Yay! Life in the earnings department is back to normal and panic mode has been delayed for now. I more than doubled last month’s total coming in this month at $6,458. The somewhat worrying thing is that I didn’t do anything different this month. It really does just seem to be a crapshoot these days. If lots of advertisers get in touch… good month. If not, I’m slightly screwed.

I’ve sold three ads on my Kigali life website with another on the way soon and I think I’ll be collecting payment in April or May. So that’s a step towards diversifying away from guest posts and I’m very happy about that. I wasn’t sure if my Kigali site would work for online advertising, but it seems like there are a lot of businesses who are keen to know more, and that’s without me even approaching anymore. So it looks like it could be a steady earner for me. It’ll increase my workload trying to keep these advertisers happy, but I’m looking forward to building some relationships in the Rwanda business community so it’ll be good, I think.

Earnings Breakdown:

• Adsense — $225 - Another low month. I’m really not seeing any quality ads showing up with Adsense these days. I wonder if their days (and as a result, mine) are numbered!
• Affiliate sales — $105 - A bit better, but still bad. My only affiliate program that’s doing anything these days is World Nomads. But that’s probably because I haven’t loked at any of my other affiliate networks in… years? So they’ve probably all expired and changed. I really should sit down one week and go over everything. Maybe this will be the month that happens!
• Advertising — $6,058 - I had a pending payment of $1,200 from February which is one reason why that month sucked so bad and March was a bit better. But otherwise just the usual medium-sized deals and a few renewals streaming in.
• Ebook Sales — $70 - Ten sales.

Spending Breakdown:

Another pretty low spending month in March at $390. April (or maybe May, depending when I get the work done) should be a higher spending month as I have a bunch of programming things I want to get done including a restaurant search and taking the site mobile in a more functional way than I have now.

• Link Building Services — $147 - I’m still using Linkvana (14 day trial for $5 affiliate link/50 free outsourcing credits affiliate link) but I haven’t actually done any link building for the past coupe of months. I need to get on that!
• Go Daddy – $90 - A bunch of domain name registrations and renewals. I’m now the proud owner of many Eastern Congo-related domain names. Haha… we’ll see how that goes!
• Facebook Ads – $110 (£72) - This money bought me around another 2,000 ‘likes’ on Facebook. No idea whether this is worth the money but my feeling is that I have the money to spend and I have a good feeling that having a lot of Facebook page readers is a powerful thing, at least in this Kigali niche. I’ve had a lot of interaction and feedback from the Facebook people and it really is a great way to get the word out about a lot of things. I’m going to keep pushing this and will probably spend a similar amount this month, so it’ll be interesting to see the effect it has on how many likes I get as compared to February.
• Content – $38 (£25) - I pay a writer for some content on a British Travel site and she wrote one article this month.
• Ebook — $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

Earnings Breakdown:

• Adsense — $226 - Lowest month in awhile. Has anyone noticed the quality of Adsense ads has fallen drastically in the past few months? I feel like I’m seeing a lot of ‘look younger’ and ‘lose belly fat’ type ads on my pages. I wonder if people are moving their ad campaigns over to Facebook. I know I’m using Facebook ads… although I’ve never tried Adsense.
• Affiliate sales — $45 - Blah again.
• Advertising — $2,868 - Pretty quiet this month on the paid posts and links front. I turned down a few offers that I felt weren’t offering enough and I’ve still got a few payments to collect for link renewals, but they’ll all roll over into March.
• Ebook Sales — $35 - Five sales.

Spending Breakdown:

If you have to spend money to make money then February is a fine example of this. I didn’t earn as much as usual but I also only spent $182.

• Link Building Services — $147 - I’m still using Linkvana (14 day trial for $5 affiliate link/50 free outsourcing credits affiliate link) but I haven’t actually done any link building for the past coupe of months. I need to get on that!
• Facebook Ads – $30 (£20) - My plan was to let my Living in Kigali Facebook page grow organically for February but that was taking too damn long so I chucked a bit more money at it. I’m up over 6,000 people and want to power on to 10,000 before I slow things down. I feel like, in the end, it’ll be money well spent. Not only will it allow me to drive more traffic to my posts (in theory) but it’s also an attractive thing to advertisers.
• Ebook — $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

February was a step backwards for sure but I’ve got a few exciting things on the horizon. I’m taking some serious steps towards monetising my Kigali site and already have several people tentatively lined up to be partners. It’s not going to be a huge money-maker (even with all of my ad slots filled the maximum I’d be able to make with my current plan is $1,750 per month) but it’s enough to kick my overall earnings up and, most importantly, move my business model away from paid guests posts and more toward something that feels ‘real’ and sustainable.

I’ve also got a couple of meetings with people doing some very interesting web things in Kenya. There’s a guy who runs a restaurant listing website who says he earned $250,000 last year and $100,000 the year before. I think his model is having restaurants pay for listings on his busy site. Nairobi is a massive city that’s a lot more web savvy than Kigali so it seems feasible. He’s looking to expand to Kigali and wants to partner up with someone who’s here, so I guess that’s what we’re meeting about. There’s another guy with a Kenya-based hotels website too who wants to meet. I feel like this might be a good time to finally get rolling on my living in Nairobi site and see if these guys know of anyone in Nairobi who might want to partner with me on that.

I had a couple of meetings also with a guy who runs a hostel, guesthouse and tour company in Musanze, a city a couple of hours outside of Kigali where the gorillas are located. He’s also got a presence in Goma in Eastern Congo (where there are also gorillas, volcanoes and some seriously adventurous travel opportunities). We chatted a few days ago about the underdevelopment of anything to do with Eastern Congo online… and after a quick search, it’s true! While there aren’t masses of people heading to this area for travel, there are still some adventurous souls and they’re willing to pay big bucks. Anyway, he knows all about the area and I know about web stuff so we might team up to corner the Eastern Congo web online market… there’s something I never expected to say. Not sure where it’ll go, but I’ve got some good domains. Plus he tells me that there are more foreigners living in Goma than in Kigali and the city is certainly a lot more intimidating… so maybe a ‘Living in Goma’ site is on the cards!

I’m not too worried about my crappy February. I’ve already racked up about $1,600 in owed payments for March and have a few decent sized deals on the horizon. I am pretty excited to see what these Kenya guys are up to and to explore advertising on my Kigali site. I think East Africa is where I want my focus to be. So much opportunity and I’m very well-positioned… at least for Rwanda-related stuff.

This is due partially to me wanting to increase the number of users to my Kigali forum which means slowly stealing them away from a popular (but very unruly) Yahoo group. This is a slow process and, while I’m getting there bit by bit, I’m nowhere near having my forum be as popular as I’d like and as I think it could be.

