Eek! My update is late! By over a week! Sorry. My excuse is that my internet hasn’t been working at home and the demon dog next door to my house has been keeping me away at night which means I’ve been a zombie during the day, unable to do anything. That’s my story. I earned $4,998 in January which is a lot less than I earned this time last year ($9,000+) which I guess is a little worrying. But I think it’s the nature of this business… sometimes earnings will be crazy high and other times you’ll settle into more of an average month.
Earnings Breakdown:
- Adsense — $318 – Adsense jumped up a bit this month but nothing too crazy.
- Affiliate sales — $36 – Blah.
- Advertising — $4,595 – Business as usual in this department. I’m seeing a few more organised guest posting businesses popping up. So instead of just dealing with a random person who contacts me, I have to register for a third party site, list my blogs and wait for them to contact me when a potential deal comes up. I like having a bit of both of these things working for me and am curious to see if these networks will end up offering good prices or not. So far it’s a mix.
- Ebook Sales — $49 – Seven sales.
Spending Breakdown:
I spent $442 this month which is up a bit from last month. Besides dropping a bunch of money on Facebook ads, I didn’t do anything too interesting.
- Link Building Services — $147 – I’m still using Linkvana (14 day trial for $5 affiliate link/50 free outsourcing credits affiliate link) but I haven’t actually done any link building for the past coupe of months. I need to get on that!
- Articles – $120 (£75) – I had three articles written this month for Backpacker Herald.
- Facebook Ads – $170 (£108) – I threw a bunch of money at Facebook ads to get my Kigali Facebook page ‘likes’ up. I think I’ll hold back on ads this month and let the page grow naturally, but I wanted to give it a little boost as I think this will eventually be a strong selling point for advertisers. My page is now one of the most popular in Kigali and it’s been a great way of communicating with people. I’m not sure I even know what all of the benefits of a popular Facebook page are yet… but I’m happy to have a strong reader base so that I can experiment with things in the future.
- Ebook — $5 – Monthly cost to sell my ebook.
So 2013 is off to a pretty average month. I’ve had a really lazy January so it’s not like I deserved to earn more! I really need to get going on a lot of projects. There’s just always so many things I want to work on but then just don’t for one reason or another. I’ve been finding it hard to get motivated to do web work. This might be because I’ve been really motivated lately with my efforts in learning French and have also recently thrown Kinyarwanda (the local language here) into the mix. Kinyarwanda is notoriously difficult and I’m freaking out a bit after three classes but I’m also enjoying it. My point is that these things are taking up a bunch of my time and brain energy so I guess I’m feeling a bit less motivated to do other things and more motivated to sit by the pool or meet friends for drinks.
Anyway! Onwards and upwards, I hope.
Leave a Reply