THE PROJECT
Building a side hustle alongside a full-time job.
Earned on the Side is my attempt to find out what it takes to build a meaningful source of additional income while continuing to work full time. I had thought about starting a side hustle for years. I collected ideas, considered different possibilities and repeatedly told myself I would begin when work became quieter or life gave me more time. That ideal moment never arrived. In 2025, I finally stopped waiting and started. This page records what I am trying to achieve, how I am approaching it and the progress made along the way.
Project summary
- Current phase
- Foundation
- Time commitment
- 10-15 hours per week
- Started
- 2025
- Public progress updates begin
- September 2026
- Funding
- Self-funded
- Long-term aspiration
- Up to £4,000 per month in additional income
- Actual income
- Kept private
WHY I STARTED
I spent years thinking about it. Then I finally took action.
The idea of building something of my own had been sitting in the background for a long time. I wanted a project that would challenge me, teach me new skills and potentially grow into a meaningful source of additional income.
The difficulty was not a lack of ideas. It was turning those ideas into action while dealing with a demanding full-time job and the ordinary responsibilities that fill the rest of the week.
Reading None The Wiser by David Charnock made me question what I was waiting for. There was never going to be a completely clear diary, a perfect idea or a moment when I suddenly felt ready. At some point, thinking had to become doing.
Earned on the Side is the result of that decision. I am starting from the beginning, learning as I go and finding out how much can realistically be built in the hours available outside my day job.
More about me
Read the background behind the pen name, the day job and the decision to finally start.
Read more about Alex ValeTHE OBJECTIVE
A meaningful income stream, built patiently.
My long-term aspiration is to build up to £4,000 per month in additional income.
I appreciate that this is ambitious and a considerable distance from where the project begins. It is not a promise, projection or claim about what someone else could achieve. It is simply a direction of travel that gives the project something meaningful to work towards.
The aim is not to chase quick wins or present every month as a success. I want to build something sustainable, learn which activities are worth continuing and gradually reduce the amount of repetitive work required.
I have committed approximately 10-15 hours each week to the project. Over time, I want to use AI and carefully designed automation to make parts of the operation more efficient, while retaining human review wherever accuracy, judgement and personal experience matter.
I will not publish an exact percentage towards the financial target because doing so would make private income figures easy to calculate. Progress will instead be shown through project phases, completed milestones and directional indicators.
THE RULES
A few boundaries keep the project honest.
Built around a full-time job
This project has to fit around an existing career in engineering and IT. The limited time available is part of the challenge rather than something edited out of the story.
Self-funded
The project is being funded using my own money. Any referral benefits, free access, gifted services or commercial relationships that materially influence published content will be disclosed.
First-hand where it matters
Personal recommendations are based on resources, tools and services I have genuinely read, watched, explored or used. I will distinguish personal experience from general information.
No manufactured success
Projects do not move forward in a straight line. Some ideas will work, some will change and others will be abandoned. I will not turn every setback into a disguised success story.
Useful transparency, not complete exposure
I will share enough information to make the project credible and useful, but not information that compromises partner agreements, customer privacy or the commercial position of the business.
No promises of equivalent results
This is a record of my experience, not a formula for guaranteed income. Outcomes will vary according to time, experience, decisions, costs and circumstances.
CURRENT PHASE
Phase one: Foundation.
The project is currently in its Foundation phase.
This stage is about creating the underlying structure needed before meaningful performance can be assessed. That includes establishing the business, developing the website, organising referral offers, creating useful content and setting up reliable systems for measurement, compliance and ongoing maintenance.
The objective is not to appear busy. It is to make sure the project has a strong enough base to support future experiments without creating unnecessary confusion or rework.
Current-phase indicators
- Business structure
- Established
- Core website
- In development
- Referral directory
- Being assembled and verified
- Editorial standards
- Defined
- Measurement systems
- Being prepared
- Public reporting
- Begins September 2026
- Financial disclosure
- Private
THE ROADMAP
Five phases, with no fixed shortcut between them.
Phase 1
Foundation
Current phase
Establish the business, website, content standards, referral directory, measurement and working processes needed to operate the project responsibly.
