August got off to a really slow start and had me nervous, but I ended up pulling in $4614 which seems to be about my average month over the past year. I feel like I started the year hoping to clear $3500 a month and I’m surpassing that consistently. So I’m happy!

Earnings Breakdown:

• Adsense – $512 - I love the +$500 months. I’m going to attempt to add Adsense to my Kigali site which is now my second busiest but I’m not sure it’s a match for Adsense given that very few ads will be geared towards anything to do with the city. but we’ll see. I’ve had a few clicks after putting it on internal pages so if I add it to the main page it could give me a little boost. Or it could crash and burn. We’ll see.
• Affiliate sales – $763 - World Nomads was less this month but my affiliates on Trade Doubler did pretty well to compensate a wee bit.
• Advertising – $3283 - Not huge like last month but still pretty good. I had one decent-sized deal canceled and I can’t get a hold of a few others because my contacts with the company don’t work there anymore (or at least their emails don’t work). This is frustrating and I think that, in the future, when I do yearly deals with people who work for SEO or large companies who do their own SEO I’ll ask for a backup email as well as their own.
• Ebook Sales – $56 - Eight sales.

Spending Breakdown:

I spent a goo amount this month with $822 going mostly towards an elance project that’s due to be completed in a week or so. I’ve had great luck so far with elance so I’m hoping this guy can keep the streak alive and deliver what I’m hoping for. The other costs are the usual things.

• Domain Renewals – $8 - Had to renew some domain names.
• 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 - For some article outsourcing through Linkvana.
• Programming – $483 - I screwed up my Kigali forum and had to pay for it to be fixed and also for a bunch of adjustments I wanted to make. Mainly to allow people to post as guests, without needing to create a login. I also put a bunch of money into elance to have a reviews plugin which I’ll use both on my Kigali site and my Africa site… if that last one ever comes to fruition!
• Ebook – $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

As you all know, I’ve been spending a lot of time on my Kigali city site and it makes me $0. Probably not a good use of my time! But I feel like it has the most potential of any of my sites because it’s the only site of its kind and there are plenty of businesses in this city that want to reach the lucrative expat market here. I just need to figure out the best ways to do this and deal with any paperwork or red tape that might come with the territory. So, while I should be working on my other sites, I feel like the time I’m investing in the Kigali site now will pay off later… hopefully in a big way (some companies here pay $1500 a month to advertise on a really shitty local English-language news site) and hopefully before the end of the year.

I’m in Bangkok now enjoying air-conditioning (I forgot how much humidity sucks!) and fast wifi. Off to Bali tomorrow where I’ll hang out in Ubud for a couple nights and then head to some hotel in the Kuta area where I’ll probably be busy with friends and wedding stuff.

If anyone’s in Bali and wants to hang out, let me know!