Sales tax time

Being a small 🥔, I only file sales tax returns once a year. My deadline is the last day of January. I filed today, because I received my December check and pay slip from the Unique Boutique on Saturday.

I won’t go into all the detail here, but I made a little more than $1,000 from selling my cards last year. That’s actually more than I thought. It’s still not enough to pay even one monthly mortgage. 😭

Given how much time I spent on making, marketing and selling, that’s a terrible ROI. As discussed before, it also won’t scale.

About half of the grand came through market places that pay sales tax for me, i.e. Etsy and the Unique Boutique. The other half was flea markets and craft fairs. Given a sales tax of 9.125%, I owed less than $50, which I promptly paid online.

So that closes that chapter for me, unless they come back to me with questions.

Social Media Graph

Above is a graph showing my social media growth since October. There are two important numbers here:

Instagram followers

This is the blue line. My goal is to reach 500 by the end of Q2. There are affiliate programs that require you to have at least 500 followers to apply. So it’s a meaningful number.

Judging from the graph, that should be doable if I just keep doing what I’m doing. Instagram

YouTube watch hours

This is the grey line in the bottom right corner. My goal is to get to 1,000 watch hours by the end of the year. You need to have at least 1,000 watch hours during a twelve-month period to become monetized by YouTube.

This is more of a stretch. I definitely have lots and lots to learn about video making and marketing. Right now every single video still feels like heavy lifting. YouTube

YouTube Hop

To help reach my goal, I’ve started a YouTube hop for cardmakers. We’ll hop on a monthly basis with a set theme. So far we’re only four people. I’m going to create a little recruitment video to hopefully entice a couple more people to join.