But the main reason is that I’m currently in Rwanda on a work visa and I’m not so sure about what’s involved in changing that over to a business visa so that my site can legally accept advertising payments and pay tax and all of that fun stuff. As I plan on being here for the long term, I don’t want to mess around with shady behaviour and want to make sure everything’s done right. Fortunately, Rwanda is an easy place to open a business and I should be able to sort things out with a visit to the Development Board.

I had a meeting over the weekend though which has started getting me more interested in getting the monetising thing going. I met with the owner of a tour company, guesthouse and hostel in Musanze (the city people stay in when they do gorilla trekking) and he’s a smart guy who really understands the potential of online advertising. He’s actually switched his focus from print ads to online ads which was interesting to talk about.

I feel like many businesses in Rwanda aren’t as on board with online ads as this guy and it’ll be a slow process to get there. But I do know of many businesses that are and these are the ones I’d like to partner with. My plan is to choose my favourite businesses (many of whom I’ve already been in touch with for one reason or another) and offer more than just advertising… I want to bring them on board as partners.

I guess basically this is still advertising but with more social media and even offline promotion to go with an image ad in my sidebar and possibly a page on my site dedicated to their business. I’ve built up a huge amount of trust with my readers and I feel like my recommendation is worth a lot here. So my idea is to find businesses I really like, offer them some ad space and also to act as a sport of ambassador for them as well where I’ll promote them whenever I can – both on- and offline. I’m not sure that these is really that measurable… but I feel like people who are a bit more internet savvy and can see the potential might be up for something like this.

So I guess my plan is to offer traditional online advertising with an extra kick of support from me. Treat my advertisers as more than just someone paying monthly for an image ad and more as a business that I’m proud to promote when I can. I’m not sure what sort of value this would have but I’m hoping to bring on 9 to 11 partners (one space in the header, and 8 or 10 square ads in the sidebar), starting small and slowly growing. I’d like to be charging $75-150 per partner per month which would depend on the extras like the dedicated page on my site, Facebook shout-outs etc.

This is all new territory for me. The ‘ads’ I sell now aren’t really businesses that I know and would recommend. My opinion on my other sites isn’t worth much. Maybe on this blog, but the rest of my sites don’t have a personality attached to them. My Kigali site is very much mine and my personality and opinions are all over the place. People know, trust and really like the site and I think this is something I might be able to capitalise on.

Does anyone have any experience monetising a site like this? Do you have any good examples of community sites that have been able to monetise? It’s all a bit intimidating, even without the whole business registering part… so I guess that’s why I’ve avoided it for so long!

I’m not sure how much money I’ll realistically be able to earn with the site, but I do see this as being a far more sustainable approach to my current strategies and I’m excited to get started and see what the interest is.

Earnings Breakdown:

• Adsense — $318 - Adsense jumped up a bit this month but nothing too crazy.
• Affiliate sales — $36 - Blah.
• Advertising — $4,595 - Business as usual in this department. I’m seeing a few more organised guest posting businesses popping up. So instead of just dealing with a random person who contacts me, I have to register for a third party site, list my blogs and wait for them to contact me when a potential deal comes up. I like having a bit of both of these things working for me and am curious to see if these networks will end up offering good prices or not. So far it’s a mix.
• Ebook Sales — $49 - Seven sales.

Spending Breakdown:

I spent $442 this month which is up a bit from last month. Besides dropping a bunch of money on Facebook ads, I didn’t do anything too interesting.

• Link Building Services — $147 - I’m still using Linkvana (14 day trial for $5 affiliate link/50 free outsourcing credits affiliate link) but I haven’t actually done any link building for the past coupe of months. I need to get on that!
• Articles – $120 (£75) - I had three articles written this month for Backpacker Herald.
• Facebook Ads – $170 (£108) - I threw a bunch of money at Facebook ads to get my Kigali Facebook page ‘likes’ up. I think I’ll hold back on ads this month and let the page grow naturally, but I wanted to give it a little boost as I think this will eventually be a strong selling point for advertisers. My page is now one of the most popular in Kigali and it’s been a great way of communicating with people. I’m not sure I even know what all of the benefits of a popular Facebook page are yet… but I’m happy to have a strong reader base so that I can experiment with things in the future.
• Ebook — $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

So 2013 is off to a pretty average month. I’ve had a really lazy January so it’s not like I deserved to earn more! I really need to get going on a lot of projects. There’s just always so many things I want to work on but then just don’t for one reason or another. I’ve been finding it hard to get motivated to do web work. This might be because I’ve been really motivated lately with my efforts in learning French and have also recently thrown Kinyarwanda (the local language here) into the mix. Kinyarwanda is notoriously difficult and I’m freaking out a bit after three classes but I’m also enjoying it. My point is that these things are taking up a bunch of my time and brain energy so I guess I’m feeling a bit less motivated to do other things and more motivated to sit by the pool or meet friends for drinks.

Anyway! Onwards and upwards, I hope.

Happy belated new year everyone! My yearly wrap is just a bit late, but hopefully it’s still mildly entertaining and informative. It’s been fun to write… it’s a nice way for me to recap my year and reflect a bit on what I managed to get up to.

Though I spent a lot of time in 2012 away from Rwanda, it still feels like I’ve travelled less, once again, than in the previous year. Here’s a recap of where I wandered to in 2012:

2012 Travels

• Kigali, Rwanda (lived here for the year minus the summer)
• St. Catharines, Canada (left January 3rd after spending Xmas and New Years 2011 at home)
• Bangkok, Thailand (a day on each end of my Philippines trip)
• The Philippines (five weeks in February/March doing volunteer work)
• Northern California (June/July for two weeks)
• Oregon (July for two weeks-ish)
• Montana (5 days in July)
• Alberta (a week in July)
• New York City (three weeks in August)
• St. Catharines, Canada (home for thee weeks in August/September)

Highlights

• Returning to Kigali in January to a place that feels really comfortable to me.
• Volunteering with All Hands in Cagayan d’Oro, Philippines. I love the work, The Philippines is one of my favourite countries and I got to see a lot of good friends and make some new ones.
• Working on a farm in Northern California with some good friends from my time volunteering in Haiti.
• Finally taking a natural building course in Oregon and meeting some interesting characters.
• Seeing my friend Kevin in Portland and going to the Pickathon Festival.
• Visiting a friend from Rwanda at her house on the lake in Montana, meeting her mom and friends and living the good life.
• Travelling around the US for the first time and really enjoying it.
• Heading to the Banff, Alberta to see an Australian friend I know from living in London. Finally seeing the beautiful parts of Canada.
• Spending a week with my family in New York.
• Getting back to Kigali in September and really feeling like I want to be here. Managing to get a two year work visa to stick around for the time being and feel a bit less like a drifter.
• Finally making some strides with learning French after taking on a private tutor and kind of starting to take it seriously.
• Work-wise, earning over $11,000 for the first time was nice!
• Buying another couple of websites and seeing good results so far.

