Back in August 2006 I was struggling to earn $100/month and dreaming of the day when I’d be able to pack in my job and live off my website income. Well it’s been a year since that first post and my earnings topped $1250 last month. In four months my dream to live off my internet income will come true!

I’ll be heading off to Asia sometime in January 2007 with no set plans and I thought now would be as good a time as any to start a blog of my own. I’ve never been too keen on the whole blog thing but I’m getting into it and I’ve learned quite a lot already about Wordpress, networking and marketing in general.

I expect to chime in now and then with guest posts on WN and I’ll be kicking around the forums as usual but I’d love for you to come over and have a look at my new site - Nerdy Nomad.

Back in my first post I said “If I can manage to make a go of all of this I think it really will prove that it can be done!” Now that I’m doing it I hope it motivates everyone to keep focused on their goals!

See you on the road!

Well I should start off by saying that anything I report on in the rest of this post pretty much pales in comparison to Anthony’s remarkable $10,000 month but it’s been a month of records for me as well on a smaller scale. My total earnings came in at just under $930 which is a record month. Considering I was still floating around the $100 per month range about 7 months ago I’m extremely pleased. Plus things seem to be pretty consistent month to month which is very important to me since I’ll be heading off travelling soonish and don’t want my earnings to suddenly drop back down too drastically.

Inspired by Anthony’s pie graph, here’s a chart of my own:

Affiliates earned me a lot more than I thought they did but seeing this graph it’s obvious how much of an impact they can have. I really need to explore this area more because at the moment I’m relying on one main program with most others only delivering a few dollars per month if I’m lucky.

I broke $200 for the first time in Adsense coming in at just under $250. I also had my first $20 day so that’s something to work towards now that I know it can be done.

I sold a few more links with Text Link Ads but my three Linkworth Advertisers cancelled so any new income from TLA was cancelled out by losing Linkworth. I’ve lowered my Linkworth price to see if I can get some back.

A major reason for my success this month is my Living in London site which I gave a huge overhaul to. I added loads of content and I think it’s filled a gap in a market that I know really well and can write about easily. It’s already getting soom good traffic even though I have yet to go on a link building crusade.

So I’m really pleased with myself, I have to say! My goal for this month is to overhaul another old site and attempt to break the $1000 barrier. August is off to a fantastic start - I’ve managed to earn nearly $100 - so I’m hoping the month carries on that way!

Well I’ve done it.

I’ve bit the bullet and booked a plane ticket which means my last day of work will be December 13th. My plane ticket isn’t for Asia though, it’s for Canada. The plan is to spend three weeks at home doing the visiting thing and Xmas thing before I wander off for who knows how long. I’m also going to use the time when everyone else is at work to try to work a lot on my sites and see if I can get into some sort of routine and see how well I’m able to motivate myself. Sort of a 3 week WN test period before the real deal starts.

I get back to London on January 7th and I suppose that’s when the adventure really begins! I don’t really have any set plans at the moment. The easy route would be to buy a ticket to Southeast Asia somewhere, kick back on a beach for awhile and slowly work my way up to Beijing where I plan to get an apartment for 6 months starting anywhere from March to May.

The dream plan would be to do the journey overland working down through Eastern Europe, across to Egypt somehow then up through Jordan and Syria to Turkey. Then that’s where things get a bit dicey and I’m not sure if I have the guts to take on the trip from Turkey to China overland but we’ll see what happens. I’m open to buying plane tickets enroute to jump over the scary places but I’m also up for a mad adventure so we’ll see what happens.

I’m encouraged because my earnings are creeping up from all sources. Slowly but steadily. Plus I just went back to read some of Webby’s early earnings reports to find that he earned about $700US his first month away. That’s about what I’m making at the moment so it’ll be interesting to see if my sites and earnings grow the same way his has once I can work on them full time.

That’s all for now. I know some of you are planning trips at the end of the year. Anyone else got any plans yet?

I’m just back from a fantastically debaucherous trip to Australia for my 30th birthday and am happy to report that my 3.5 weeks away had little impact on my income. There were a few direct link sales that expired in mid June that I haven’t been able to chase until now, but other than that things have been trucking along nicely.

I guess the main things to note are that my Adsense had its best month ever, largely due to the success of my new Living in London site which has sone really well despite not being totally finished.

One of my affiliate programs exploded, earning my a large chunk of my earnings which is a bit of a concern I guess because I want to diversify as much as possible. Other affiliate programs have been crap as usual but I’ll be looking to add some affiliated to my London site and if I can find some good matches I think I’ll be able to do well with this site. The trick is finding the right programs though, something I’ve never been too good at.

