November Income Report

November has been a busy month but, in hindsight, I am not sure exactly what I did! I do have a new authority site which I have started marketing and I continued to work on my affiliate sites and my two main blogs.

Income has not been great this month. I am no longer attracting decent advertising offers so my income is down. On the up side, I have income coming in from far more sources than ever before. All my stats across my money making sites are going up. I am hopeful that things will go the way I want – eventually!

I have also had far better work life balance as I make a big effort to stop working every second I can. This means I have not produced as much, but I have been happier and I have been a far better mum. I am trying to remember that my whole motivation to become a digital nomad was for a better lifestyle. There is no point doing any of this if I am not ensuring that I actually do have a better lifestyle.

Where’s Sharon

As usual, I have not been working on growing this site. My traffic boost since the Penguin update has continued though, and I am very happy to report that I am over 30,000 page views, even after the mega day from Facebook in October stopped showing up in my page view results.

Traffic

Page Views: 31,546 (up from 29,100)

My growth seems to have slowed down now, but I am very happy how quickly I climbed from 20,000 to 30,000 page views. Even though I am not actively working on this site, I think it shows that I put in good ground work with SEO and Pinterest and that I am now reaping the rewards.

I must admit, however, that with this increase came extra frustration that I am making less money than before. It annoys me that I have not successfully monetised Where’s Sharon. The extra traffic is really just vanity traffic – it makes me feel good but is currently doing nothing for me.

Sponsored Travel

We had a great long weekend in country Victoria. I lined up more for when we hit Asia at the end of this month.

Income

I am happy to report a few different income streams this month for this blog.

Advertising

Directly – I only made about $70

Google Adsense – I finally decided I should experiment with this. I have been reluctant to as I think it is ugly, but it doesn’t look too bad, especially as I can’t bring myself to put it places like the header and the start of a post.

I put this up about half way through November, The first 10 hours I made about $6 and I was very happy thinking I had a new income source. However, since then it has only been about $2 a day. I am still playing with it, but at this stage it does not look like it will make enough money to continue bothering with it.

Income – $70 + $30.44 = $100.44

Affiliates

I had forgotten I had put my first affiliate links in with a couple of Amazon links to books in a planning post. Anyway, I sold a couple of books and made a fabulous $1.56

I am trying to put up a couple of posts aimed at making money through affiliates so hopefully this will grow at some point.

Contact List

I sold the contact list I bought in May which has made me most of my income to date. I stopped using it in September as I no longer want to contact random people for advertising. I sold it to someone for $200.

Total Income – $302 (down from $550)

Digital Nomad Wannabe

Page Views: 2,013 (up from 1,603)

I have not posted much in the last month. Other than my income report and my niche site updated, I only posted about how I improved my page speed quickly and easily.  I wish I could find the time to post more often on here and to market this site.

I am happy to report that I have some earnings. All affiliate commissions from Long Tail Pro. Some was earned in the previous month and I just hadn’t realised. The other was a sale I made after sending out an email to my subscribers about the Thanksgiving weekend discounts. Thanks whoever you are!

Income – $36.26 (up from $0)

Work / Home / Life

Page Views: 813

This is the new site I have built as part of the NoHat course I mentioned last month. The site is about working from home, all the ways you can make that happen and supporting people who work from home or want to work from home. An informative, legitimate site in this space seems to largely be lacking and my keyword research showed this is a great space to get into in the Australian market. It is my first site with a .au at the end of it, although most my content is applicable to people anywhere.

It is coming along well so far. My brother actually wrote for me this month and it was a relief to finally have a trustworthy, good writer on board. This helped me get a decent amount of content up. Unfortunately, he has already decided he doesn’t want to do freelance writing anymore so I am back to having problems with content production.

I have worked hard on the page speed aspect of this site as it was very poor with my initial theme but has thankfully improved now thanks to a great theme from Thrive Themes.  I think the site is looking pretty good now as well. I have also been publishing interviews from people who already work online who have then shared the content which has helped with my page views. Reddit is also helping and, only 5 days into this month, I already have 500 page views. It is not monetised as yet.

Niche Sites

My niche sites continue to grow. You can read more about my progress here.

Income – $87 (up from $75)

Gambling Product

J’s earnings held firm at $400.

Earnings Total: $825.26

Down from $1025 in October.

Plans for the Next Month

This next month is a big one – we move to Asia at the end of it! It is exciting to think that I will be writing the next report in Bali where we will be holidaying before moving to Penang.

Preparing for this big move is sucking away a lot of my time at the moment. I am also trying very hard to not work much when I should be spending time with the kids. All this means that I am not working much apart from the two days a week when I have the kids in child care.

In the next month, I will continue to work on growing Work / Home / Life. I am working on content that will form part of my opt in bonus to encourage people to subscribe to my mailing list. I also have a list of blogs who are happy for me to guest post for them to help me grow the audience for this site and to get some nice links. These jobs are my main focus.

Otherwise, I will do my usual jobs for the other sites. I will continue to add content regularly, market them and build links. I still need a good, regular writer, but I don’t have the income to justify looking any further at the moment.

J has decided to try freelance programming when we get to Malaysia. If anyone needs a Java developer or technical architect, he is offering some great rates. No matter what happens, it is going to be a big month!

You can now read about what happened in December and more posts on blogging and income reports here.

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