August was my best month ever but I just realised that sharing my earnings each month is really only half the story. Every business has expenses as well as revenue and this online earning gig is no different. True, expenses can be kept as low as $10 per year for a domain name and around $10 a month for hosting but over the past few years I’ve started to see the benefit in investing back into my business. Like any business, if I don’t invest some of my earnings back into it, it won’t grow.
So, with that in mind, I feel like my earnings reports need to be accompanied by expenses and I plan to do that in the future. Here’s a look at my expenses for August:
- Domain Renewals – $55 – Mostly a bunch of domains I’m not using but don’t want to let go just yet.
- Ebook – $30 – I bought an ebook from Sitepoint about designing WordPress themes, tried and promptly gave up.
- Software – $147 — My freebie copy of BB Edit, a text editor I’ve been using (because I’m still stuck in the past and hand code all of my sites), finally expired so I shelled out for the real deal.
- Plugins for a Forum – $86 – I bought some add-ons to a forum I’m going to use on my new Africa website.
- E-Junkie Ebook Distribution – $5 — It costs $5 a month to keep my international volunteering ebook going out. Bargain!
- Advertising – $120 — Some advertising to help my living in New York City site.
All up I spent $443 in August on web-related things. Obviously I have hosting fees and each domain name costs me $10 divided by 12 each month but, as I report my earnings on a monthly basis (as in I put the whole amount down as earnings for each month rather than dividing ad deals by the number of months they’re for, etc), I figure I’ll do the same for my expenses. So if I pay my yearly hosting bill in September, I’ll just report the whole amount. Probably not sound accounting, but I sucked at accounting in uni, so screw it.
I’m going to invest heavily this month on link building, first just buying articles and submitting them myself to article marketing sites (which I’ve already done a lot of) and later I’ll outsource the actual submission process which should be a learning experience. I’m also going to join some link building website things (I don’t actually even really know what they are yet) that come with hefty monthly fees as an experiment. More on this once i get it all going.
I’ve got no problems paying taxes and I’m not into finding loopholes or tax havens, but it makes more sense to pump money back into my business than it does to give it straight to the tax man. Things like outsourcing article writing and link building, investing in software, products and membership sites that will help the business, paying graphic designers to create things that would have taken me ages to do and stuff like that are all things that will improve my business and also bring down my tax bill at the end of they year. It means less money in my pocket now but if I don’t spend that money, a portion of it will just go to the tax man at the end of the year and do nothing to strengthen my websites.
That’s all! I hope you’ve found this interesting. I really wanted to let people know, especially those who are starting out, that you might find that you’ll need to spend money to make money. I’ve invested thousands back into my business over the years. Once you start earning, it’s much easier to invest but it might also be necessary to spend a bit to get the ball rolling as more and more competition pops up.
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