I’m back in Leogane, Haiti and am currently murdering mosquitoes on my computer screen so will keep this short or I’ll end up with a carcass-covered screen and a lot of bites. I earned $4643 last month which is great considering I’ve been on the road since early April.
Earnings Breakdown:
- Adsense – $510 - Yay, another +500 month! That’s all.
- Affiliate sales – $857 - This month was pretty average. I’d like to see this consistently above $1000.
- Advertising – $3064 - Huge month! I had a lot of new links which, as always, were emails from out of the blue. I had a couple of renewals and I’m still chasing a couple more.
- Ebook Sales – $63 - Nine sales.
Spending Breakdown:
This month I spent $961 with a pretty even spread across a bunch of different aspects of my business.
- Content Outsourcing – $250 - I’ve got a couple more quality Africa country guides now.
- 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 – $120 - This was for articles to use on my link building networks… because writing my own makes my face hurt.
- Programming Outsourcing – $380 - I use Google maps loads on my sites and I’ve never really been fully happy with them. I headed on over to Elance and cound a guy who seems to know what he’s talking about. He’s going to bust out a WordPress plugin that’ll hopefully do what I want. It’ll be something that I use across a lot of my sites so it’s totally worth the money. If he gets my vision!
- Ebook – $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.
I know I’ve been crap with posting! A few updates to come soon. I honestly haven’t been working at all, really, so there’s not much to report. But I’ll give a wee travel update soon. Thanks for reading!
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Congrats on a great month!
Always great to see you doing so well because it stirs my competitive spirits.
I’m curious, since I know you have a lot of sites, whether your earnings are spread over all of them, or you have one or two sites that are pulling in the majority of your income? No need to mention specific sites.
I’ll go ahead and publish my April earnings later tonight. FYI – I’ve set up a redirect at my old Blog to Travel site, and now report monthly on Travel Blog Success.
I really like the maps you have on your http://www.livinginkigali.com/map-of-kigali/ site, clean and modern how are you going to improve on that?
Every month these posts provide a little bit of inspiration and kicks my efforts up a notch. If you could give an estimate, how many words do you think you publish a month?
Congrats with your results! I am just curious how do you manage to maintain all your sites? I have only three and still it is so time consuming and can’t imagine to put another site to my list.
@dave I know what you mean! Seeing you do well pushes me to work harder, too. My earnings come mostly from http://www.stuckinlondon.com and then with Adsense http://www.workingholidayinfo.com is next. Nerdy Nomad does well with text links and Travoholic has an important page for selling travel insurance. It’s difficult to say how much each makes. One thing I do know is that having a bunch of sites makes big deals more of a possibility. It’s happened on several occasions that I’ve been contacted for a single link and given them a list of my sites and they’ wanted 7 or more links at once. Plus having a variety of sites (especially city sites) makes them interesting to the same SEO people at different times, depending who their clients are.
@rentals There are some small things I’d like to change the look of. Plus Google has just upgraded to a new version and I have no idea to make the changes myself. Plus, at the moment, I code the maps individually which is a pain. I’d much rather be able to do it all in a WordPress admin panel.
@dan Not many! I don’t remember the last time I wrote new content. These blog posts are about the only thing I write (semi) regularly. I have been writing some transporation guides for my Africa site so I’d guess maybe about 3,000 words in March?
@vi I only have this one blog and the rest of my sites are static, so if I don’t update them, they don’t look out of date as with a blog. So I don’t really do much upkeep. I might take some time once a year to update obvious mistakes and changes in the info on my site (like working holiday visa stuff, etc) but that’s about it, besides fielding emails and adding advertisements.
what’s the affiliate breakdown though? i.e. which affiliates are pulling in the sales?
That’s great that you are able to bring in so much from advertising. I guess it really helps that you have such well targeted websites that appeal to a specific demographic. Currently I make very little money from direct advertising deals, but numbers like this are making me reconsider. Great job Kirsty.
Nice work, dude! I love reading these monthly reports on blog. So, so motivational and inspirational, and makes it seem so much more achievable to everyone else. Keep up the good work! Rob.
