December Income Report

December may have been our most exciting month yet as we are no longer Digital Nomad Wannabes – we are now Digital Nomads!

We left Melbourne on the night of December 30. It was a busy and stressful month getting everything organised and packed up. There was also some extra added financial stress as our tenants stopped paying rent and J’s job made him finish early when they found out that he was leaving. All this means we no longer have 6 months of living costs saved up, but only 3.5 months. We need to be self supporting quicker than we hoped.

We are not worried but it does mean we have less freedom for J to follow some of the business ideas we have and instead he will start looking for freelance work quicker than we expected. If he can earn just what he does in a few days back home over a month, then we will be right.

Where’s Sharon

I have worked harder than usual on my travel blog this month. I did a fair bit of keyword research and wrote some affiliate style posts in the same fashion as I would for my niche sites. Time will tell if they will pay off.

I have been feeling quite frustrated by the massive growth I am seeing on this site while still not making any more money. I am feeling ready to give making this site more profitable another go. I have learned so much from my other ventures, that I feel I am better placed to do this now.

Traffic

Page Views: 35,402 (up from 31,546)

My traffic was slowly increasing this month until I hit Christmas. It then went up dramatically and I have hit over 40,000 page views now (and still increasing). Some of this increase is from google search, but the majority is from Pinterest – despite the fact I have barely gone in there. It seems that the new algorithm update in Pinterest loves me. You can read my strategy here.

Income

Advertising – $562.87

Direct advertising – $420

Google AdSense – $142.87

I have continued experimenting with AdSense and have increased it to a more worthwhile $5 a day. The increase in traffic helped push this up to $7 a day by the end of the month. It is still not all that much money for ruining some of the look of my site, but the fact is I need to make money so it will stay until I have a better alternative.

For other bloggers considering this, I have an ad in my sidebar and one in the middle and the end of posts. There are none on my home page and they do not show on pages, categories etc. The one in the middle of the post is the best converting and I had to play with the sizes as some sizes did not give me as much value per click.

Affiliates – $50

I made $50 from SiteGround hosting.

Total Income – $612.87

Digital Nomad Wannabe

Page Views: 2,459 ( up from 2,013)

I continue to have little time to work on this site. In the last month, I only posted my usual niche case study update, as well as a post to help others set up self hosted WordPress.

Work / Home / Life

Page Views: 1,203 (up from 813)

This is my 2 month old site all about working from home. I have been working on building up the content, especially for my email opt in which will be a course to get people working from home within a week. It is nearly completed. I also added more interviews from people who already work from home/while travelling – contact me if you would like to be interviewed.

I have also been guest posting and wrote 7 guest posts. They have started going online in January so hopefully this will help build up some traffic as well as give me some nice links.

I surprised myself by actually already making some money from this site! I have not monetised the site apart from two amazon links to cheap ebooks. I sold a couple! It’s a pathetic amount, but it feels like a good sign.

Income – $1.63 (up from $0)

Niche sites

They continue to grow. Much slower than what I would like, but at least I am earning money. You can read a full update here.

Income – $177 (up from $87)

Gambling Product

Income – $250

Earnings Total: $1,041

Up from $825 in November.

Plans for the Next Month

The first two thirds of January is all about having a holiday and sponsored travel. At the moment, we are spending a bit of time in Malaysia and in Bali having a holiday and working hard on Where’s Sharon as we work with accommodation and activity providers. The internet is not the best and this is making it difficult to achieve much.

Once we are in Penang, after a few more days of sponsored travel, we will settle down and finally have the both of us working full time on working on our first income goal of $3000 a month. After I finish my sponsored travel obligations, I plan to finish my email opt in for Work / Home / Life and start publicising this, improving my subscriber rate for Where’s Sharon and doing some work on my niche sites.

J is looking at whether it is worth our while trying to become Amazon sellers and starting trying to attract freelance clients for programming work. It will be great to get stuck into it all at last.

You can now check out what happened in January! Find more posts on blogging and income reports here.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, tips or advice…