$1,000 a Month Goal - December Status Report
Quick reminder: the goal is to reach $1,000 a month of web income by January, 2010
For nearly seven years now, I’ve been playing around with my websites. I’ve pulled in a little income from advertising, but I never really wanted to add up the figures. This way I could tell myself I ‘broke even’ — even if I didn’t. Breaking even was an important goal — it felt like a validation. But the time for vague ideas has passed. To reach my goal, I need to know where I stand to see how far there is to go.
It’s time for charts and figures. Here’s how things went last month, December 2008:
Income
- Adsense: $122.00
- Text-link-ads: $64.45
Outgo
- Website Hosting: $299.99
Nearly all my pain comes from webhosting. Hosting all of my sites, each running wordpress and receiving substantial traffic requires a dedicated server. The $299.99 for three months is my biggest expense and the one I can do the least about. $100 a month for dedicated servers and the good tech support is the best I could find at the time.
The noticeably smaller side of the equation is my income. Adsense is the program that has earned me the most income over the years I’ve been running it. Top earner though it is, it’s not enough to cover costs.
My second source of income for the month is text-link-ads. I’m newer to them and not quite sure what to think. For the moment, they seem to be a bit of too-good-to-be true, but I withhold judgment.
In summary I lost $114 in December — not ‘breaking even’ by far. How to reverse this trend? Next article up, my expansion plans.
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Header photograph by kevindooley
Filed in goals 3 Comments so far
Studenomics on 09 Jan 2009 at 5:35 pm #
I don’t understand why your web hosting is so expensive. I paid about $200 for 2 years with bluehost. $1,000 is very attainable and I can’t wait to read your expansion plans. Adsense has its good days and its bad days. What me and you make in a month some blogger may make in a half a day.
Grey on 11 Jan 2009 at 8:58 am #
The hosting cost is so large because of my webcomic site. Normally the traffic there is about 4,000 visitors a day — but it can occasionally spike to 100,000 a day. I’ve had difficulty finding any cheap providers who can actually handle that kind of traffic without hitches.
How does your own site do for traffic / income?
Studenomics on 11 Jan 2009 at 6:02 pm #
Wow you have that many visitors? Congrats that’s amazing! My blog is fairly new so the monetization process hasn’t been so great. Here and there I may earn a few dollars a month but am nowhere remotely close to $1,000 a month.