I earned $8044 in November which is completely crazy to me! Again, it was mostly through ad deals and paid articles but, unlike in October when I had a huge $2600 deal, November was one biggie for $1200 then a whole bunch of smaller deals.
Earnings Breakdown:
- Adsense – $370 - Same old stuff here. I’m going to finally add Adsense to my new Blighty Traveller site so which might up things a little bit.
- Affiliate sales – $790 - Affiliate sales are up a bit this month but I won’t really be happy until it’s hovering around $1000 consistently. I’m not really doing much to achieve that though. I guess I should also add affiliates to Blighty Traveller. Maybe I’ll make tweaking that site my project for the month.
- Advertising – $6821 - So ya… a pretty big month with advertising. I had about half of my ads that expired in November renewed (including one that I’d forgotten to charge for several months) but a lot of smaller ($200-300) deals, as I mentioned. I like the smaller deals since it means I’m dealing with new SEO companies and individuals and the more contacts I have in the SEO world, the better. It’s probably a lot easier for them to contact existing partners when new advertisers come to them than it is to look for new sites and I think this is another reason I’ve done well here – I get links up fast with no hassle and I see a lot of repeat business from SEO people.
- Ebook Sales – $63 - Nine sales.
Spending Breakdown:
Wow I really didn’t spend much at all last month, only $517 which makes November a pretty profitable month for me! I did fork over about $550 in All Hands and Movember donations and also had to pay for my plane ticket back to Canada for Xmas, so funds were spent, just not on my business. I really dropped the ball on article marketing this month but will get back into it in December.
- Domain Renewals – $240 - Go Daddy renewals.
- Stock Photos – $66 - I bought a bunch of credits for stock photos. I use iStock Photo in case anyone was wondering. I like them.
- 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.
- Ebook – $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.
Thinking back on November I don’t think I did a lot of work. The star ratings plugin I’m using on my Kigali site has finally been finished after a lot of back and forth with my programmer guy. But I’m really happy with it. I almost had a sale go through for a moving to Hawaii website but the guy realised at the last minute that he’d be crazy to sell for the price I was offering ($2300) and, to be honest, he’s probably right. I didn’t ask him to name a higher price but I might at some point soon.
December has started slow. I might have a deal in the works for $500/month but other than that I haven’t had any advertisers get in touch. I guess it was the weekend so we’ll see what the week holds. I find that most deals I do are during the first couple of weeks of the month and then things drop off considerably. But I do have about $3000 in renewals due this month so fingers crossed on those.I think this month I’ll work on adding Adsense and affiliates to The Blighty Traveller and trying to get my map to a point where I can have something to print before I leave. While I’d like to print the map in Rwanda, I’d also like to know what the quality/price difference would be. I’ll also be trolling the net in search of a website or two to spend my money on.
I’m heading home to Canada on December 9th and staying until January 2nd. I live about an hour from Toronto and love going up there so if there’s anyone nearby who feels like meeting up, let me know!
Woohoo! That’s seriously impressive. November was our most profitable month too (we started accepting advertising 4 months ago) but not on that level. Congratulations!
Thanks! Well done to you guys too!
Wow that’s a seriously impressive month. It seems like just yesterday when you were not able to break a $1000 keep up the good work.
Ya I know! Well, it doesn’t actually seem like yesterday to me… but I certainly remember struggling to get beyong the $1000 mark.
Hey Kirsty – Congratulations!
Any tips on how to source/approach SEO companies to advertise on your site?
Thanks Shay! I don’t have any tips, unfortunately, because the SEO people always come to me. I don’t think I’ve ever approached anyone to advertise.
But I guess you have to think about why they’d approach me… I’m guessing they have a list of sites they need to advertise for with a list of keywords then they search Google for terms related to what they have on their list and when they find good sites that look like they accept advertising that rank high for those search terms, I guess they get in touch.
So having a visible email address on all of your sites is obvious but not something people always do! Then work at making quality sites and ranking them. If there are people who want to advertise in your niche and you have a good site that ranks well then they’ll find you. I’m lucky that travel is a popular niche and that my sites rank well… but as for cold-calling people. No advice there. I suck at sales, so I’m lucky they find me!
