March 2015 Earnings Report

March saw the map sales really bail me out and I ended up earning a very impressive $7,159. That’s one of my best months ever, ladies and gentlemen! It reminds me of the good old days when I was a links whore. Ah… good times. But nobody seems to be buying anymore so I’m happy to report that diversification is working out for me. Read on for all of the juicy details…

Adsense, Link and Affiliate Sales, and Article Marketing

Earnings: $703

Adsense rose a bit to $165 which is an improvement on February but that’s probably only chalked up to March being a longer month. Meh. Article marketing and links sales brought in $538 which makes me very happy that I moved away from this as my primary income source. Times would have been tough! I might have needed to get a job… ew. But these two revenue streams are just a piece of a larger earnings puzzle so having a bad month doesn’t stress me out at all.

Volunteering eBook

Total Earnings: $99
Amazon Sales:
$57 (9 sales)
Direct PDF Sales: $84 (6 sales)
Affiliate Payouts: -$42 (6 payments)

Kind of a lame month for sales of my international volunteering ebook. All of my sales were due to affiliates which was a first! That should give me a kick in the pants to get out and find more affiliate partners. It’s suuuuuch a pan in the arse though. I hate it. So much. So. Much. But this isn’t my focus at the moment and won’t be again for a few months at least. So, I suppose things will just keep rolling along as usual. At least, for now.

Living in Kigali

Earnings: $1,020

THIS! This is where my focus lies at the moment. Living in Kigali has become a very well-known and useful resource here and it’s done so with a pretty serious amount of neglect on my part. Despite my only posting new articles about once a month for the last year (although I keep the events calendar updated and the forum is popular), the site continues to trundle along and still attracts advertisers. There’s so much potential and my aim is to have content going up daily with my ultimate goal being to attract the ‘big boys’ in advertising here in Africa – beer, airlines, banks, and phone companies. I know that 800 visitors a day isn’t going to cut it for them so I’m hard at work creating content and thinking up some new ideas. But despite the neglect, I still managed to collect $1,020 in payments this month which is great.

Living in Kampala

Earnings: $0

As with last month, Living in Kampala has been sadly neglected. But that’s about to change, folks! My partner and I have brought on a third person who will manage the content side of things. It’s good timing, too, because I’m hoping to do the same thing with my Kigali site – up the content drastically. So we can brainstorm new ideas together and figure out any new programming things all at once. I want to be consistent across the sites, too, so this new ‘content, content, and more content’ strategy is well-timed. Whether we can pull it off or not is another story. So far we’re off to a slow start but everyone’s pretty committed to the site and it’s time to turn all of the time and money we’ve put in into profit. I really believe that the Kampala site can be even bigger and better than the Kigali one and it’s time to prove that.

The Map – Kigali

Earnings: $5,337

Woohoo! The Map – Kigali is paying off in a big way! March saw me running around like crazy distributing and restocking maps and it was great! I also sold a bunch of unfolded wall maps and made some sales myself and double the wholesale price. In short, this project has been a life saver. After working out my costs, it looks like I’m already in the black with this project ater just

Total Earnings for March 2015

Building on a pretty good February with a pretty awesome March has been a relief more than anything. In total I earned $7,159 this month with a decent showing from my Kigali ads and article marketing. There’s still a lot of room to grow my ebook and affiliate sales and my Kampala website is well-positioned to start earning a bit, so I’m feeling good!

Last month my plan was to focus on creating a site and map for Addis Ababa but, as it turns out, there’s a popular Facebook group who will be rolling out a website soon and, even worse, it seems like it’s not legal for anyone to print maps in Ethiopia aside from the government.  Aaaarg! So that’s a couple of major blows. Especially since I’m going to Addis in a few days! But it’s ok… I have a meeting with someone who should be able to clarify the maps thing and I’m going to write content for the Addis site anyway as it’s 100% ready to go… except for the content.

In a way this bad news might be good… I’ve spread myself a bit thin and I haven’t been able to put the love and care into my Kigali and Kampala sites. I’d like to get some content onto my Addis site and then leave it there, adding things occasinally as the site wriggles its way into the rankings. Then I think I’ll refocus for now and maybe even start to think about a Kampala map. It’s the logical next step and, while I think something already exists, I think I can do better. So why not try? Plus it seems like this maps business can be pretty lucrative so

About Kirsty