October Earnings & Spending Report

By
Kirsty
– November 2, 2010Posted in: Earnings

October was ridiculous! In a great way. I earned $5227, clearing the five grand point for the first time and proving to myself that I my goal of $5000+ months in 2011 is doable. So I’m obviously pretty happy!

But with the good, sometimes comes the bad. I fractured my stupid hand when a stupid motorcycle fell over with me on it. Blah! So no Uganda for now and typing is a bit of a struggle as well. So no Uganda, no guitar playing, no going to the gym, and possibly not much work because typing is a pain in the arse (and the arm). Not sure what I’m going to do with myself… it might be a good time to take up drawing again. Or French. I’ll go crazy if I don’t find something to do.

Earnings Breakdown:

  • Adsense – $414 - Adsense creeped up to above $400 once again which is the direction I want it to go. I think my work on promoting my living in New York City site is finally starting to show some results, albeit small ones. I think any increases in Adsense will come mainly from the New York site, so I’m going to continue to focus on link building to get that bad boy to the front page of Google.
  • Affiliate sales – $973 - My travel insurance affiliates are still paying off and the programs I have aimed at people moving to London are doing ok too. I’m adding new affiliates very slowly and not doing much to promote them so it’s good that my insurance affiliates are still paying off.
  • Advertising – $3749 - Advertising went crazy in October and for the first two weeks people seemed to be throwing money at me. No idea why! I had a bunch of renewals as well. It doesn’t seem like people cancel ads. I have a feeling that finding good places to advertise is a hassle so when they find one, they tend to stick with it. That’s good news for me or anyone who has quality websites. I don’t have many renewals lined up in November so I could see a big earnings drop next month.
  • Ebook Sales – $91 - I sold 13 ebooks without doing anything. I love it when that happens! It’s not a lot of money, but it’s certainly passive and I like that.

Spending Breakdown:

  • Domain Names – $39 - The usual renewals.
  • Link Building – $603 - Seeing my Paypal account fill up so quickly in the first half of October meant that I went a bit spending-crazy on link building. I’m using two services now and both are as easy as creating a list of links, paying some money and then outsourcing. It makes it almost too easy! I’m seeing good results so far with my New York site which has jumped from page eight to page four in a few weeks.
  • Article Outsourcing – $20 - A friend of mine wrote me up some Africa content based on her travels. I’m going to be investing a lot in the coming months in content creation for this website. I’m not going to go to article websites though, I’ll be attempting to get in touch with individuals who are or have recently travelled in Africa. If you know anyone, let me know!
  • Ebook – $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

I don’t have many renewals for November but I have been in touch with an interesting company with some opportunities for setting up ads. I’ll give more details once I get the deals set up but it’s a combo of banner ads and articles across several sites on a monthly basis. They need my sites on different IP addresses so it might be a good incentive to finally get that done.

So I’m super happy about my earnings in October, a bit sad about my hand (but I’ll get over it) and I guess I need to come up with some sort of plan for how to spend my time in the coming months.

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