Phase 2
Validation
Upcoming
Test whether the content, offers and digital projects attract useful engagement. Continue what shows genuine potential, change what can be improved and stop what does not justify the effort.
Phase 3
Early Traction
Upcoming
Look for repeatable signs that the project is moving in the right direction. This may include improving search visibility, useful audience engagement, recurring referral activity or more efficient working processes.
Phase 4
Consistency
Upcoming
Build enough repeatability that progress is not dependent on a single page, offer or short-lived result. Strengthen the parts of the project that continue to provide value over several reporting periods.
Phase 5
Scale
Upcoming
Expand proven activities carefully and use automation to reduce repetitive work. The objective is to grow without allowing accuracy, disclosure standards or the quality of the reader experience to deteriorate.
Movement between phases will be based on evidence and judgement rather than arbitrary deadlines. A phase may take longer than expected, and the project may occasionally move backwards when an assumption proves wrong.
WHAT I AM WORKING ON
The work behind the project.
I will keep the exact operating methods and commercially sensitive details private, but the work falls into four broad areas.
Workstream 1
Useful content
Creating and improving pages that answer genuine questions, explain referral offers clearly and help readers make more informed decisions.
Workstream 2
Referral offers
Finding, checking and maintaining offers connected to products and services I have personal experience with. Offer terms can change, so accuracy and regular review matter.
Workstream 3
Digital projects
Developing and testing online ideas that may contribute to the wider objective. I will share the lessons and decisions without publishing a complete operational blueprint.
Workstream 4
Systems and automation
Building repeatable processes for research, organisation, content maintenance, quality checks and reporting. AI may assist parts of the workflow, but important outputs will continue to receive human review.
HOW PROGRESS WILL BE SHOWN
Progress without publishing private business data.
The original plan was to publish detailed monthly income reports. On reflection, that would expose commercially sensitive information and could create unnecessary risk around partner agreements.
Instead, progress will be reported through project phases, milestones and directional indicators. This still provides an honest view of whether the project is moving forward without publishing information that should remain private.
Public progress indicators
Project phase
Whether the project remains in Foundation, Validation, Early Traction, Consistency or Scale.
Time commitment
Whether I maintained the intended 10-15 hours per week, reported as a broad range rather than a detailed timesheet.
Work completed
Meaningful pages, improvements, systems or experiments completed during the period.
Search development
Directional changes in visibility and audience discovery without publishing commercially sensitive account-level data.
Offer maintenance
Whether referral information was checked, updated, added or removed.
Experiments
Which broad experiments continued, changed or stopped and what informed the decision.
Lessons
What I learned and how it changed the next stage of the project.
Next priorities
The most important objectives before the next meaningful update.
REPORTING BOUNDARIES
What I will and will not disclose.
Transparency does not require publishing every number. I want the project to remain credible and useful, but I also need to protect private business information, comply with partner terms and respect customer confidentiality.
I may share
- The current project phase
- Broad ranges of time invested
- Work completed and milestones reached
- Directional changes in search visibility or engagement
- Experiments continued, changed or stopped
- General costs where disclosure is useful and appropriate
- Decisions, mistakes and lessons
- Priorities for the next stage
I will not share
- Total commission or net income
- Commission earned from individual brands
- Referral volumes by brand
- Exact conversion rates
- Earnings per click or customer
- Confidential commission structures
- Partner-dashboard screenshots
- Customer or referral information
- Private programme terms
- Metrics that could be used to reverse-engineer the commercial performance of the business
Where a partner agreement restricts the disclosure of information, the agreement takes priority. If I am uncertain whether a figure can be published, it will remain private unless written permission is obtained.
WHAT COMES NEXT
Complete the foundation, then test what deserves to continue.
The immediate priority is to complete the Foundation phase: finish the core website, verify the referral directory, establish the reporting process and make sure the underlying systems are reliable enough to support the next stage.
After that, the focus will move towards Validation. The objective will be to identify which areas attract useful engagement, which require improvement and which should be abandoned before more time is invested.
