Since I started this internet business thing, December has always been a bad month so, after an average November, I was expecting more of the same. But early in the month I did a huge advertising deal and December ended up being one of my best months ever coming in at $4616. This was despite being offline for the first ten days of the month and everyone I seem to do business with going on holiday from December 22nd or so until the New Year.
Earnings Breakdown:
- Adsense – $300 – I’m sick of you, Adsense! Time to focus on other things and accept that Adsense is stuck around the $300 to $400 range until I come up with some genius idea to bump it up.
- Affiliate sales – $604 – Travel insurance, as usual, but I’m also waiting t hear how much I earned with my London starter kit affiliate. I guess I’ll have to add that onto next month.
- Advertising – $3677 – I feel like my eggs are starting to be all in one basket again which makes me nervous and had been the reason for my persistent pursuit of higher Adsense earnings. Of course, ad sales continue to happen and I made my biggest deal yet this month, but I still live in fear of that month without any new emails or renewals.
- Ebook Sales – $35 – I’m going to look at doing an update and rolling out an affiliate program in the new year. That’s the only thing that’ll get this baby going again, I think.
Spending Breakdown:
I spent $796 this month, mostly on link building. I might have to tone down the amount I’m spending on this as I’d like to keep it closer to $500 a month including the monthly membership fees. All of the link building sites I use make outsourcing very easy which makes it easy to spend money without thinking too much about it. Linkvana is expensive at $147 per month and I’ve heard rumblings that it might not be the best option, especially not for the price. I’ll keep it going for another few months but I might reassess the situation at some point.
- Hosting – $124 – This was mostly for IP address changes. I’ve had a lot of advertisers recently have to limit the number of ads they’ll buy because too many of my sites were on the same IP. So I got new IP addresses for a few of the key ones.
- Link Building Services – $206 – These are the monthly fees for two link building sites I’m using.
- Article Outsourcing – $461 – All of this money went towards articles for link building.
- Ebook – $5 – Monthly cost to sell my ebook.
So my December earnings were a great way to end what’s been a really successful year. I never would have expected to have had a plus $5000 month and two months above $4000 in 2010… I was more aiming for around $2500 so I’m pleasantly surprised. I’m hoping the trend continues into the New Year… I can’t see advertisers suddenly deciding that the internet is not the place to put their money, so things should keep chugging along. I hope!
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