Feb 28 2010
February Earnings Report
I earned $2341 in February and with flights to Haiti to pay for and pints to buy in London, the timing couldn’t be better and I’m breathing a little sigh of relief.
Earnings Breakdown:
- Google Adsense - $328 - More of the same with Adsense but with February being a short month, it’s actually a better result than it looks.
- Affiliate Sales - $390 - My main affiliate is continuing its downward spiral but a couple others are stepping up to the plate a bit more each month. I have ideas for how to put a push on these other two affiliates but, as always, need the time to implement.
- Advertising - $1623 - Woop woop! This month was huge for advertising with $350 in renewals, $330 in monthly payments and just over $900 in new sales. I love those emails out of the blue asking to advertise and that was what happened this time as well. It’s not predictable but when it works, it works.
I wasn’t able to do any work on my sites in February and I haven’t actually done a thing for several months since I’ve been working on my ebook so I really couldn’t be happier! I have been waiting for the passive income bubble to burst and for things to nosedive for months now and everything seems to keep chugging along as normal, always seeming to average out to my goal of around $1500 a month.
The outlook for the next several months doesn’t look great for working but, with my ebook almost finished, I will be able to dedicate my free time in Haiti to my sites instead of to writing about volunteering for hours at a time. I didn’t have much luck last time in Haiti just because the work life and play life were both so full-on but this time around I’m going to try to make a better effort.
I’m about to board my plane to London! I won’t have any time to spare while I’m in London but I will be in and around Glasgow for a week from March 5th. If anyone is around and wants to meet up, drop me a line.
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Hey Kirsty,
Great to see your earnings growing while dont doing any work.
I really do think if you invest the time from the start that you can go months without working on your sites.
Now that I have about 5 sites built its good to see my income starting to grow $100 a month isnt bad for someone who only started 3 months ago and I havent spent as much time as I should on my sites.
All the best Kirsty,
Steve
Actually, if you know other bloggers in your niche and you refer advertisers to them, you could probably get a 10% commission when they sign an advertising deal.
Amazing how things allways just seem to come at the right time re “tickets” looks like you have around $1000 pm of pure residual this is awesome….
Those advertising deals must have been a huge relief. Relying on online income can be frustrating with it’s random ups and downs. So you are lucky to always manage to get some other money coming in from somewhere. Not all online entrepreneurs are so lucky.
Good job! From reading this past month, it appears to have been tough to work on anything business-related, so that’s awesome to get that amount.
Congrats on your earnings! Those are are some awesome numbers!!!
Your earnings is best
congratulations 
Wow, that is incredible. Congrats on your success, it sure is sweet when it clicks.
Till then,
Jean
Wow! That’s really incredible.
If I may ask, do you approach advertisers or do they usually come to you?
Good job Kirsty! Are you seeing any traffic to your London Olympics site yet? I hope that one does well leading up to the Olympics. I’m interested in how a site targeted for a specific event will do before and after the big event.
@steven Sounds like you’re on the right track! I like your Phuket site, looks great and it’s nice and targeted.
@blogging banks I have referred advertisers to other sites before, I hadn’t even thought about a possible commission.
@kelsey Advertisers almost always come to me out of the blue and a couple of times as referrals from online friends. I started out by finding advertisers over on Digital Point but I haven’t done this for ages since they don’t tend to pay well. But if I were having a terrible month, I might head over there for a look around.
@steve I’m really interested about that too! I have had good results for some sport-specific pages that I have built links for which gives me hope for the rest of my site… I just need to make the time to build links. That’s the tough part. I should get on this sooner rather than later. A friend of mine ran an event site that I think brought in about $5000, mostly through Adsense. He wasn’t too happy with that result but if I can come close to that, I will be pleased… my goal is for this site to pay for my Olympics tickets, partying and accommodation and I think $5000 should cover it all.
I’m actually going against the grain here. I think this is proof you need to work more. Your adsense and affiliates are hurting big time and as you can see link sales are greatly unreliable. Easy money but if you rely on them too much then you aren’t really making money, you’re just selling pagerank.
I have spent months and months breaking away from link sales and i barely do them anymore.
IMO, if your money is coming in too much from link sales, its time to focus on your business and get everything else up. i trippled my adsense earnings in two months just by putting in some work.
just my thoughts
@Nomadic Matt Wat did you do to triple Adsense? and what was the starting point $X $XX or $XXX?
@matt I would be interested to know how much you count on ebook sales vs Adsense vs link sales vs affiliates.