Things I Learned in 2012

For me, 2012 was a confirmation of my desire to settle down in one place… at least for the moment. I left Kigali at the beginning of the summer with a very open mind about what I might want to do next, but only a week after leaving, I found that I really missed it and was counting the weeks until I could go back. I had an amazing time in the summer travelling around the US and Canada and enjoyed every moment of it, but I was also looking very forward to returning to Africa. It’s a nice feeling to be having an amazing time and then knowing that once your trip is over, you’re going to go back to a place you really love.

Work wise I bought a couple more websites and continued to test my theory that buying established websites is a great way to go. I picked up British Travel Blog and Backpacker Herald which were both smooth transitions with people I trust. I created another site called London Town Traveller and made my first guest post sale yesterday… so I guess we’ll see if that was a good investment or not.

I’ve seen that paid guest posting is going strong and it seems like it’s still a viable way to make an income – for now. I’ve had a few people contact me asking for links to be removed on some sites. I guess Google gives them a list of non-compliant links or something. Who knows… I don’t pay any attention to anything Google does. But that could be an indication that this type of income could be on its way out eventually.

The biggest thing for me this year was teaming up with a friend for a moving to Kampala website that aims to be similar to my very successful (popularity-wise… I still haven’t tried to monetize it) Kigali site. This has been a great partnership and we’re always on the same page, have the same goals in mind and work very well together. It’s nice to see that I can do this type of work in a partnership. We’re having some challenges with our content for this site (the part that my partner is in charge of) which is frustrating but I think we’ve got a good idea and if we can get content coming in more regularly, we’ll be fine.

This also marks a shift in my mind towards working more on community type sites. My Kampala and Kigali sites are very community-oriented and the aim is to eventually bring local businesses on board to advertise. This, to me, is a lot more like a ‘real’ business than selling guest posts. I’m hoping to build a little East African city guide empire and this is something that I feel really good about working towards.

I’ve also learned that if you want to get ‘likes’ on your Facebook page quickly, throw some money at it through their advertising platform. I’ve seen great results and I really believe that having a lot of ‘likes’ will mean good things down the road. I’m pretty new to using Facebook as a marketing tool but having all of these ‘likes’ certainly won’t hurt!

2012 Travel Plans

I’ve become one of those people who are perfectly happy hanging around my city, having dinner parties, watching movies, and going out occasionally. I’ve got a few Kigali projects on the go (buying land, building something, working more on the website and map idea) but, as far as travel plans, I’m pretty quiet on that front. Here are a couple of ideas floating around:

• Hang out in Kigali as much as possible soaking up sun, working on some projects and just enjoying life.
• Short break to Zanzibar because it’s awesome and also to try to learn a bit or Swahili.
• Visiting my family in Glasgow for a week.
• Cycling around the Bordeaux region in France. I’ve always wanted to do a cycle trip and this seems like as good a time as any! Might cycle to Biarritz to try surfing and I’ll definitely be trying to speak as much French, drink as much wine and eat as much cheese as possible.
• Bring my bike back to Rwanda and do some cycle trips in the country.
• Go to Reunion, an island off the east coast of Africa. I’d like to spend another few weeks in a French-speaking place and this island is on my radar for some unknown reason. Might try to take a trip there at some point during the year.
• Visit interesting building or gardening projects in East Africa.

Goals for 2013

I did ok with my goals last year. I, once again, didn’t touch my Africa travel site… but I did continue to work on Living in Kigali, I’m doing well with my attempts at learning French, I took a natural building course in the States and I dragged my guitar around with me for three months in the summer so made some progress there, too. Here are some of my goals for 2013:

• Living in Kigali – I’ve slacked off a bit lately with content writing, but the site is gaining in popularity. My goal is to transition everyone from using a horrible Yahoo Group to communicate to using my forum. I’ve recently run a contest to get people to register and I’ve got a few more tricks up my sleeve. I’d also like to bring on a Rwandan to write about culture and customs and stuff. I plan on registering the site as a business and either bringing someone on board to sell and manage advertising… or to do this horrible job myself.
• Kigali Map and App - I’ve been working on a Kigali tourist type map for over a year and I really want to get it done this year! I’m held up because I don’t really have any print design experience and I’m not sure really where to start. I’ve done a few things in Illustrator but not I’m stuck. Fortunately I have a few friends who can help me out. Also, I’ve just bought a smart phone for the first time and I want to see what apps are all about. My goal is to create a city guide app for Kigali… but first I need to download other apps to learn about what an app can do and to steal their good ideas.
• Living in Kampala - This site has only been live since August and it’s done very well. We’ve got over 5,000 Facebook ‘fans’ and the site is getting around 100 visits per day. It took my Kigali site well over a year to get to that point. We’ve got a good team in place but need to find a way to get more consistent writers. Our goals for 2013 will be to get some advertisers on board and make an income. This might not be until the second half of the year but I think we’re both keen on making some money so we can prove to ourselves that this model will work.
• Other Africa City Sites - I’ve registered sites for Addis Ababa and Nairobi so I’m hoping to expand my little city guide empire to those places. Ideally I’d like to partner up with one person in each city who is willing to look after all of the content and eventually ad sales stuff and go 50/50 on eventual profits. Or I might also just pay people per article and keep the sites all to myself. I’m not sure… and finding good people to write is tricky. This is more in the back of my mind and won’t be something I think about until much later in the year.
• Learn French – I’m taking a couple of hours of private French lessons a week and really enjoying it. I love reading and writing in French but have a very hard time listening and speaking is a struggle too. It’s tricky and hard work but I’m getting there slowly. I need to be speaking more than I am if I want to make progress so I’ll work on that. Luckily in Rwanda there are always French speakers around. My trip to France will hopefully help with this too.
• Buy Land - I want to be a land owner! Rwanda is a realistic place for this to happen with affordable land and an openness to foreigners being able to own it. I’ve got a few people here who I trust to guide me through the process but I’m not totally sure exactly where to start. I guess looking at some land is a good start but it’s all a bit daunting. I’ve going to start the process soon and see where it takes me.

So all up, 2012 was another great year for me! I did a few things last year that I’ve been meaning to do for awhile, visiting a lot of friends all over the US and Canada, got to see my family twice, went to a good friend’s wedding, did some volunteering, finally took a natural building course and just generally had a great time! I’ve grown more and more fond of Kigali and am happy to be here with a great network of friends and I’m excited to see what the next few years here have in store for me.

Earnings wise, I had another great year in 2012 although I’m seeing signs that things might even off a bit. Sure I had that crazy $11,000+ month but the rest seem to have averaged out at around $6,000 per month which is still pretty amazing. I’d be very happy if that continues through 2013 and, of course, a freakishly huge month is always welcome!

