July 2012 Earnings & Spending Report

Well I’m less late than last month by far but still late! I just got back from a pretty great weekend festival concert type thing near Portland. It’s called Pickathon and if you like small, fun, well-organised festivals with some great music you should check it out. A lot of banjos, fiddles and big base guitars. It was good stuff.

I earned $6298 in July which is about $1000 less than last month but about $500 more than the month before. It seems like I’m averaging around $6000 a month since the tax year started in April. I’m pretty happy with that! As always. šŸ™‚ I guess it’s hard not to be happy when money is rolling in with little to no work being done! July was a pretty travel-heavy month and it’s difficult to get work done, especially when I’m visiting with friends along the way. There hasn’t been much downtime to try to catch up on things and I doubt there will be for another 4 or 5 weeks. But that’s ok… I’ll have plenty of time to catch up once I get back to Kigali.

Earnings Breakdown:

  • Adsense ā€” $328 – Blah. I have a London Olympics site that I was hoping would earn a lot during the Olympics but that hasn’t panned out. I haven’t really put any effort into it at all so I guess I’m not surprised.
  • Affiliate sales ā€” $138 – I have a feeling my affiliate sales are going to slowly fizzle down to nothing. A few of the affiliate programs I’m a part of have expired and I haven’t done anything to switch it up. It’s a very neglected part of my business and I can’t expect that anything will change until I make the changes.
  • Advertising ā€” $5734 – I have a few deals that expired last month that want to renew but will pay in August. Otherwise it’s been business as usual with people randomly contacting me for ads. There’s been a definite shift away from text links in the sidebar and towards guest posts.
  • Ebook Sales ā€” $98 – Fourteen sales.

Spending Breakdown:
I had another pretty low spending month at $397 which is about half what I spent last month. I’m hoping to buy a new site this week (the person who’s selling it is currently considering my offer) so if that works out then that’ll be a pretty big purchase.

  • Link Building Services ā€” $147 – Iā€™m still using Linkvana (14 day trial for $5 affiliate link/50 free outsourcing credits affiliate link). No idea if this is a good idea or not.
  • Domain Renewal – $12 – Another year for one of my domains.
  • Programming ā€“ $210 – I had a hacking issue that I paid to have fixed.
  • Stock Photos – $23 – Stock photos mostly for Blighty Traveller articles.
  • Ebook ā€” $5 – Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

That’s it! I’m off to Calgary tomorrow (and then straight to some place called Canmore) for about a week. Looking forward to seeing one of my best buddies there so can’t wait. It probably also means that this girl isn’t going to get much work done.

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