June Earnings & Spending Report

I earned a pretty sweet $4400 in June which was much more than I was expecting. I didn’t have many link renewals lined up for June and I though that would really hurt me. But, as always seems to happen, a few more people came at me out of the blue and propped me up this month.

Earnings Breakdown:

  • Adsense — $590 – This was my best Adsense month so far and, as usual, I haven’t really changed anything. My newer sites that are made pretty much just for Adsense still haven’t started ranking so it’s not that. My London site did remarkably well this month so I guess I just got lucky with some higher paying keywords. I had a couple of $35 days too which was nice.
  • Affiliate sales — $688 – Things slumped a bit this month here. I’m still earning decent amounts from three main insurance affiliates and I’m happy with that but I need to diversify a bit more. The problem is that adding affiliates and giving it the attention it needs in order to earn takes a lot of time.
  • Advertising — $3066 – Without too many renewals lined up for this month I was expecting the worst but was surprised. I have a couple of really big deals this month along with my usual monthly earnings.
  • Ebook Sales — $56 – Eight sales.

Spending Breakdown:

This month I spent $835 which actually took me a bit by surprise when I totaled it all up. I thought I’d spent much less this month than last but turns out it was more. My spendings were spread across a bunch of different types of things so maybe that’s where I lost track. I’m still happy as long as I spend under $1000 a month but still do everything I need to do.

  • Content Outsourcing — $265 – I added another couple of Africa country guides and some transportation info.
  • Programming Outsourcings – $90 – A bit extra for my Google Maps plugin to be finished as I kept thinking of new features I wanted it to have. Money well spent!
  • Theme – $69 – I bought a WordPress theme to use on my charity bike ride site.
  • Domain Renewals – $40 – Had to renew some old domain names.
  • 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 — $160 – I outsourced some articles to Linkvana and Build My Rank.
  • Ebook — $5 – Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

I’ve been a bit lazy since I got back from my travels. I’ve been working a lot on my Kigali life site but that’s really more of a hobby right now than anything else. It doesn’t earn anything (yet) but it’s super useful for people who are coming to live here (or already do) and it’s a great feeling when people know the site and say it’s helped them.

I really need to get my biking site finished and I’ve just volunteered myself to build a website for a street kid’s home here in Kigali so that’ll be time consuming as well. My Africa site is the one that always seems to get pushed to the side but I really need to get onto it. I think the sheer size of that projects is making the whole thing super scary. But I’m slowly gathering info and it’s likely that I’ll take a trip to somewhere soon to write some of my own content as well. I’m thinking Senegal right now but we’ll see what happens.

July has some ad renewals lined up but I also had one of my monthly subscription payments canceled so that’ll be over $200 that I can’t count on anymore. But I keep getting surprised with new emails so we’ll see how things go.

About Kirsty