October Income Report

This month I concentrated on building a new authority site as I worked through the NoHat Digital Private Training Course.

We had some technical problems this month which made things quite stressful at times. For two weeks, we did not have any home internet and it is still not great. This has caused me to waste a lot of time, but we are a bit stuck since we are moving next month anyway.

Then after the internet was fixed, my hard drive broke on my laptop and I was without a laptop for a few days and lost some of my work. I am still catching up on that. I am also quite annoyed with myself as it is the third hard drive in a year, and I should have a better back up strategy by now. On the same day in a completely separate incident, the screen on my husband’s laptop was smashed. So neither laptop was operational and it was pricey to get them both fixed.

All this has me wondering if we should be travelling with a third, back up computer.

On the money front, income is down as I put no effort into attracting income. I am focused on my long term goals and not that fussed if I am earning money or not from short term sources. I do continue to have success with sponsored travel though which is effectively money to us. Recent deals have literally saved us thousands of dollars. It also means we are having at least one trip a month now.

Where’s Sharon

I am doing as little as possible on my travel blog and have dropped back to just one post a week. I did have a very nice boost in traffic which showed what I already knew – posting frequency is not related to my page views.

Traffic

Page Views: 29,100 (up from 23,500)

This massive increase was fabulous and I have since reached over 30,000 page views. A couple of thousand were thanks to a share of my New Orleans post by the New Orleans tourist bureau on Facebook. However even without this, I still have had a nice increase. The increase was thanks to more hits from Google and even more hits from Pinterest. I didn’t even use Pinterest at all most of this month so I continue to just love that forum (read some tips here).

Social Media

I only kept up with Twitter this month but saw nice increases in traffic across Facebook and Pinterest. My followers are growing slowly across all.

Sponsored Travel

We had a weekend trip within Melbourne which was fabulous. I have basically everything lined up for the first few weeks that we are overseas when we leave Australia next month too.

Income

I made $550 through advertising which I think may be my lowest month since starting to try to make money. I am fine with this though and I did nothing to seek out any work. My focus is elsewhere.

Digital Nomad Wannabe

Page Views: 1603 (down from 2503)

I am not surprised my traffic dropped this month as I only posted twice compared to the previous month where I put a fair bit of effort in.  I do want to do more to this site but it is hard to find the time at the moment.

New Authority Site

Page Views: 443

This site was only created in October and I am still working on building it to the point where I can start marketing it. I am very close to this, so I will share the URL next month.

I have built this site from keyword research as part of my NoHat Digital course and using their SEO and optimisation guidelines. I started building a second site as well, but since I want these to be authority sites that are built using white hat SEO and a variety of content marketing techniques, I just don’t have the time to do more than one. I may come back to the other site in future though.

I am very happy with this site so far and excited about where I can take it. It is already getting a little bit of Google action and I have just started some social media accounts. I look forward to learning many different ways to market and monetise it in the next part of the NoHat Digital course. This course has actually completely changed while I was doing it, so I have been lucky enough to get to do the brand new one for free which is about content marketing and building a sustainable online business.

Niche Sites

These continue to slowly grow in search rankings, page views and Amazon sales. You can read more about my progress in my update about my niche sites.

Income

Across Amazon US, Canada and the UK, I have earned about $75.

Gambling Product

J’s earnings from this fell down to $400 this month.

Earnings Total: $1025 + weekend away

Down from $1420 in September

Plans for Next Month

I am trying to get my new authority site ready to start marketing by next week. I then want to primarily work on growing this new site. I look forward to sharing this with you next month. I also need to work on getting some more links for my niche sites which has become a bit of a struggle.

My course starts again next week and that is supposed to take about 8 hours a week, so that will take a fair chunk of time.

My biggest problem at the moment is content creation. Although I am outsourcing a fair bit, I am left having to still produce the more quality content myself. This is draining up so much of my time, and I feel that the only way I am really going to succeed is to stop writing most things myself so I have time to concentrate on everything else – at least for sites other than this and Where’s Sharon where it really has to be me.

We are also trying to work out what J will do when he stops working at Christmas time and joins me in working online. Should he work on my projects? Freelance? He is a programmer. Or work on something completely different? I have one idea for a service that I think could be really good, but I am not sure that splitting our time on yet another thing is a good idea. Every approach has its pros and cons.

Read our November income report! Find more posts on blogging and income reports here.

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