I’m excited about the work and life projects I have in store for 2013 but also happy that the rainy season is coming to an end and I can start my year with a bit of relaxing by the pool to gear myself up for all of the exciting times ahead! Did I mention how much I love the weather here?

All the best to everyone in 2013!

Earnings Breakdown:

• Adsense — $270 - Still floating around the $300 mark which is fine with me given that it takes no effort to stay there. I am a bit curious about how Facebook advertising might take a bit of a chunk out of Adwords advertising. Facebook seems more targeted and, to me, would make more sense for certain types of businesses.
• Affiliate sales — $14 - Well my affiliate sales have finally completely crapped out. This is due to me paying zero attention to this part of the business because it sucks the life out of me. I’m sure that most of the affiliate programs I still have linked on my sites have expired or are inactive or something. At the bare minimum, I should spend a day or two going through and either updating all of my existing affiliate links or find new programs to slot it. Will this happen? Probably not.
• Advertising — $4,697 - Around what I made last month in this area. I had about $1,200 in renewals and then a lot of $200-300 deals for guest posts. No huge deals to speak of although I had a bunch of inquiries which might turn into something in the new year, we’ll see!
• Ebook Sales — $49 - Seven sales.

Spending Breakdown:

Another low spending month at $397. Just to clarify my spending reports, I don’t include things like the office space I’m renting or the money I spend on lunch when I review a new cafe in Kigali or the smartphone I just bought (going to be exploring the wonderful world of travel apps soon!) and stuff like that. The expenses listed below are the basics like marketing, hosting etc. There are other costs but I’m too lazy to keep track of them or don’t view them as super essential to the running of my sites.

• Link Building Services — $147 - I’m still using Linkvana (14 day trial for $5 affiliate link/50 free outsourcing credits affiliate link) but I haven’t actually done any link building for the past coupe of months. So I guess I’m paying $147 for nothing, at this point. I see the value in Linkvana so should start up a couple of link building campaigns this coming month. I’ve got a new travelling to London site to promote so might start there.
• Hosting – $80 - I paid for a bunch of months hosting with Dreamhost.
• Articles – $120 (£75) - I had three articles written this month for a couple UK travel sites.
• Facebook Ads – $45 (£28) - I’ve stuck with Facebook ads this month again and will continue with it into the future. It’s an amazing way to see the number of Facebook page likes grow quickly. I’m not sure having a huge number of ‘likes’ is good for all sorts of Facebook pages but, for a community site like Living in Kigali, I think it makes a lot of sense to be able to communicate with a lot of people through Facebook. It’s also a good selling point for when I start to approach potential advertisers. I see this as a great investment.
• Ebook — $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

I was looking at my 2012 January ($9,700), February ($7,000) and March ($9,100) totals and they were all really big months so I feel like I have a lot to live up to in 2013. I’ve got a few new sites since last year and I’m off to a decent start this January but I still can’t help but feel that, except for the crazy $11,000+ month in November, the end of 2012 has been a bit flat. True, $5,000 a month is great and I’m happy with that, but seeing those totals from the beginning of 2012 makes me wonder if I can reach them again in 2013. I guess anything but year on year growth makes things feel a little stagnated and makes me wonder a bit which direction things are heading for me.

To combat my fears of the paid posts gravy train coming to an end, I intent on focusing this year on trying to crank some money out of my community-oriented moving to Kigali and moving to Kampala websites. I don’t think making a bit from these two sites will be too difficult, but it will be more hands on and time-consuming given the nature of the sites and where we are in the world. Advertising online is a lot newer here and, though I know there’s demand for it and plenty of businesses in both cities who want to reach out readers, making it work will involve a lot more work than just answering an email and adding a link or post. But I’m excited for the challenge and making this work is, I think, what will keep me being successful into the future.

Bring on 2013 and lets see what the internet world has in store for me. I hope 2013 is a great one for everyone!

I’ve been thinking a lot more seriously lately about buying land in Kigali and eventually building a little house. I still get asked the question: “So… you can live anywhere in the world and live here? Why??” by puzzled people fairly often which, before I left for the summer, really had me asking myself the same question. Since leaving for the summer and missing this place almost immediately after departure, I’ve come to the conclusion that, though it might seem strange to many people, I do really love it here and want to live here… at least for the foreseeable future. I’ve done a good job in surrounding myself with friends who also love it here and are here for the long term which makes my supposedly crazy life choice a little less crazy.

Many of the friends I’ve surrounded myself with here have started businesses. One has created The Office, an affordable shared office co-working space meant to also encourage entrepreneurship and collaboration in Rwanda. Another is about to start City Arts, Rwanda’s first art centre where children and adults can take visual arts and dance classes on a weekly basis. I’m excited about both of these projects and it’s getting involved in things like these and becoming friends with creative entrepreneurs who also love living here that make me excited about my plans to stick around for awhile.

Part of my plan for sticking around for the long term is to buy a piece of land somewhere in or near Kigali. Land prices in the city aren’t crazy cheap by any means, but they are affordable and I keep hearing rumours about plots of land on the outskirts of town for as little as US$2,000. Not sure if that’s the case still or where exactly I want my little piece of Rwanda to be located, but these are things I’ll be looking into in the new year.

One thing that I’m really excited about is the City Arts garden. A friend of mine has taken on the role of gardener guy and he’s got a large rectangle plot to work with. I spent yesterday morning helping him and a couple of Rwandan guys hoe up the weeds which was really hard work but it’s got me excited to be involved in this project from start to finish. Part of the reason I want to buy some land is to create an amazing garden on it and being involved in this will allow me to learn a lot. I have a little experimental garden at my house and a small nursery so it’ll be great to do things on a larger, more permanent scale. It’ll be a really fun project to be a part of and it’s these sorts of opportunities that make me really like it here.

I’m not sure if my dream of building a cob house in Rwanda is something the government (who are slightly obsessed with ‘progress’ which, in their eyes means concrete and steel) would allow but it’s another thing to check out in the near future.

So, all up, having a group of friends who choose to live here and do amazing things, getting involved in some cool projects, and just continuing to enjoy my life here means that I’m really comfortable where I am and ready to get a bit more settled by buying a hunk of land somewhere. It’s all kind of exciting and scary and confusing at the same time and I’m not sure what my next step is… but I guess I’ll be going land shopping in the near future! Bring on the gardens!

I had one big deal for about $1,400 but, other than that biggie, it was mostly a month of small deals and some renewals. I kind of scratched and clawed my way to almost five grand. I was disappointed by a bunch of late payments, though, so I’m already off to a good start for December. Had everything come in as promised, this would have been an over $6,000 month, but its actually kind of nice to get December off on a good foot as I’ve had several pretty bad Decembers over the year, so I’m not going to complain too much.