I’ve sold a few more links with TLA but at $7.50 per link per month it’s not as big an earner as I’d hoped. I’ve lost another Linkworth advertiser as well so am down to one with them which is annoying but an area I can work to improve.

So all up, my earnings came is at just over $750 which I’m more than pleased with. I’d still like to diversify more and definately want to get more affiliates performing for me because I still feel as though the money I’m earning could drop off very drastically with a few bits of bad luck.

This month I’ll be focusing on getting my London site finished, adding affiliates and boosting traffic. I haven’t done any link building at all for this site but it’s already pulling in a good number of unique visitors so I see some huge potential here.

Now that Webby’s chimed in with his inspiring earnings for the month of April I thought I’d fill you all in with my earnings too. Sadly, mine are nowhere near the mighty Webby’s, but I have had my best month so far - by about $3.50.

I earned $744 for the month with most of my earnings coming from selling a link directly to a company for £200. This works out to be about $400 US and without it my earnings would have been closer to $350. This amount seems to be a monthly average for me when direct link sales are taken away. I’ve got another link sale lined up for £200 so that’ll get me off to a good start in May but counting on direct link sales makes me a bit uneasy (especially since I hate sales!) so I’m going to work hard at increasing my other income streams including affiliates, Adsense, Linkworth and Text-Link-Ads.

Affiliate sales have also been pretty sporadic but I’m sure I can put more of a push on these and search for new programs so hopefully they’ll only rise over the coming months. I had my best month ever with Hostelworld but that still only adds up to $17 so nothing to write home about.

But overall I’m pleased. Traffic on my sites is slowly increasing and I’ve got a few things up my sleeve for May so here’s hoping I can keep my earnings steadily increasing.

This past week I’ve been working on the complete overhaul of an old site and I’ve decided to break free from my usual same old template and try something new for a change.

This has meant attempting to move away from using my beloved tables to lay out the site, instead opting for a bit of CSS. Not knowing anything but the basics, this has been a bit of a challenge but I think I’m slowly pulling it off and learning how powerful CSS really is.

Using tables, I’d be able to hammer out a site layout in a matter of hours. With CSS because I’m still learning, it’s taking a lot longer and I’m still tweaking things a week after starting. But the thing with CSS is that I have a greater feel of control and flexibility than ever before so I don’t feel like I have to nail the design straight off the bat. If I get sick of it, I can easily tweak little things here and there or even change the entire look with little effort. I’m still learning so I think my CSS file is unnecessarily long and unruly but that’s something I can go back to later once I learn more about it.

I think the more I use it the more I’ll see what it’s capable of so, like the design junky I am, I’m kinda looking forward to learning more. CSS - it’s the way forward!!

You know my life would be so much easier if I would have stuck with computer science in university instead of jumping ship once I discovered it actually took lots of hard work and I couldn’t stay out drinking 6 nights a week.

I’m feeling really frustrated these days and it’s nothing to do with my income or running out of ideas. It’s actually the opposite - too many ideas! I’ve got all kinds of grand plans for sites running through my head and not enough tech savvy to pull them off.

I’m finding it quite hard to strike up a balance between working on my sites and working on myself - ie. educating myself in CSS, PHP, mySQL, Google Maps and all those things that will make the web publishing game much easier in the future. But when I sit down and dedicate my time to learning something new I wonder if it will pay off as much as I think it will.

Adding to my frustration is my wifi connection at home. It’s gone a bit haywire and I’ not sure what the deal is. It sounds like it’s my wifi card but I just wish I knew more about these sorts of things. I think I wrote a post in my early days saying that you don’t have to be a huge computer nerd to be able to publish successful websites, but I think it would help!

I think I might leave the other tech things I mentioned for awhile and concentrate on learning CSS as I’ve avoided it for far too long now and not knowing it really causes headaches when I want to alter Wordpress templates.

Since December my income has jumped up considerably from barely earning $100/month to over $700 in January. Things were down a bit in February but jumped back up in March. The main reason for this increase has been link sales.

I stuck a few ads onto Digital Point saying I had a PR5 travel-related site with some link space for sale, pulled a price out of my arse and hoped for the best. I felt a little bit like a sell-out but since the links were buried way down at the bottom of my page, I wasn’t too worried about it. The goal for people buying the links is generally to raise the PR of their own sites. They’re not too concerned about getting traffic so selling footer links is a good way to pass on PR without changing the look and feel of your site too much.

