March Earnings & Spending Report

By
Kirsty
– April 1, 2011Posted in: Earnings

I earned $3975 in March which is exactly where I want to be – creeping up towards the $4000 mark consistently. I had spurts of getting some work done but mostly spent my time watching DVDs, sitting in my hammock, laying in the sun, studying French and hanging out with friends. So it’s been a kinda slack month on the work front.

Earnings Breakdown:

  • Adsense – $551 - Finally! Adsense has moved on from lingering around the $300-400 mark. This time around I know why… my London 2012 Olympics site has seen a big jump in visitors (with the tickets going on sale this month) and contributed an extra $40. This is encouraging since I’m not really working on monetizing the site with anything but Adsense so I know that as the Olympics approach, the earnings will come. My moving to New York site is another key to the Adsense puzzle and it’s slowly improving. Plus I have a site about travelling by van in Europe and it’s earnings always improve as the summer approaches.
  • Affiliate sales – $1261 - I love it when my affiliate sales do well because this is where the highest potential for earning is. I’m happy also to see that earnings are spread pretty evenly across several sources: World Nomads insurance sales, Clix Galore affiliates, Trade Doubler affiliates, Linkvana subscription sales and a program I run through my living in London site. The more diversified this is, the happier I am so it looks like things are on track.
  • Advertising – $2130 - I had one pretty big, new deal in March along with a few smaller ones, some renewals and my beloved monthly subscription payments. My sales all came early in the month and I was expecting March to be huge, but they tailed off. I did turn down a deal for over GBP1000 (although they would have paid per month) because they wanted a ridiculous number of links for that price across a bunch of my sites and it just wasn’t doable.
  • Ebook Sales – $33 - I’ll get to an affiliate program one of these days, but not for several months. It’s not a priority for me and I’m happy that the thing keeps selling little bits here and there.

Spending Breakdown:

This month I spent $1011, focusing less on link building and article outsourcing and more on acquiring content for the Africa site I’m working on. I really want to make it a fantastic resource and I’m investing a lot of time and money in it.

  • Content Outsourcing – $600 - I’m paying $150 for country guides for my backpacking in Africa site (which is a work in progress but thought I’d give a sneak-peek) which will add up quickly with 50+ countries on the continent. I’m not in a rush and see myself launching the site when I get to about 15 guides and then slowly building all of the content up from there.
  • Link Building Services – $206 - These are the monthly fees for two link building sites I’m using Linkvana (14 day trial for $5 affiliate link/50 free outsourcing credits affiliate link) and Build My Rank.
  • Article Outsourcing – $100 - This was for articles to use on my link building networks… because writing my own destroys my soul.
  • Software – $100 - I bought a program called Rank Tracker to, well, keep track of my site’s rankings a lot easier. I had a little play around with it and have since ignored it but once I get time to set things up, it looks like it could be useful.
  • Ebook – $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

April and May are going to be pretty interesting months for me with some busy travel plans ahead. I’ll go into detail later but what it means is that I’m not going to have much time to work for the next little while. As always, I’m curious to see if this passive income thing keeps chugging along or not.

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