Earnings Breakdown:

• Adsense — $309 - Adsense shmadsense. Same as always.
• Affiliate sales — $111 - Still sucking but I’m not doing anything to stop the downward spiral.
• Advertising — $4,272 - A far cry from last month’s huge total but the lack of a giant $5,000 deal probably has a lot to do with that. Ah… if only those deals came along every month! But this is more in tune with my usual monthly earnings so I’m just settling back in and should get used to it.
• Referrals – $105 - A couple internet buddies came through this month with referrals.
• Ebook Sales — $98 - Fourteen sales.

Spending Breakdown:

I only spent $573 in November and not really on anything too interesting.

• Link Building Services — $147 - I’m still using Linkvana (14 day trial for $5 affiliate link/50 free outsourcing credits affiliate link). I’ve seen some great results for my Kampala site so I’m still on board with them despite many people saying that the days are numbered for link building services like these.
• Articles – $161 (£100) - I had four articles written for a couple of my sites but didn’t have any articles for link building this month.
• Domain Renewal – $95 - Go Daddy stuff.
• Facebook Ads – $135 (£30) - I paid a bit more for Facebook ads this month after seeing some great results (at least for the number of new ‘likes’) last month.
• Programming – $30 - I paid a bit extra to the guy working on my events plugin after asking for some small changes.
• Ebook — $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

Nothing too exciting this month. Pretty average earnings, nothing much spent, no new projects to report on. I’m still working on the website for the shared office space in Kigali that I’ve been working from. I’ll have to get that done by December 21st. I’m also trying to tweak a section of the living in Kampala site to display photos more nicely and I’ve volunteered to make a simple website for an organisation here in Kigali for vulnerable women. Should be a fun project!

I don’t have much up for December, either. Just a bunch of Xmas gatherings and stuff. Should be a fun month and I’m looking forward to an Xmas in the sun!

Most of this month’s earnings were due to one gigantic deal for just over £3,000. It was one of these dream deals – no negotiation, she wanted links in existing content so very little work for me, and payment straight away without even needing to send an invoice. I thought it was too good to be true and then suddenly I had a large sum of money in my Paypal account. Pretty sweet.

Earnings Breakdown:

• Adsense — $384 - Adsense seems to be coming in closer to $400 each month which is nice to see. Again, I’ve put zero work into Adsense.
• Affiliate sales — $99 - I think this is a sinking ship. Affiliate sales really don’t inspire me at all and they’re a lot of work if you want to really do well. I’m not paying them any attention at the moment and the results are obviously because of that.
• Advertising — $10,805 - So that big $5,000+ deal was a big chunk of my earnings but, even without it, I would have had a pretty good month. I actually had a lot of cancellations this month so most of my deals were new ones. It’s good to see that people are still approaching me each month but renewals are great because all you need to do is send an email and wait for payment… not much new work required and who wouldn’t love that?
• Ebook Sales — $77 - Eleven sales.

Spending Breakdown:

October was a biggie coming in at a total of $4,082. Spending went a little nuts last month but only because I acquired another website – The Backpacker Herald (yay). It’ll probably be my last site for awhile… although I’ve said that before. When a good website drops into my lap, I can’t help but consider it. I certainly wasn’t expecting to spend much in October so this decision kind of took me by surprise.

• New Website – $3,515 (£2,200) - The casual mention of a site for sale in an email turned into an actual sale shortly after. Having just bought a site not too long ago, I wasn’t actively looking for more but this one seemed like a great fit, the price was good, I’d already bought a site from Ross before and managed to pay it off in four months, and the content and design of the site are good. So I went for it and I’m GBP2200 poorer and another website richer. I’m not expecting this one to do as well as Blighty Traveller (only because that would be too good to be true) but there’s no reason why it can’t. I’ve already sold a couple of guest posts so I’m on my way!
  
• Link Building Services — $147 - I’m still using Linkvana (14 day trial for $5 affiliate link/50 free outsourcing credits affiliate link). I’ve seen some great results for my Kampala site so I’m still on board with them despite many people saying that the days are numbered for link building services like these.
• Articles – $50 - Articles for Linkvana.
• Domain Renewal – $26 - Go Daddy stuff.
• iStockphoto – $54 - Bought some more photo credits.
• Facebook Ads – $135 (£85) - I committed £100 across two sites for a month and I’ve been charged for a portion of that. I was just playing around the with Facebook ads idea and it’s turned into over 1,000 new ‘likes’ for each site in less than a month. Not bad value for money although the new likes doesn’t seem to be adding up to a higher reach. I might also experiment with sponsored posts which I guess is Facebook’s master plan.
• Hosting – $150 - I paid a bit over a year in advance for some hosting.
• Ebook — $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

This big freakish month comes at a great time for me as I’ve just spent £2,200 on that new site. Plus I just got a Rwandan work visa for two years which means I’m thinking more seriously about staying here for the long term which also means I’ve got my eye out for offline investment opportunities. It all sounds so fancy!

All up everything is running smoothly and November is looking like another excellent month. I’m going to be focusing most of my work this month on building the website for The Office, a co-working space in Kigali, Rwanda that I’ve just joined. I think I’ll also spend a lot of time on my Kigali life site just because it’s fun and also on organising everything I do a bit better. Less fun.

So that’s that! October is done. I earned over $10,000 in a month for the first time which is ridiculous and I’m looking forward to seeing what the rest of the year holds for this crazy website stuff that I do!

Hopefully I don’t come across as too much of a moron and might even have some useful things to say. You can be the judge…

Here’s a link to Mike’s post: http://mikefrommaine.com/how-kirsty-henderson-makes-over-5000-per-month-selling-guest-posts-on-her-websites/

I was very slow to hop on the Facebook page bandwagon, I have to admit. I thought there was something really strange about asking people to ‘like’ you. I still think that’s a bit odd, especially for my Nerdy Nomad personal site. But, these days, I’m well and truly and fully on board with the Facebook page thing and currently have three of the things.

Facebook Pages

My Nerdy Nomad page isn’t one I put too much effort into. I guess the idea behind this one was to have a place to keep my blog’s readers informed on what I’m up to… sort of acting like a regular Facebook page but for people I don’t know. I feel like I could turn this page into a pretty interesting place to be, but I haven’t put a lot of effort into it so far. Part of this might be because I’m not really travelling at the moment and have settled into a routine life of waking up, doing a bit of work, going to the gym, meeting friends for lunch, doing a bit of work, eating dinner, watching a movie or going out for drinks, and then going to sleep. Sure, I’m doing all of this in Rwanda, but when you break down my day-to-day life… it’s not much different from yours! But I still feel like people are interested in live abroad and also in the earning online stuff and I intend on pimping out my page a bit more in the near future.

