Jun 01 2008
May Earnings Update
After a freakishly amazing month in April that saw me break the $2500 mark for the first time, I’ve come back down to planet earth but still managed a good month. I earned $1874 in May which is about where I was expecting to be so I’m not too upset. A big reason for April’s record was a single link sale for nearly $800, so I’m not at all upset with the fall in income and was sort of expecting it.
Earnings breakdown:
- Google Adsense - $433 - This keeps going up and up and the only reason I can think of is that the traffic across all of my sites has been steadily increasing since January. Getting to the $20 a day mark has always been a big goal of mine and it’s great to see things creeping in that direction without doing much about it.
- Affiliate Sales - $924 - Hostelworld finally came through with nearly $20 this month… yay! But it was from a single sale… boo! Everything else was crap except for my usual good performer.
- Linkworth & Text Link Ads - $165 - Nothing much to report here. Just the same steady earnings as always and I haven’t really been active in finding ways to improve this area. I guess one way would be to submit more sites but I’m not sure I have anymore that either program would be interested in at the moment.
- Private Link Sales - $352 - One of my crappiest sites mysteriously rose to PR5 and I sold a link on it for $160 for the year. I also opened up this site to accept links (bad me!) and that helped. I am owed about $280 for a sale that didn’t go through because my Paypal account was suspended but will wait until I actually get the money and then tack that onto June’s earnings. Something to give me a head start.
I’m really excited about June. For once I’ve motivated myself to do some work and I’ve got three sites on the go. One is just at the ideas stage but I plan to make it a site aimed at mobile phone users so I’m kind of interested to see how that goes. The other is a copycat of a current travel insurance site but aimed at the UK market and it’s nearly finished. I’m hoping to have it finished in a few days and will be looking for feedback. Then there’s my never ending Beijing site that I still haven’t done much work on. I am going to aim to have this done by the end of the month as well.
I don’t expect that these three projects will start paying off straight away but I’m hoping they work together to push me up above the $2000 mark consistently in the coming months and even higher by the end of the year.
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I've been travelling since January 2008 living off earnings from the web. Follow me as I bum around Asia and beyond, getting up to mischief and working online as I go.
Hey Kirsty,
Seems like you are on your way to big cash soon… 3 more websites wow !
Would be interesting to know how many pages you have now online…
I like to see that it can be done. I am in income stagnation mode since 1 year at least…
I am wondering what I do wrong ?
Fab stick with it! I was stuck at $100 for longer than I can remember. A year maybe as well. I’m going to do a post now about how many pages I’ve got. I do think that having a little portfolio is important but aiming to have hundreds isn’t my approach. Plus I think it’s important to have sites that run themselves. I have only a couple of blogs and they’re for fun.
Congradulations about the PR jump, it’s always interesting to see how the quarterly Google ranking changes things up. That’s an impressive achievement with the Adsense growth- keep it up!!!
Just FYI that is enough to live in Perth or Brisbane: Sydney you might have to pick your area. You may want to have some savings for buying a vehicle and flat bond but for on-going I think you will be fine. Do u have a WHM for visa for Australia? It might make it easier to stay on past 6 months if you want to
Suz I never will understand PR… one site up, the rest down but it doesn’t bother me the way it used to because I have other sources of income that don’t depend on a good PR ranking.
Lissie that’s great to know! I was picking my friend’s brain who lives in Brisbane when I was there last year about how much it would cost to live and I was liking the numbers she was giving me. Forget what they were now though! I used my WHM in 2001/02 but I don’t intend on staying much longer than 4 months.
hi, i m creating a spanish budget travel community, do you have an idea of an affiliate program that will work for my type of site?
BTY your blog its great i learn a lot from it. Thanks
Chava I’m afraid I don’t! I don’t know if there are any Spanish-language affiliate sites or not.