I earned $5496 in September which is one of my better months to date. It was a big month in the spending area with the purchase of my first website and that seems to have been a great investment. Another great month without a lot of work on my sites.
Earnings Breakdown:
- Adsense — $455 – Pretty average month. My Kigali site has the lowest click-through rate in history! I think I’ll scrap Adsense on that site. I had a feeling it wouldn’t work. Come on African businesses! Start using Adwords!
- Affiliate sales — $842 – Pretty average month in this department. Nothing really to report… I’m not really trying anything new or changing things up. This includes $200 worth of Linkvana referrals… $100 of that is from this month and the other half is from June and August. I forgot to check!
- Advertising — $3869 – Another great month in this department! Blighty Traveller has given me a boost in this area and has also meant that, for the first time, I’m accepting permanent articles/guest posts from advertisers, as opposed to yearly deals. Plus a few renewals and a bunch more new deals out of thin air.
- Referrals $260 – I’ve benefited from a bunch of referrals from my small gang of contact-sharers but this is the first month where a couple of referrals I’ve sent have paid off. One payout was for $200 which means that they did a deal for $1000 which is pretty good stuff.
- Ebook Sales — $70 – Ten sales.
Spending Breakdown:
Ok I went a little nuts this month spending $3754. My big purchase this month was a new travelling in England website. Kind of scary, kind of exciting. Everything else is pretty usual. I did some link building outsourcing for my backpacking in Africa site. I’m not really that happy with the site and there’s still a lot of work to do, but I figured I’d get it site out there so it can start weaseling its way into Google and gaining PR.
- Domain Renewals – $78 – Go Daddy renewals.
- The Blighty Traveller Site Purchase – $3100 – So… spending around $3100 on a new website puts a bit of a dent in the bank account! But so far it’s looking like it was a great deal for me with about $750 in deals in the first two weeks. This is without approaching my current advertisers with the new site. Actually, it’s working the other way around where I’m getting a bunch of new inquiries and then I can pitch my other sites to them in addition. So the purchase is, so far, turning out to be even better than I expected.
- 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 — $340 – For some article outsourcing through Linkvana and Niche Tracker.
- Website Content – $25 – I’m starting to pay $25 a pop for articles for Wanderstruck.
- Ebook — $5 – Monthly cost to sell my ebook.
I’ve been working a lot this month on a new idea for an offline business. Kigali is a city without a map! Seriously… you can’t buy a road map of this place and it’s a place with very few straight roads. In short, it’s confusing and there’s no way for a new arrival to know what’s what. So a friend and I are making it our mission to make a map aimed at expats. I’ll write a post about it soon. It’ll be a lot of work but fun and worthwhile, I think.
Last year October was my first plus $5000 month, sandwiched between two sub $3000 months. This year I’ve got a whole bunch of renewals lined up so I’m expecting big things. Although I probably shouldn’t since this business is so unpredictable! But I’m looking forward to seeing what the month has in store and also to seeing if The Blighty Traveller continues to produce so well.
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