@fishcare I link built like crazy and my site went up in the serps. more page view = more clicks = more money. I went from $250 to aroun $700 now.
@kirsty Most of my income is based on ebook sales, affiliate sales, and banner advertising. I make about $1500 a month on link sales just b/c i have so many sites it’s easy income so i just slap a link up. I dont care about the sites really and i dont do them on nomadic matt any more. But if they all stopped tomorrow, i could still live.
That’s pretty good info, Matt. Thanks.
Till then,
Jean
Wow great result! Keep up the good work, I always like reading your earnings reports as its nice to see some honesty from someone trying to make a living from the net, rather than the usual
make-thousands-by-doing-nothing
links.
I don’t think it matters how the money rolls in, the only thing that matters is profit, and you are doing well on that front!
@matt Ya, thanks for the info. It’s helpful to read that stuff, as you will know. I obviously need to do more work since I have pretty much done nothing for four months. It’s a common theme with me. I know what I have to do but I need to take a break from the volunteering thing and lock myself away in an apartment somewhere to do it. I am thinking of renting a place in South Africa after the World Cup to work for a few months… but I’ve said that before!
@WN Ya that’s true. I am happy with the amount I’m earning even though I know I could be (should be?) earning far more than that after all this time. I’m expecting the ebook to kick up earnings, although March isn’t looking great in other areas right now so it could be the ebook that saves me… now I just need to release the thing!
I actually think that online earnings are fine, however you should start creating other income streams just for diversification purposes. I am purchasing long term US Treasury bonds yielding 4.5% with my online earnings for example. I know that off of $10,000 investment i would make 450/year in interest income, but at least I won’t have to do ANYTHING to earn the income.
As far as link sales are concerned, my main issue is that one day google could simply take you out of their search engine results because you are trying to “outsmart” them with link sales. Then you would lose both your link sales revenues as well as adsense and affiliate revenues, since you will no longer receive “free traffic” from search engines.
I have refered online friends to link sales brokers and I have earned 10% in the process. Of course this is pocket change but if I had 1000 friends at $20 each, that would be awesome
Your online earnings are good, but I personally think that you must focus more on affiliate sales. If you work on affiliate marketing stuff little more you can see a good increase in your earnings. Just my 2 cents.
yeah!congrat!
have a nice day in Haiti and London!
Hey,
I am never sure about the whole if you sell links on your site, if google find out they would drop you from the search engines!! The way I look at it is, google sell links themselves “google ads” is basically them selling links on your site.. They limit the number of “google ads” blocks that you can have on one page which is 3 I believe?? So taking that as a guide line I would only ever sell 3 links on one page. How can they punish you for following the same set of rules they apply for their customers/webmasters??? By the way I don’t sell links at the moment because I am building my sites to last for months without me needing to touch them..
I might be wrong in the above statement time will tell and I will report back..
Keep up the good work kirsty.
Congrats on your earnings!
This is my first time to your blog and I love the idea of what you are doing. I think that it is great how you are doing the traveling on what you make from online. Fantastic.
Hey,
Real nice amount of earnings in one month, specially from the web, nice work!
Regards,
RT
Wow! That income is pretty good for a month. How do you deal with someone wants to advertise to your sites? I hope you give some tips. Congrats!
Perhaps I should look into this e-article concept and write a few about how royalties work for books and music. I could educate as well as promote awareness of our software.
wow..thats really cool income..
$1600+ income from advertising?
Is this income from advertising on this blog? I hardly see an ad in this blog!
Well that is the great think about blogging, once established there will be some residual income. Good job helping out and volunteering.
this is amazing kirsty
i have lost my whole day in the depths of your blog! i really aspire to do something along the same lines as this (the revenue generating line i mean, i have the travel part down pat - february 2007 and still going…) Where did you learn your web design skills? thats what i seriously lack :S
good job and good luck. South Africa here we come
Great job shifting your earnings to more from advertising than from AdSense. While AdSense is an easy way to monetize a website, it is usually not the most profitable. Now the trick is figuring out how to find the advertisers instead of relying on them to find you.
Good stuff with the direct advertising! hah, i’m always wondering how much you charging for these ad links. I tend to price mine much more thus not getting as much advertisers, most are frightened by the price quoted!
Hopefully, next month be a better one!
Congrats and wish your earnings go higher next month.
Congrats on your earnings! Those are are some awesome numbers!!!
congratulations really valuable success..and amazing numbers