on my Blockfi account, it gains compound interest, I check the USD$ value of the interest each month and add it to the spreadsheet, that’s why in December this was actually negative, we will have earned more Bitcoin and Eth in December than in November, but the drop in value means the total interest had declined.
Total – £9.07
Zilliqa
The less said about this the better. It was a punt, I gave up a few months in and withdrew at a loss.
Total – -(£8.73)
Bitcoin
One day I’ll be happy I owned bitcoin back at its current value, but for now that is just a dream. As with all the investments I have I’m not going to withdraw unless it gets to an amazing profit, I’ll either be happy with a big amount of cash, or I’ll lose £250.00, I haven’t invested loads in crypto, maybe one day I’ll come back and reinvest but for now I’m happy to stay where we are. At the time of the 1st Jan my Bitcoin was valued at around £194.00 so that’s the £56.10 loss roughly.
Total – -(£56.10)
Sorare
Sorare sorare sorare. Please if you don’t know what this is scroll up to the top of the page, click on sorare and get lost in this magical world. Yes I’ve lost quite a bit, but only from my own mistakes, it has 100% been worth the loss, I absolutely love it!
Total – -(£75.48)
OHM
Honestly, I still to this day have no idea what OHM is. It promised 7000%+ APR, but at the end of the day it is still just crypto. The fees involved with this are the majority of the money I’ve lost, I think in real terms I bought £350.00 worth of OHM that’s now valued at £240.00 – so not really a £400 loss, but I thought I needed to include the fees to really show where we are at!
Hopefully with all the investments we will see a better 2022, but who knows how it will go – but being honest….it’s probably hard for it to go worse!
Total – -(£410.85)
Final Total – Conclusion
Total Amount – £16,629.33
Total Online Income – £6,639.66
In general I’m quite happy with the fact I managed to make £6,639.66 this year. However that being said, I want to change a lot going into 2022. Referral codes, YouTube income, I want these to be at the bottom of my income – that doesn’t mean I want them to go down, it just means I really want to find some other income sources that I can show you guys that bring in alot.
Other YouTubers rely on their referrals and YouTube income, me personally I want that to be a nice addition, but really want to earn with you guys through the methods we find.
Hopefully in 2022 we will find a better balance as I try to finish University and move onto a full online only income. When I come to write this next year I may end up being successful, or I may end up with a full time job – if that is the case, I will still try to include YouTube as much as I can with the hope one day we can all do this together and make a full time income online!
See you next year!
