May Earnings Update

After a freakishly amazing month in April that saw me break the $2500 mark for the first time, I’ve come back down to planet earth but still managed a good month. I earned $1874 in May which is about where I was expecting to be so I’m not too upset. A big reason for April’s record was a single link sale for nearly $800, so I’m not at all upset with the fall in income and was sort of expecting it. 

Earnings breakdown:

• Google Adsense – $433 – This keeps going up and up and the only reason I can think of is that the traffic across all of my sites has been steadily increasing since January. Getting to the $20 a day mark has always been a big goal of mine and it’s great to see things creeping in that direction without doing much about it.
• Affiliate Sales – $924 – Hostelworld finally came through with nearly $20 this month… yay! But it was from a single sale… boo! Everything else was crap except for my usual good performer.
• Linkworth & Text Link Ads – $165 – Nothing much to report here. Just the same steady earnings as always and I haven’t really been active in finding ways to improve this area. I guess one way would be to submit more sites but I’m not sure I have anymore that either program would be interested in at the moment.
• Private Link Sales – $352 – One of my crappiest sites mysteriously rose to PR5 and I sold a link on it for $160 for the year. I also opened up this site to accept links (bad me!) and that helped. I am owed about $280 for a sale that didn’t go through because my Paypal account was suspended but will wait until I actually get the money and then tack that onto June’s earnings. Something to give me a head start.

I’m really excited about June. For once I’ve motivated myself to do some work and I’ve got three sites on the go. One is just at the ideas stage but I plan to make it a site aimed at mobile phone users so I’m kind of interested to see how that goes. The other is a copycat of a current travel insurance site but aimed at the UK market and it’s nearly finished. I’m hoping to have it finished in a few days and will be looking for feedback. Then there’s my never ending Beijing site that I still haven’t done much work on. I am going to aim to have this done by the end of the month as well.

I don’t expect that these three projects will start paying off straight away but I’m hoping they work together to push me up above the $2000 mark consistently in the coming months and even higher by the end of the year.