I’ve beaten my best month again and, again, it’s been a surprise! I earned $5927 in July, admittedly I was boosted a bit by the low US dollar, but I still cleared my best month by $300 and approached six grand… something I never could have imagined when I started the year.

Earlier in the month as I was dealing with what I thought was a huge hacker attack (but turned out to be a stupid set of mistakes by me that screwed up the files on my hosting account… oops) I was really spinning my wheels and have to spend a lot of time fixing things and doing uploads which is very frustrating on this slow net connection. It’s nice to see that that time suck didn’t effect my earnings potential and I guess that’s further evidence of the wonders of passive income!

Earnings Breakdown:

• Adsense – $427 - Some of my sites were down for a couple of days which had a small effect on Adsense but I still managed to do ok.
• Affiliate sales – $839 - Creeping back up towards the $1000 where I want it, but still falling short. Travel insurance is still my main earner with about 60% coming from World Nomads and the rest from a collection of small insurance affiliates across a couple of networks.
• Advertising – $4612 - Huge month! There were a few renewals but I actually have about $1000 worth of cancellations as well. What boosted me was some very large new deals. I ventured into offering permanent ads for the first time but the money was too good for me to turn it away and it’s hidden in my internal pages so it’s no big deal. A referral came through for me and I’m waiting to hear back on what could possible be a big deal. Thanks Jason!
• Ebook Sales – $49 - Seven sales.

Spending Breakdown:

I don’t feel like I’ve spent much this month, and it turns out I haven’t, with $547 going towards the usual things. I want to be spending money on writers but I’ve been lazy lately finding them so I’ll get on that in July (thanks to everyone who emailed me with suggestions). I’m also hoping to get some custom work done on an existing review plugin I have but the guys who I want to do the work (the plugin creators) are super busy.

• Domain Renewals – $24 - Had to renew some domain names.
• Hosting – $112 - I paid a Dreamhost bill. I think ttat’s for a year.
• 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 – $200 - I paid a Dreamhost hosting bill. I think ttat’s for a year.
• Ebook – $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

I have been spending plenty of money on travel stuff and I have a pretty ridiculous trip coming up at the end of August. That’ll make two crazy trips in one year (Rwanda to Haiti was pretty silly!) It’s another surprise so I’m a bit apprehensive about writing about it on my blog but I don’t think my friend reads it so I’ll fill you all in shortly.

My Kigali life site is going really well and is now my second busiest. What makes it different from all of my sites (except this blog) is that the readers  are a different type than I’m used to. They’re not the mass of people who find me through Google then click through on ads never to return again. They’re people I meet at parties who tell me they love the site and give suggestions. They’re a community and monetising a site like this is new to me. Post to come soon!

My budget travel Africa site is still bringing out the procrastinator in me. I’m going to spend a lot of time with it this week to try to finalise the look and also the framework and how it all fits together. I know that adding content to a site that’s complete is a zillion times more fun than messing around with a half completed site. So that’s my goal for this month.

I also spent a stupid amount of time last month playing with my custom Google maps plugin and using it to update my neglected travel map. I’ve got a lot of content from earlier trips on Travelpod and I want to move it over. Mapping things out first has been a nice way to see where I can fill in the holes. Plus I just love maps.