My focus in November was almost exclusively on freelancing. Now I have 2 big clients taking most of my time, and I am not working a lot on Data Internships. SEO should help however, and as long as I keep posting new jobs and publishing new pages, my rankings should be improving and traffic should slowly but steadily grow.

November was also Black Friday and I have been lucky enough for my books to be featured in a couple of lists. It is great to see how much a good marketing channel can do. In November, I got 479 visitors to my Gumroad page and 68 sales. A whopping 14% conversion rate, almost triple my usual conversion rate.

As expected the book sales picked up quite a bit due to Black Friday. I noticed a slight decrease in Amazon sales, but more than made up by the sales on Gumroad.

Freelancing is now my main source of income, and I am sharing everything I learn in the process. Funny enough, I tried to start freelancing in 2017 already, but it didn’t work out. At that time I was moving from London to Italy and I didn’t know yet if I could keep my job remotely. Before 2020, it was not very common, and I was worried that it would not work out for me. So I started to look around, build a portfolio, and send 4 or 5 proposals on Upwork. My wife even printed me some business cards to advertise my services in some London meetups. In the end, I kept my job and started to work remotely from Italy, for another 6 years.

At the time, I didn’t try freelancing seriously, because I didn’t need it. But if I told my old self of 2017 that after 5 months freelancing I would be making almost $10k per month, he would be very pleased. My 2023 self is impressed too, but I am already looking forward and trying to find out what could be next. Don’t get me wrong, freelancing is fun, I learn a lot, I have the chance to work on great projects, I earn good money and I can share all the things I learn, but I am always looking for something different, and I have this feeling that I could be doing something more, something bigger, and I don’t have the time or the energy for it. If I freelance for almost 5 days a week, I cannot have time for my side projects, or just to think and be stricken by inspiration. Something to think about.

I should also write more often. One of my blog posts went semi-viral on Reddit this month and as a result, I got almost 200 followers on Twitter and a huge traffic spike on my website and Data Internships. I experience it again and again, putting yourself out there, sharing what you do, your learnings, your mistakes and wins, is always a good idea. There is always a big upside to it, and I can’t think of any downside.