There is no guaranteed route from the first phase to the final one. That uncertainty is part of the project. The purpose of Earned on the Side is to document what happens when a longstanding idea is finally given consistent time, structure and attention.
Earned on the Side documents one person's experience of building additional income alongside a full-time job. Nothing published here is financial advice or a guarantee of equivalent results.
FIRST PROGRESS UPDATE
First progress update: a baseline, not a result.
Earned on the Side went live on 24 August 2026. The first reporting period covers the 19 days to 12 September 2026.
This is too early to judge whether the project will become commercially successful. The purpose of the update is to establish a clear baseline: what has been published, what Google has discovered, what the project has cost and which parts of the measurement process still need work.
| Measure | First 19 days |
|---|---|
| Published pages and articles | 20 |
| Pages indexed by Google | 18 |
| Google Search impressions | 389 |
| Google Search clicks | 5 |
| Organic click-through rate | 1.29% |
| Average Google position | 46 |
| Confirmed conversions | 0 |
| Revenue earned | £0 |
| Direct costs | £46 |
| Approximate time invested | 20 hours |
The website has begun appearing in search, but visibility remains limited and no revenue has been generated. Website users, sessions and referral-link clicks are not yet reported because those measurements still need to be confirmed or implemented reliably.
Most of the initial work has involved content refinements, coding improvements, SEO optimisation and testing. The next priority is to strengthen measurement, continue improving existing pages and observe whether early search visibility develops into useful engagement.
OCTOBER PROGRESS UPDATE
October update: early rankings and a change of tools
This update covers the period from launch on 24 August 2026 to the end of October 2026. It builds on the 19-day baseline published in September.
The project remains in its Foundation phase. October did produce the first signs that matter for the next phase. Pages are starting to rank, a handful of people are finding the site through Google, and the way the site is maintained has changed significantly.
| Measure | First 19 days | Launch to end of October |
|---|---|---|
| Published pages and articles | 20 | 31 |
| Google Search impressions | 389 | 3,750 |
| Google Search clicks | 5 | 21 |
| Organic click-through rate | 1.29% | 0.6% |
| Average Google position | 46 | 22 |
Approximately four hours were spent on the project in October. That is well below the intended 10-15 hours per week. Part of the reason for moving to automated checks is to make limited time go further.
Search development
The most encouraging change is average position. It has moved from 46 in the first reporting period to 22 across the whole period since launch. Several referral-code pages have started to rank for the searches they were written for. Most are not yet high enough to attract regular clicks, but they are moving in the right direction.
Clicks remain modest: roughly two a week rather than a few a month. The click-through rate has fallen because impressions have grown faster than clicks. The site is now appearing for more searches, often below the positions where people tend to click. That is normal at this stage, but it is not something I will present as a success until it turns into consistent engagement.
Moving away from the AI website builder
Earned on the Side was launched using Hostinger's AI website builder. It was a quick way to get a working site live, but it has not proved cost-efficient for a project that needs frequent small changes. Each edit uses AI credits, and because the credits expire, any unused allowance is lost rather than carried forward.
I have decided to move the site away from the builder. Instead, I will manage it directly by connecting it to Claude. This gives me more control over the content and avoids paying for credits I may not use.
Systems and automation
Alongside the move, I have started setting up rule-based automations. They review article quality against the site's editorial standards and handle routine updates. The rules check things such as dated claims, offer terms that are due for review, disclosure wording and the difference between first-hand experience and general information. Changes are still reviewed by me before they go live.
The first real test came at the start of November. Every offer page was rechecked, review dates and headlines were refreshed, and the Tide pages were verified against Tide's live pricing and public review platforms. Two details had changed and were corrected: a Google Play rating and the name of Tide's free plan.
Offer maintenance
All 16 offer and review pages were checked and re-dated during the period. No offers were removed.
Lessons
Impressions come well before clicks, and patience is part of the process. Tooling costs also matter more than expected at this scale. A tool that is fast to start with can become expensive to maintain.
Next priorities
- Complete the move away from the AI builder.
- Implement reliable measurement for site visitors and referral-link clicks.
- Improve the pages ranking just outside the first page of results.
- Continue regular checks so that every offer stays accurate.