I’m pleased to see your growth in affiliate sales and advertising. This is what I want to do over time. I’ve been so busy trying to get content together and blogging that I’ve really neglected the sales and advertising. I did have my first link sale recently >>
<< which was very encouraging. So I follow your progress with keen anticipation each month. Time to shift gears and get the site running at peak efficiency! Once again, congrats!
Congratulations these are outstanding results and you are one of the few honest people who don’t only show their revenues but also your monthly expences with so many details.
Thanks for sharing, hope you grow even more and continue inspiring all of us who follow you.
@nomadicmatt I’m not going to break it down… I’m not *that* transparent. However I have made a few comments about my affiliates in the past so if you’re willing to dig, the info is there.
@laptop I think part of the reason I do well is because I have a few sites on different topics within the travel niche.
@rob Thanks! I’m always happy to hear that what I’m doing motivates people. Then once they get things
@10minute Congrats! The first sale always makes you realise how possible it all actually is. Getting the first one is the trick to staying motivated.
Another great month, especially as you mentioned you didnt do that much work. Thats the beauty of this business model, take a break and still get paid.
All the best for your latest web projects (Africa site)
nice , i need to learn the outsourcing thing . the best i do is manage alone , but as site and traffic grows , im really not able to give time to myself
As always great to see the transparency in your business. I am learning everyday from you
Suggestion for you …
I subscribe to your blog through Google Reader (RSS Feeds). For me, it’s good because I just get to see your latest blog’s text only – no ads, no clutter.
For you, people who have full access to your latest blog that only come through RSS are robbing you of hits and ad views, aren’t they? I could literally read all of the last 12 month’s posts without ever having to jump on to your site.
Two suggestions – First, your RSS feeds should simply be a snippet of your blog, maybe the first few sentences. I see that on a few RSS feeds. I’ve got no idea how it’s done, but that would make the interested reader click through to read the rest. You’d get a lot more hits. Second, you also have the ability to post Ads in RSS feeds. You should research how to do that.
I enjoy the way you think… It is undoubtedly terrific when you get instantly to the point.
Kristy, Those are really very impressive numbers, I have only been on this site a few times and I have marked to follow. How many sites do you actually have? Ok, no after reading a few comments I will have to digg the information!
That’s quite impressive and I’m pretty surprised that the big majority of your earnings are coming from advertising. I always thought that online marketers make the most of of affiliate sales.
I’m just starting out online and currently I’m making a bit under$100/month. I’m also wondering, do you make all your income from one blog or do you have several sites?
All the best and keep up that great work.
Firstly, I just wanted to say that I love that you display your earnings. It’s extremely helpful to see the month-by-month breakdowns.
Secondly, I was just curious to know where you find writers for content outsourcing? I’ve tried a few services in the past (freelancer.com) being one of them, but I found the quality to be quite ordinary.
Keep up the great work!
You know i never see posts like this, people sharing how much they make (in detail) and how much they are spending. Thankyou for giving us the breakdown. Once you start to make some money and putting that money back into the blog things just get better and better.
I totally agree about the affiliate sale, at the moment im building an amazon blog. Right now i havent made one sale and to me it still feels like im wasting my time as i keep thinking what is the chance that someone is going to buy something from visiting my blog. I keep working on it though. I just need that first sale to happen, i dont even care how much the sale is, just need a sale. Once it happens all my negative thoughts will disappear and i will know that it is possible to make money from affiliate sales. Ive never made an affiliate sale in my life, i have made a small amount of money from adsense so right now im more motivated towards adsense. I read so many people who are killing it with the affiliates it seems stupid to pass up the oppurtunity to makes an extra buck.
Im going to sign up to that linkvana trial and see how it is.
I just commented on your other post, but after reading this, you should donate at least 2% of your earnings, lol
@chris Thanks for the advice but I’m not really that interested in plowing my blog readers with ads. I have other sites for that. My blog was never intended to be an earner and I still don’t do Adsense, in-content links or paid posts. So while that’s great advice and people with blogs they want to earn off of should follow it, I’m going to stick with how things are.
@paul The first sale is a huge one! Makes you realise that all the work isn’t for nothing and that it is, in fact, possible! Keep at it.