February Earnings & Spending report

By
Kirsty
– March 1, 2011Posted in: Earnings

February, for being a short month with few ad renewals lined up, turned out pretty well with $3319 in earnings. It’s a big drop from January and December but I think those months were the freaks and coming in at above $3000 is closer to what I’m aiming for. At least as far as consistency goes. The freaky months are obviously welcome, though!

Earnings Breakdown:

  • Adsense – $435 - Things often go well for the first few months or the year with Adsense. Maybe companies are spending their brand spanking new ad budgets, I don’t know. But I’m happy, whatever the reason.
  • Affiliate sales – $675 - It seems like I can count on being around the $700 mark with my affiliate sales. This is the area where I think things could improve drastically but, it’s also what would take the most work. In the meantime I’m happy to have things chugging along.
  • Advertising – $2117 - Not so many renewals this month but I did line up a few new ads with monthly subscription payments. I love these because I can count on a certain minimum amount each month, assuming they don’t cancel which, so far, they never do. I’ve got over $750 in monthly ads now and I would love to get that above $1000.
  • Ebook Sales – $28 - Blah.
  • Photography – $64 - I got a random email through my Kigali life website from some guy who works at the Brussels Airline magazine. He was after a couple of photos of Kigali restaurants so I sent him some shots. They decided to use one which is kind of cool.

Spending Breakdown:

I cut back a bit on my spending with only $900 spent this month on web stuff. My spending was spread pretty evenly across a bunch of things, rather than being skewed towards article outsourcing.

  • Domain Renewal – $79 - I had a bunch of domains up for renewal plus a few new ones to add to the pile.
  • Content Outsourcing – $150 - More content for my Africa website.
  • Design Outsourcing – $150 - For an illustration for my Africa site. All of this is adding up but I also have to remember how good a year I had and I’d much rather invest money back into my business than send it to the tax man.
  • Link Building Services – $206 - These are the monthly fees for two link building sites I’m using.
  • Article Outsourcing – $275 - This was for articles to use on my link buildng networks.
  • Coding Outsourcing – $40 - A bit of tweaking for the miniBB Kigali life forum.
  • Ebook – $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

Depending on what my taxes tell me, March could be a big month for spending money as the UK tax year ends in April. I’m a big fan of outsourcing all of a sudden though, so that’s fine. So I’m happy these last few months have been good earners. They’ve put my savings back on track and hopefully I’ll be able to do a lot of interesting things through outsourcing.

I’d like to focus 100% on my Africa site this month but, guess what? A friend and I have decided we should ride bikes from Montreal to Haiti next year to raise $30,000 to build a community centre in Jacmel, Haiti. So… I need to work on the website for that crazy scheme. We’re looking at an August 2012 departure but we have some big ideas of engaging the Haitian communities in Montreal, New York and Miami and raising awareness as we go so we want to get a site up and running as soon as we can. Plus, having a good site with a clear plan will help us in trying to score gear donations. It’s a huge undertaking and I’ll tell you more in a post soon.

So March is looking as busy as always!

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