July Income Report

Guess what – another busy month!

It has been hard to keep the momentum going on the things I have been working on thanks to taking a one week trip to Tasmania and then another trip down there when my grandfather passed away unexpectedly.  It has not been the best month from a personal standpoint and this has meant I have not been able to complete as much as I would like.  I get most work done on the two days of child care I have a week, but I missed out on this for three weeks this month.

I am still completely burned out when it comes to my travel blog.  I don’t even want to look at it.  Thanks to my trip to Tasmania, I have still had to work on it a fair bit since I had (and still have) obligations to people I worked with down there.  I am off to Singapore next week so I have also been working on making contacts there as well.  I plan to take a whole week off once I finish off my Tasmanian obligations.

I have been enjoying working on the new direction I am taking – that being Amazon affiliate sites.  It is quite addictive, so I am also making a big effort this week to not work on it so much when I am looking after the kids, as it is taking too much of my focus.  Anyway, on to the update..

Where’s Sharon

I have continued to have some success with organising press trips, selling advertising and my DA going up.  It moved up to 36 this month which made me very happy with no effort.

Traffic

Page Views: 20,510

I am very happy with my page views given I no longer really contribute to them! Most hits are still from Google search and Pinterest.

Social Media

I have stopped obsessing over Klout. I was upset when it dropped back below 70 while I was in Tasmania despite the fact that I was working harder on it than usual.  I have cut back all my social media activity apart from Twitter in the latter part of this month and somehow it has stayed firm at 69.  I don’t think it is worth trying to get it back to 70 anymore given I was spending soooo many more hours a week on it just for that extra point.

I have not been doing anything to grow my followers. They remain steady.

Sponsored Travel

We had our holiday week in Tasmania where all our accommodation and more expensive activities were sponsored.  I have arranged the same for Singapore.  I really wanted to have my first experience working with a visitor bureau and it looked like that would happen with Singapore.  Unfortunately though, the person I had been communicating with for a few weeks went on leave and then there was suddenly no funding.  I quickly had to look into other options and thankfully it has come together and I am looking forward to it.

I also learned from Tasmania that I should really think through what I seek out and accept in regards to sponsored travel.  For a six day trip, I worked with three accommodation providers and two other companies.  It means I have a lot of work for not really enough return.  I am not going to do any more sponsored stays unless they are at least three nights or there is something very spectacular about the place.  It is just not worth my time.

Income

I made $670 from advertising and another $300 for a sponsored review. I was so lucky with the review.  The PR firm actually contacted me to write about an activity that I had coincidentally just done.

Digital Nomad Wannabe

I have finally started posting more often on this site, and I hope to continue this.  I need to take the time to work out exactly what I want to do with this site and what I want to achieve.  At the moment, it is more like a journal of my experiences, but realistically, I need to consider how I can make money from it if I want to justify time to make it better.  Once I have done this, I want to do a redesign and improve the navigation.  I don’t see this happening any time soon.

Affiliate Sites

I have my first two affiliate sites online and a private blog network.  I am working very hard on this. I have read I will have about six months before the sites are likely to rank well on Google, so it may be awhile before I post an income from this project. I can be patient though.  You can read more about it in my case study.

I have started working with writers on iWriter and oDesk primarily for the content for my PBN.  That is going well overall.

Gambling product

J’s gambling product has not had a good month.  It suffered some downtime and with the reinvestment they are currently doing with the profits, J only made $200.

Earnings total: $1170 + 1 week of travel

Plans for the next month

For Where’s Sharon, I don’t plan on working on growing it further in the next month.  I will just keep up my current workload.

I hope to publish a couple of more posts this month on this site with more details about my Amazon affiliate site case study.

I will keep working on my affiliate sites and PBN. By the end of the month, I hope to have enough content scheduled on my PBN for the time being. I hope to have all three Amazon affiliate sites I am working on online and to have completed some link building for all with a good plan of how to progress forward for each of them.  I also hope to have an ongoing arrangement with an overseas writer.

J and I also hope to make a plan for the next year, particularly in regards to whether we will move to Asia or not or just travel more regularly.  We have lots of decisions we need to make in regards to our living and schooling situation here in Melbourne that we can’t make until we can decide that.  You can probably guess my vote, fingers crossed that J comes to the party!

Find more posts on blogging and income reports here.