I hadn’t realised this was even possible so it was a real eye-opener when I made my first sale. I’ve always wondered how useful PR really is but in the world of selling links, it pretty much rules. People often don’t even care about the theme of your site, they’re just looking to get links from the highest PR sites they can afford.

While Digital Point is one avenue for selling links, contacting companies directly is also a good way to go. So far I’ve only tried this once with some success, pairing up my very niche Van Tour site with Wicked Campers, a company aimed at my site’s target market. I was just trying my luck because it seemed like a logical fit and they agreed. I’ve also been contacted by Generator Hostels to place an ad on my article about hostel etiquette. This request came out of the blue really and I’m not sure why they wanted that page specifically or why they chose a banner ad over a text link, but I wasn’t going to complain.

Keep in mind that many people/companies have budgets now for this sort of thing now and SEO companies might also be interested in purchasing links on behalf of their clients so it never hurts to ask! One problem is that you can get locked into having a link on your page for up to a year so the income will come in peaks when the links expire. Plus I’m guessing that the more external links you add, the more likely your PR is to drop. The PR of Travoholic.com has since dropped to 4 and the prices I could once ask for have fallen. Another problem is that you have to come up with a sales pitch and then monitor expiry dates, so it’s not the sort of thing you can put on autopilot like affiliate sales or Adsense.

But overall I’m happy with the move to start selling links. It’s padded my Paypal account a bit and I finally really feel like my sites are beginning to pay off!

Hey guys,

I’ve been offline for the past week and a bit but I’m back and have managed to work out my earnings for January. I may have already posted this stuff to the forum but I might as well stick it up here as well just to keep better track of things.

My grand total for January was $600 almost right on. I made most of my money through Adsense and link sales which is a bit of a worry since link sales tend not to be sustainable (most links I sold were yearly) and Adsense can be a bit volotile at times. Linkworth made me $35 for the month and I’d like to increase this as I see it as a steady, reliable source of income. I’ve been doubting affiliate programs for months now but have finally seen some results which is encouraging. Cafepress also did well for me but as the event is over I don’t expect any sales in February.

I’m happy with the diversity of my income sources and will continue to be on the lookout for affiliate programs, especially for travel insurance for Americans and Canadians which so far I’ve had no luck with. I plan to promote my travel insurance site with Adwords and I’ll let you know how that goes. I’ve been encouraged by Cafepres which I was expecting nothing from and will put some effort into designing shirts for another event-oriented site which will start to get some good traffic in the next month or so.

So far in February Adsense seems to be on track but I’m not expecting much income from link sales. I haven’t had much time to work on my sites this month ( a typical excuse!) so I’m anxious to see how they do, especially the affiliate programs. I’ll keep you all posted.

On another note, I’m probably going to be breaking away from posting a blog to this site as I’m planning on starting my own. Nothing fancy or in competition with WN but I figure if I’m taking the time to make blog posts, it might as well be on a site of my own so I can reap any rewards. Not sure when my last post here will be but I’ll let you know and if Webby allows it I’ll post a link.

Cheers, Kirsty

Hey guys,

It’s been ages since I’ve updated on my progress but it seems like a lot has happened lately. December was a great month with a couple of discoveries - Linkworth and selling text links directly. I sold one Linkworth link in December for $20/month (before the %25 cut) and decided to up my price to $30 and just got an email today saying I’ve sold another.

Selling links directly has helped me rake it in over the past few weeks. It’s great motivation to get back to basics by focusing on Travoholic.com, my main site with the best content, most traffic and highest PR that is therefore the most appealling to people looking to buy links.

Adsense was under $100 yet again for December but has picked up loads in January and if I don’t finally break that $100 mark this month I’ll be surprised. Plus I’ve sold a couple of t-shirts! My niche site http://www.waitangidaylondon.com which I built for an event coming up on February 3rd has let me down severely in the Adsense and affiliate departments (despite getting pretty good traffic and pageviews of 150+ and 400+ daily respectively) but I’ve managed to offload a couple shirts in a couple days for a whopping $6 in profit. Not much but it’s always nice to get that first sale to know a program actually works!

Speaking of which… I bought some travel insurance via an affiliate link (through Clix Galore) on one of my sites and have yet to see any commission reported. That’s a bit of a concern, especially since the people at the insurance company have been pretty slack at getting back to me. Oh and one more thing… I just realised last week that my Hostelworld.com affiliate program was a bit wonky making bookings through my site impossible. It’s fixed now and has never been a major earner but it’s still frustrating. I’m up to about $170 with them at the moment too so every sale, no matter how small or few and far between, will push me towards the $200 payout and losing two months sucks big ones.

That’s all for now,
Kirsty