Great job in November. I enjoy reading your blog. Where do you live around Toronto. We’re heading back as well over the holidays, albeit a short trip. We’re about 1 hour west, just outside of Brantford, Where around Ontario are you heading?
Enjoy your holidays.
Tina
I’m in St. Catharines.
Hi Kirsty, great figures! My AdSense is the mainstay of Women on the Road and usually brings in about $1200/month (until I was hit by Google’s Panda release six weeks ago at which stage traffic stayed up but earnings went down a bit) with a very few affiliates (I’ve been lazy on this so far but it will have to change) bringing in an additional $500 or so. I’m about to get started taking ads so I’m following your progress with huge interest!
I’ve only got two sites (one of which is new, small and only has a bit of AdSense) and another is in the works for 2012 so things should improve somewhat. Thanks for keeping us all informed!
Wow, $1200 with Adsense on just one site is impressive! I might have to wander over there and spy on you to see what your secret is.
Hi Kirsty,
You might not remember me, but I met you briefly in Haiti with All Hands. Sounds like you’ve had a great month! I think your business model is extremely interesting and you’ve done a very impressive job at maintaining it.
Have you considered migrating your domains from GoDaddy in the wake of the CEO’s penchant for elephant hunting in Zimbabwe and recent shady business practices that are coming to light? I know it can be a pain to switch, I had to do it recently, but with all those domains you have, you could really make a statement by switching!!
http://www.good.is/post/how-to-leave-godaddy-com/
I moved my renewals GoDaddy to ResellerClub years ago for several reasons (pricing and free privacy being part, but hatred at Bob Parsons’ right wing politics being a factor too, but for new registrations GoDaddy’s discount codes can save a lot, and make the price so low they’re probably not making a profit on it – I just move the domains from them before renewing.
Well done on the massive figure last month Kirsty, I think this just about beats my best ever month in 2006. My adsense in November was around the equivalent of $590, but every other of your categories either was zero or was much lower for me.
The rating system you’ve installed on Wanderstruck looks good. Is it a bespoke one? I’m playing about with MyReviewPlugin at the moment and it seems pretty good.
Are you worried about the Google Maps news that they might start charging sites to use their maps? I saw a blog post by a UK media company called Fubra on how they have implemented OpenStreetMaps as a free replacement for it on some of their sites in preparation which actually looks pretty good (the maps seem somehow more friendly than google maps, it might be just something to do with the colours and fonts on them).
Thanks! November was a bit of a freak month and December isn’t looking quite as good.
The Wanderstruck thing (it’s actually more in use on http://www.livinginkigali.com) is a Plugin called WP My Review that I think costs something but I forget how much. I paid a developer $400 to make some fairly substantial adjustments to it, a lot of that being how it displays on the site. So it’s kind of aligned to my Arras theme now. I’m really happy with it.
I don’t pay much attention to news either about online stuff or in general… I probably should!
So I haven’t heard that. But I wouldn’t mind paying to use it. Obviously if the price is crazy expensive then I’d have to look at alternatives. The Open Street Map project is one I’ve heard about and it’s pretty cool. Kind of like a giant Wiki for maps where people can add their own points of interest. Pretty cool stuff but my sites are all pretty Google maps heavy and I also had a plugin developed to make adding Google maps to my sites really easy. So fingers crossed nothing changes!
Hey Emily! Wow that guys is pretty douchey. The main reason I would leave GoDaddy is because their website sucks and their interface is confusing and slow (on a net connection in Rwanda)… this guy’s assholeyness would be an extra reason.
Anyone have alternatives?
Hi Kirsty, that’s mightly impressive. Well done.
Do you find you can sustain growth using only third-party lost-cost link building services (which are normally associated with low quality) or do you also do quality link building of your own?
Mark
Mark link building makes me want to shoot myself in the face so I don’t do it at all anymore.
I’m not sure what “lost-cost” is but I’ve been really happy with the results I’ve gotten from Linkvana which I use most often. I’ve also used Niche Tracker and have a membership with Build My Rank which I use less.
In the early days I did a lot of article marketing myself, writing and submitting everything manually. It sucked but it also had a positive impact, I think.