My other two pages are for my living in Kigali and living in Kampala websites and these pages are lively and actually a lot of fun to work on. I manage the Kigali Facebook page since I live here, own and run the Kigali website and am truly interested in what’s going on around town and in helping people figure this place out. It’s been a great way to keep on to of what’s on in the city (I’ve followed every Kigali-related page I could find) and fun to make contact with people on Facebook who stumble onto the page. It’s very social and an excellent way to drive traffic back to my website, share events or to have questions answered. I really love posting to the page and getting feedback and it’s great to see the number of ‘likes’ slowly rising.

The Kampala Facebook page is run by my partner’s housemate in exchange for free rent. Ah, I love bartering! The guy running this page, James, is really into it and he loves Kampala and you can tell. He does a bit more day-to-day commenting on the page than I do. Stuff about weather, humour, where he’s eating, reports on random things happening in the city and it adds an interesting element to things. I’d like to follow his lead and start doing more of this sort of thing on the Kigali page but I always forget. It’s interesting to see that, with half the ‘fans’ (352 to the Kigali page’s 730), the Kampala Facebook page has a much much higher reach. I guess this is a good indicator of the size of the communities in each city. Kigali’s expat community and population in general is a lot smaller than Kampala’s and maybe we’re seeing it through Facebook.

So, all up, I see Facebook pages as an amazing communication tool for all of those little things that don’t warrant a blog post of their own. It’s an awesome way of sharing cool things you find and of making contact with a lot of different people who are into whatever it is your page is about. If you have a website to pair it up with, a Facebook page is a great way of sharing new posts and things with a lot of people (or at least the people who’ve liked your page) and then makes it easy for those people to share the link with their friends and suddenly you’re reaching some new people fairly easily.

Facebook Ads

So now that I’m all jacked up on the wonders of Facebook pages (finally), I’ve decided to delve even deeper and put out a couple of ads for my Kigali and Kampala pages. So far the results have been pretty amazing. I’m not sure how advertising a website would work, but advertising my Kigali Facebook page has resulted in over 150 new page likes in just three days. Considering it’s taken over a year to crawl up to 700 likes, I think that’s a pretty miraculous thing. The best part? It’s cost me a whopping £5 so far! That’s some serious value for money, my friends.

The Kampala ad was set up a day later and is seeing the same amazing results, so far. Over 100 new likes for under £4. I’m impressed. I feel like there’s likely to be an initial spike in new likes at the very beginning as people see your ad for the first time. After awhile, I’m sure the ad will reach lots of people but many will either already like your page and many others will have decided they’re not interested. There’s only a finite number of people you can reach but, once you try geographical groups with certain interests, you can always mix it up a bit and try for a broader audience. I’m new to this so I’m not sure what works best but my goal was to get more people to like my page and my expectations have been exceeded already.

I really think that Facebook ads are a fantastic way to reach a very targeted audience – by location, interests, demographics or any combination of the three. This is a pretty powerful thing, especially if you’re on a limited budget and don’t want your ad displaying to the whole world. I’ve never used Adwords but I’m already seeing some pretty major advantages to Facebook ads. The results I’m getting so far are speaking for themselves. I wonder if my ad prices are so cheap because of the combo of not many people in my niche using Facebook ads yet and because Africa might not be a topic that commands high prices. If I were in a more competitive niche, I feel like my ad prices could potentially be a lot higher and I wouldn’t be getting nearly as much bang for my buck.

Another good thing is that ads are really easy to monitor. There’s no logging into another advertising platform to set everything up… you just do it from a different page within your regular Facebook account. I’m on Facebook all the time anyways in the background so I just need to swap windows and click on one thing and suddenly my ad stats are right in front of my face. It makes me feel less guilty about spending time on Facebook because I’m doing work… right?

So… given that I got into the Facebook page thing relatively late (a couple of years ago, I think?) and am only writing about it now for the first time – you guys probably already know all of this stuff! But I’m into it. I like it. I think it’s good! I used to think of the pages as extra work needed just to stay afloat, but now I really enjoy using them to share and connect. Plus it looks like Facebook ads are going to make finding new readers a lot easier… and I like it when things are made easy for me!

So if you have a blog or website and don’t have a Facebook page yet, get one. If you’ve got a Facebook page and you’re looking for some more ‘likes’ and you have an extra $50 kicking around, try setting up an ad for the month and see how it goes. I’m really curious to hear about other people’s experiences with Facebook advertising because, so far, I’ve got nothing bad to say!

Earnings Breakdown:

• Adsense — $390 - Higher than normal but not due to anything I’ve done.
• Affiliate sales — $202 - A slight improvement but still nowhere near to what I used to earn. If I were ambitious in any way and interested at all in affiliate sales, I would put more effort into tracking what’s working and what isn’t. Plus update all of the affiliate programs I’m a member of that have ceased to exist. But I am not.
• Advertising — $4906 - Almost all of my money came from ads and guest posts. I had a couple of minor renewals but nothing too major. September saw a lot of smallish deals that added up. I’ve seen a lot of new business in the form of guest post inquiries coming my way as a direct result of my recently purchased British travel blog site. This has worked as I had hoped by bringing me some new contacts who I then pitch the rest of my sites to. This new site has been a great help this month.
• Ebook Sales — $42 - Six sales.

Spending Breakdown:
Spending in September was very minimal, coming in at only $359. Probably a good thing after almost spending as much as I earned last month. But I have a new site to show for it and it’s working well, so no regrets there! This month didn’t see any interesting purchases… just the basics, really. I don’t anticipate much spending in October, either. I might put another push on for new articles but nothing major.

• Link Building Services — $147 - I’m still using Linkvana (14 day trial for $5 affiliate link/50 free outsourcing credits affiliate link). No idea if this is a good idea or not.
• Domain Renewal – $40 - Go Daddy stuff.
• Programming – $65 - I had to make some tweaks to my miniBB forums.
• Articles – $50 - Articles for Linkvana.
• Premium Theme – $52 - I decided to go the premium theme route for my newest site about travel to London.
• Ebook — $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

I’ve been back in Kigali for a couple of weeks now and I’m super happy to be here and loving it at the moment. I’m getting involved in some interesting projects including kLab, an IT capacity building venture, The Office, a shared office space that I’ll be moving into shortly, and I’ll be doing some volunteer web designing too which is always fun and a great way to meet interesting people doing great things in this city. I’m plugging away at my Kigali life site which is getting more and more popular and I’m hoping to get started on my tourist map of the city which is a huge project I’ve had in mind for over a year.

I’m enjoying catching up with friends and meeting new ones. I met today with Tyler, my partner for our moving to Kampala website and had a great discussion on business in Africa, living in our chosen countries, opportunity, and lots of exciting things. I’m not the most ambitious person in the world but I really do love meeting up with people who are and hearing about their plans and experiences and he’s one of those people who are really inspiring to be around.

