Expense/Income Tracking

Here is a breakdown of my online income for March 2012.  This is going to be the last report breaking down my online income for a while.

Google Adsense – $295.91

Affiliate Income – $367.75

Brokered Ads – $62.63

Direct Ads-$2670.81

Total – $3397.10

My online income for March was actually quite good.  Unfortunately since Google has greatly reduced the amount of traffic they are sending me and hit me with Page Rank reductions I won’t likely be back to this level for a long time.  I’ll be lucky if I can keep my income to the thousand dollars a month level. I’m going to be looking at ways to increase my passive income and alternative income which won’t necessarily be online.  Since Google doesn’t like the advertisements I was placing on this site I will no longer be taking those kinds of advertisements and looking for other ways to make money.  Once I have the site revamped I’ll ask Google to reconsider their penalty but it will be some time before I can do that since I can’t remove  advertisements until my contracts run out.   I won’t be doing online income report posts because there won’t be much to report.  You will still be able to see the amount of my online income by looking at my monthly income posts.

Here is a breakdown of our expenses for March.

Our expenses were way too high in March.  This was mainly due to my hiking trip.  Hiking is actually an inexpensive hobby but I managed to turn it into an expensive one by staying in hotels way too often.  This makes two months in a row that our expenses have been higher than our income.  Combine that with the fact that my online income is going to be way down and it is easy to see why our savings are rapidly dwindling.  I’m not too worried since my wife and I are taking steps to get our finances back in order.  We are both going to do better at watching our spending this month.  I’m looking for new sources of income which might even include a job.  My wife’s business has some big deals which should be closing soon which will result in a nice increase in income.  The combination of reducing expenses and increasing income should get our savings back up to a comfortable level.

Since our expenses were so much higher last month I broke down them down into more categories.  We usually don’t even have a hotel or travel or charity or even clothing expenses so getting rid of those categories this month will bring our expenses way down.

Here is a breakdown of my income for  February.

February income was down substantially even considering there were two less days.  I knew the string of great months would end eventually.  I still made almost $2000 in online income so it was a soft landing.  This time last year I would have considered this amount of income a great month.  I think my online income should rebound slightly this month.  I’ll be hiking the last two weeks of the month though which could reduce my ability to make money.  Once I get back from hiking I will work more on increasing my passive income and alternative income.  And I’ll also work on diversifying my sources of online income so that private advertising doesn’t make up such a large chunk of my income.

Here is a breakdown of our expenses for February.

Expenses were higher in February than in January despite it being a shorter month.  That is mostly from the purchase of train tickets and a hotel room for my hiking trip this month.  A bright spot was the transportation expense which was just $169 this month which was just gas purchases.  This is the first time in a long time that we haven’t had additional transportation expense in addition to gas.  I thought our food cost would go down but it stayed about the same.  I think it might go down this month since I’ll be gone the last two weeks of the month.  Our entertainment expense should go down as well since most of this month’s entertainment was paid for last month.  Everything else should be about the same.  Our expenses still aren’t at the level I’d like but they aren’t too bad so I won’t complain.

Here is a breakdown of my online income for January 2012.

Google Adsense – $362.75

Affiliate Income – $708.89

Brokered Ads – $62.24

Direct Ads- $3396.17

Total – $4530.05

My online income was up quite a bit this month which was a pleasant surprise. The addition of Investorz Blog plus a larger than normal amount of affiliate income was responsible for most of the increase. I’m still making about 95% of my affiliate income from Bank Bonuses, if I can start making some decent affiliate income from Investorz Blog and My Retirement Blog as well then I should start making $1000 a month from affiliate income.

Some people are wanting to know about my expenses. My biggest expense is the 25% commission I pay on most of my ads. That was about $500 last month. I don’t worry about this expense because it only goes up when my income goes up. Other than that last month I spent $20 for some writing, $10 for carnival submissions, and $5 on Fiverr to have Investorz Blog moved to my new host. I’m going to pay for more staff writing this month but otherwise my expenses shouldn’t go up. Other than that my expenses are pretty minimal.