September Earnings & Spending Report

By
Kirsty
– October 1, 2010Posted in: Earnings

September wasn’t close to my record month in August but it was still a good month coming in at $2624. Anytime I earn above $2500 I’m happy, at least until the end of this year. Next year I’ll set the bar substantially higher.

Earnings Breakdown:

  • Google Adsense – $350 – Same ol’ same ol’. I suppose consistency is good. I’m finally putting a real push on link building for three sites that I think will do well with Google. One is my living in New York City site which is currently languishing somewhere on page seven of Google for my keywords. But it’s climbing. The other two sites are small sites about specific info that I did keyword research for. I think they have potential but time will tell.
  • Affiliate Sales – $644 - My three travel insurance affiliates are still consistent which is reassuring. I don’t think I’ve had any sales from my working holidays site affiliate and another program on my moving to London site is hopeless with their reports, so who knows what’s going on there. I wish companies that offer affiliate programs would take the time to set up an area for affiliates to check their reports. but I digress. I’ll be adding a dating affiliate site aimed at Aussies, Kiwis and South Africans in London to my London site. It’s a perfect fit with my target market and I know this niche pays well so I’m curious to see how it does.
  • Advertising – $1560 - Another good month in this area. Some renewals but a few new deals for around $300 each which is great. The more separate deals I can add, the more people I have lined up each month for renewals. I’d love to have five or six opportunities for renewals each month as well as fielding new ad requests.
  • Ebook Sales – $70 – I did zero work on promoting my ebook and it shows in the (lack of) sales. I’m aiming to update it in a few months and I’ll introduce an affiliate program at that point as well. Until then, I’ve got too many other things on my plate to be able to focus much on this.

I’m already off to a great start in October with over $800 in ad sales today alone. I’ve got some big plans for next year and will need to start tucking some money away to finance them so I really need to keep the $2500+ months coming with the occasional doozy month thrown in for good measure. Dave over at Blog to Travel has stated that he’s going to aim to be earning $5000 a month next year and I think if he can do it, then so can I so I’ll make that a goal of mine too. I’m not too motivated by money, but I am motivated by competition!

Spending Breakdown:

I spent $722 in September which is substantially more than I’ve ever spent before in a month. I’ve decided to invest a minimum of $300 each month on link building so, along with other costs, I expect to be spending about $500-600 a month in the future. I’m only including spending that relates directly to what I do online. So things like my ticket to TBEX, travel expenses and other offline, tax-deductible expenses won’t be listed here. I prefer to leave those as a big pile of receipts on my floor until two days before my tax return is due!

  • Domain Names – $90 - This was for a yearly subscription to some GoDaddy service that gives me cheaper domain name renewals and some other perks. I wasn’t planning on renewing this but I forgot to turn off the auto-renewal. Then I forgot to get in touch to cancel it. Ah well, next year I guess I’ll cancel it.
  • Link Building – $307 - I’ve joined a link generation site that I might have mentioned before. I’m not totally sure just yet if it’s smart for me to talk openly about this kind of thing or if it’s dodgy. I’ll write about the results at some point soon but, for now, it’s early days. There’s a monthly membership fee of $147 plus I’ve also been using their outsourcing services to have articles written which is cheaper than Textbroker and more efficient since I just need to click a few boxes. I really love their interface and everything is made very easy. If I get the results I’m hoping for, it will be well worth the $147 a month just in the time it saves me.
  • Article Outsourcing – $320 - I suppose outsourcing articles is a part of link building since most of the articles I have written go to article submission sites in an effort to build links. But some of them go onto my sites as content so I decided to keep these separate. I outsource all of my articles through Textbroker and I couldn’t be happier. Their interface is fantastic and the submissions I’ve had have mostly been very good.
  • Ebook – $5 - It costs me $5 a month to sell my ebooks.

I like that I’ll be tracking my spending… it helps me keep everything in perspective and keeps me aware of what my actual profits are. It’s one thing to say I’ve earned $3000 and it’s another to say I’ve earned $3000 less $1000 in expenses. In the past I’ve kept my costs very low and I think that I could have months where I spend very little on things like link building, but I think that I’m fortunate to be in a position to throw month at these things now and hopefully give me sites a bit of an edge. We’ll see! As always, it’s all one giant experiment.

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