October Earnings & Spending Report

By
Kirsty
– October 31, 2011Posted in: Earnings

Another best month! I earned $6801 in October even though I didn’t get a lot of the advertising renewals I was expecting. Still, it was a month heavy on advertising… far more than other months. This dependency on ads makes me nervous but, then again, I’ve been saying that for years and things just keep improving year after year. So maybe I’ll stop worrying and just enjoy it. :-)

Earnings Breakdown:

  • Adsense – $399 - Nothing exciting happening here. I still need to add Adsense to my Blighty Traveller site so maybe that’ll give things a boost. I think I’ll try building links to a couple of sites with a heavy Adsense strategy to see how that works. I know the sites have good per click payouts… I just need to get people to the sites. Easy… right?
  • Affiliate sales – $550 - A slightly concerning drop in affiliate sales but I’m not going to panic unless things stay the same for the next couple of months. I really do nothing to promote affiliate sales so I’m not really sure I should be surprised at the drop in earnings.
  • Advertising – $5782 - I did my biggest deal ever this month (ads on 7 sites for almost $2700 for 12 months… it pays to have a lot of sites!) which was what led to me having my best month so far. It was a huge deal with very little work on my part and no bargaining. I really have no idea what I’m doing right. I think I’m reaping the rewards of great timing as more and more companies are seeing the benefits to advertising online. I’m getting a lot of repeat business from SEO companies who already have my sites on file as well as weekly emails from new people wanting ads… almost all of which convert into a sale.
  • Ebook Sales – $70 - Ten sales.

Spending Breakdown:

Considering October turning out to be my best earnings month… maybe I should have spent a bit more on my business! It was actually a pretty stingy month for me, only spending $654 on the usual things. I guess it’s good though since I spent a ton of money going to Bali in September and just bought a plane ticket home for Christmas this year (my first Xmas home in five years). So a month like this is good for re-padding the bank account.

  • Domain Renewals – $143 - Go Daddy renewals.
  • Hosting Fees – $100 - Paid a bunch of months for Hostgator.
  • 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 - For some article outsourcing through Linkvana.
  • Ebook – $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

I’ve been working really hard on my Kigali site this month, as well as the Kigali map. I’m not sure I’ll stay here past June 2012 (I really want to learn French so am thinking of a move to somewhere I’ll be totally immersed… French Guiana anyone? Plus I want to do more disaster volunteering next year and travel with a friend around Canada a bit) so these are two projects I plan on putting a lot of work into until then. Plus I really want to get the map finished before I leave for Canada on December 8th which will mean neglecting pretty much everything else… as usual!

But I’ve got a few more renewals and a couple more deals already done for November so I’m off to a good start. I’m not expecting anything close to October’s results but I’ve been surprised before… so who knows!

I got an email last week from a reader called Adam who started a site called Monthly Income Report. It’s a… yep… site dedicated to listing bloggers who do income reports for their online businesses. It’s a list of 10 sites so far… I’m not sure if that’s due to grow or if it’s meant to be a ‘top 10′ type thing. Anyways… check it out if you’re into reading about what people are earning online.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!