As for earnings, the first three days of October have been ridiculous. I’ve got $2,900 in deals already agreed, most with the work already done and just awaiting payment so hopefully everything goes smoothly. I’ve also got a lot of outstanding guest post inquiries… an unusual amount, actually. Not sure what’s up with this month but the SEO companies are on the hunt for guest posts and my sites seem like a popular choice.

So October is looking good so far, the sun is shining in Kigali and life is good!

I don’t remember exactly how  got involved but I’m currently sitting at the kLab, a pretty amazing office atop a building in central Kigali. The kLab tries to address the need for a space for people working in Kigali’s IT community. Somewhere for them to interact, share ideas, help each other out, and teach each other, all while forming a community willing to work together to push the IT industry in Rwanda forward. A place with reliable internet and a nice working environment to bring solo IT workers together to collaborate, network and push the IT industry forward. Coming from a partnership of public, private and educational institutions, kLab was born and exists as a not-for-profit workspace aimed at capacity building for the IT industry. It’s primarily funded by JICA (Japan’s version of USAid) and the Private Sector Federation and the Rwanda Development Board has donated the sixth floor of the Telecom Building, internet, power and all that practical stuff.

kLab is a non-profit venture and to be able to work from here you have to commit to being either a mentor or a tenant – there’s no paying for a desk space. Tenants tend to be young Rwandans who are working on IT-related projects of their own. To be accepted into the kLab they have to pitch their idea and commit to working on the project during their time in the office. Mentors are people, some foreign, some local, who have a good amount of experience in their field and an interest in sharing their knowledge.

This is where I come in. While I’d never describe myself as an IT person, I do have a good amount of experience with websites and more to offer than I originally thought. I had an opportunity on Tuesday to attend a promo day where four guys presented their projects in an effort to get feedback on both their ideas and also their presentation skills. It was an interesting evening and, while I wasn’t blown away by any of the ideas, you could see that some of these guys are very talented.

One thing in particular that struck me was that the four presenters all seemed very focused on what their product/website could offer and all of the cool things it could do, without much of a focus on how to turn their idea into a viable business. For a few of them, the strategy was to offer it for free, let people see how amazing the product or service is, and then start charging them. If a business idea isn’t good enough to stand on it’s own from the beginning, then it probably never will be. The presenters didn’t seem to give much thought to the business side of things and seemed to think that, because they had a website that was capable of doing something cool, that it would make them money somehow. They were getting caught up in the details without looking at the bigger picture.

This got me thinking a bit about my own approach to web development and my own path. I feel like I’ve come from somewhere in the middle where I have a bit of technical knowledge (enough to put together a simple website) and, while I’m able to dream up big ideas for what I’d like my websites to do, I don’t have the skills to actually pull these ideas off and need to outsource. I wonder if this is a really good thing that I’ve never thought of before. I feel like, if I had mad programming skills, I’d get caught up in all of the amazing things I was creating and doing and lose track of whether any of these things are actually useful to people.

I’m really excited to be involved in this project. Not only is kLab and amazing place to work (it’s got an almost 360 degree view from the top floor of a high building on a hill in Kigali) but it’s also nice to be back in an office-ish environment, meeting interesting people and learning what people here are working on. As someone who is self-employed and works on things that have nothing to do with Rwanda (my Kigali life site is the exception), I don’t have much contact with Rwanda on a business or working level and it’s nice to get more involved. Plus it’s exciting to be involved in what will eventually grow to become the hub for innovation in IT in Rwanda.

Plus, besides feeling connected work-wise, I’m also excited to get more involved in things in this city and to commit myself to things. I’ve made a conscious decision to live in Kigali until I get sick of it (which won’t happen anytime soon) or until they get sick of me (I’m applying for a work visa on Monday which means that I won’t have to worry about being denied entry for abusing my tourist visas) and it’s exciting for me to make longer term commitments.

So that’s what I’m up to at the moment! I’m loving being back, seeing friends, getting back into a routine and working on some interesting projects. I love being in Kigali anyways, but when you throw cool stuff like the kLab at me, it reaffirms why I love this place so much and I’m looking forward to seeing what the next few months hold for me.

I’ve just launched my latest (and hopefully soon-to-be greatest) website. It’s aimed at helping new arrivals moving to Kampala but we’re hoping that it eventually grows into a resource fit for expats and locals alike. It’s modeled after my really successful (in popularity, not really in earnings – yet) Kigali website and we’re hoping that this new site will become the go-to online guide for Kampala’s residents. More importantly perhaps, we hope that the larger target market and more internet-savvy business community will mean that the site will earn us some cash, too!

My First Business Partnership

I say ‘we’ and ‘us’ because the Living in Kampala website will be my very first project with a partner. As you may or may not know… I don’t actually live in Kampala. I live 8 hours south in Kigali, Rwanda and, while I’ve visited a bunch of times, I’m barely even comfortable getting around town, let alone an expert on anything. Enter Tyler – a dude from Oklahoma who moved to Kampala several years ago to see if he could start a business. I forget what his life story is but I do know that he now owns and operates Inflate Africa which offers inflatable advertising products… so he’s an advertising guy! Exactly what I’m not and, in my mind, his experience in and love of Kampala makes him a great partner for this project.

I initially got in touch with him when a blog reader who neither of us knows personally put us in touch through Facebook. My original hope was to hire him as my content writer, paying a set amount per article. He had bigger plans though and pitched the idea of a partnership where he would be the marketing and content side of things and I would be the nerdy part, setting up and updating the site, managing programmers, and looking after SEO stuff. So far the partnership is going really well. Our division of work is great and we both seem to have the same vision and expectations. He realised that making a site like this work will take several months, maybe even over a year, and is in it for the long haul.

I was a bit wary about working with another person on a project like this, especially one that will take an investment of some money and a lot of time. I like taking things at my own pace and without any expectations and partnering up means that suddenly I have someone else to answer to about everything to do with the site. But it’s been great so far and I’m excited to be working with him on this project. I really think that together we can make something pretty amazing.

Early Days

We launched the site just over a month ago with a bit of fanfare on Facebook which brought us some early spikes in traffic. Continued use of Facebook has meant that we’ve had about 30 to 40 visits daily, a much better start than my Kigali site had two years ago. I’m finally seeing the benefit of Facebook pages! Most of our traffic is from within Uganda and very little of that is from Google which means loads of room for improvement with our SEO and also with reaching people yet to arrive in Uganda.

SEO Strategy

We’re slowly climbing up the rankings and are now at the bottom of the first page of Google for my key term ‘living in Kampala’. I don’t see any problems getting to number one for these keywords because of the domain name we have, the SEO we’re doing and the lack of high quality sites ahead of us in the rankings. Then my plan is to target ‘moving to Kampala’ (currently ranking high on page two of Google) and lots of long tail keyword combos that will bring people to our internal pages.

I’ve stuck with Linkvana (14 day trial for $5 affiliate link/50 free outsourcing credits affiliate link) even though many people have been worried about them becoming de-indexed by Google. If they have been, I’m not seeing any evidence of it. They’re the only link building I’ve done and I’ve seen the site steadily climb since I added my Kampala site into the mix.

Goals for the Site

Our hope is to become the leading site for expats in Uganda. The site is aimed at everyone in Uganda, including locals, but the articles are definitely aimed squarely at foreigners in Kampala, either living there or passing through as tourists. The idea is to create a community site that people come to to review restaurants, comment on posts, and communicate on our forum. I don’t think there’s a decent forum for expats and tourists in Uganda and we plan to be the best and busiest option. We haven’t put much effort into the forum just yet (although I really feel this is where the focus should be but my partner is a bit busy at the moment) but I see its success as the key to the site’s success.

We hope to become a great resource for new arrivals to the city, offering articles and guides on all of the mundane and annoying things that you need to figure out when you arrive in a new place – transportation, phones, finding a house, grocery stores, etc. We want to write in a fun way and hope to earn a reputation as experts on the city and have people come to us not only for information but also for trusted advice. Eventually we’d like to use our popularity and reputation to attract advertisers wanting access to our lucrative niche of expats in Kampala.

Challenges

In the time between registering the domain name (November 2011) and launching the site (August 2012), a bunch of quality sites have sprung up with a similar purpose to ours. The best of the bunch is www.inkampala.com which seem to be aimed at everyone, specifically Ugandans, and have a strong cultural, reviews and events focus. They’re not really a ‘welcome to Kampala, here’s some help’ type of site like ours and their design isn’t the greatest, but they are filled with some good information and, most importantly, they’re consistent. They seem to have a team of writers on board who keep the content coming.

Content is another of our challenges. Of the three writers who started out eager and excited about the project, only one remains. The other two have lost interested partly, I think, due to our launch date being dragged on forever, partly due to our low pay rates and partly because their lives got busier with new jobs. So keeping our content consistent will be our greatest challenge, I think. We’ve got a two month buffer but not a lot coming in at the moment, so it’s a bit worrying. However, my Kigali site is hot and cold with content but that doesn’t seem to be an issue now that it’s been established as one of the best resources on the city.

As I mentioned above, I think our Kampala forum will be a big key to the site’s success. Figuring out a way to grow the number of readers and posters will be a tough one. I’ve never run a successful forum (although the Kigali forum is really picking up) and am a bit curious about how to get it all started. I’m going to need the help of my partner and writers for this one to keep answering people’s questions but I’ll need to figure out what I can do from my end.

What Next?

Now, we wait! People need to find the site, see that what we’ve got on offer is good stuff, get engaged with our content, start using our forum and sharing things on our Facebook page. This will take a lot of SEO on my part, a lot of word of mouth, and a bit of time. Or maybe a lot of time, I’m not sure yet. I’m not expecting any miracles within the next six months and I think that, as long as we can keep the content coming in and our Facebook followers growing, we’ll be in a really good position by early next year.

Regardless of what happens in the near or even the far future, I’m really excited about this project. My Kigali site is my biggest source of internet pride – most people I meet not only know about it but also really love it – and I really think we can accomplish something similar with this Kampala site, just on a larger scale as the city is a lot bigger than Kigali and has a lot more expats. I think my partner is a great fit and we’re both on the same page with expectations and timeline – which is very important.

So the site is up, let’s just wait and see what happens!

But after looking a little more closely at my books, I’m not so worried. August has been the first month in ages where I’ve had almost no renewals. It’s not that I’ve deals to renew and people have cancelled, on me – it’s that I haven’t had many links even due for renewal this month. One deal for GBP90 expired and I haven’t been able to get a hold of the guy, and another deal for GBP320 was partially renewed as they wanted fewer links. It’s not unusual for me to earn $2000 or more in renewals alone, so not having any has really left a gap in this month’s income.

Earnings Breakdown:

• Adsense — $302 - I’m doing nothing to work on my Adsense earnings so I’m happy to have a seemingly stead $300-sh rock up every month.
• Affiliate sales — $51 - A downward spiral! I think there are a few things I could be doing to improve this – like actually having links to existing affiliate programs instead of dead ones. Now that I think back, I seem to remember lots of emails telling me about affiliate programs that are no longer in effect. I should probably look into that and update the links or change my affiliates. I’ve also decided to report quarterly for one of my affiliates so this update is missing in this report, too.
• Advertising — $3139 - As I mentioned above, I didn’t have many renewals in August which I think had a big effect on this month’s earnings. It’s a good reminder for people who are new to this as well – renewals are important for growing you earnings base and another reason not to expect too much too soon.
• Referral – $50 - Referred an advertiser to an online buddy and they did a deal.
• Ebook Sales — $70 - Seven sales.

Spending Breakdown:
This month was a doozy for spending! Not only for web stuff, but I’ve been loading up on gadgets and things to take back to Rwanda with me so the bank account has taken a hit. Not a great time to have a crappy earnings month, but I think the big spending days are behind me, anyways. In August I spent a total of $3204 which is almost as much as I earned. Eek.

• Link Building Services — $147 - I’m still using Linkvana (14 day trial for $5 affiliate link/50 free outsourcing credits affiliate link). No idea if this is a good idea or not.
• Domain Renewal – $12 - Another year for one of my domains.
• Website – $2800 - I bought the site British Travel Blog to add to my collection of UK-related sites. I’ve had several inquiries and a few guest post sales so far but am hoping things kick off a bit in the coming months. We’ll see!
• Articles – $240 - I paid for some articles for a new London site and my Kigali life site.
• Stock Photos – $23 - Stock photos mostly for Blighty Traveller articles.
• Ebook — $5 - Monthly cost to sell my ebook.

I’m back home in Canada right now sort of working, sort of not. I’ve got a bunch of writing to do but haven’t really sat down to do it. I’ve mostly been trying to organise and get on top of some neglected things. The biggest thing on my plate at the moment is the new living in Kampala site that I’ve launched with a partner. I’m working on SEO and also trying to keep on top of the city’s events and trying to get the forum going. We’ve got someone helping us with the Facebook stuff (like us! like us!) and my partner is working on the content side of things. People seem to like it and I’m looking forward to this project.

That’s all from me! I’ll be at home for another 10 days-ish then off to NYC for a couple of nights with a bunch of people to visit with and then back to Rwanda. I’m looking really forward to getting back, finding a house and getting settled into a routine. I’ve got a lot of interesting projects on the go around me (friends doing cool stuff) plus a few fun things of my own in the works.

Here’s hoping this month is a fluke!