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January has just passed and it’s terrifying to realize that one month of my twelve-month goal of earning $1,000 a month has already passed. I’ve made slight progress, but need to do much, much more. Here are the charts for January:

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For expenses, the bill to renew my domain names came up, accounting for a small portion. Annoyingly, there was a charge for website hosting from my old, pre-dedicated-server plan that I should not have received. That charge stings because it’s unnecessary and I thought I had resolved the issue already.

On the income side, there was no cheque from Google Adsense. For reasons that I don’t understand (and will vaguely blame on the recession) my Adsense revenue has plummeted from about $20 a week to just pennies. Since Google doesn’t pay out until you accumulate at least $100, it may be a while before I see them again.

On the positive side, one of my irregular payments from Cafepress came in. Also, my text-link-ads income was slightly higher this month.

Text-link-ads has been a strange experience so far. For almost half a year, I had a big, banner on the Miscellanea webcomic letting people know they could buy text ads on the site. All that time the banner just gather dust and I decided to remove it. I was literally hours away from taking it down when I sold an add. Then the next day I sold two more and increased the limit to five. Shortly after I sold another. If I was a dirty hippy, I’d believe I was manifesting my way to success — but I’m a science guy, so I’d like to try and figure out what happened.

In summary:

Income:

  • Cafepress: $60.83
  • Text-link-ads: $72.69

Outgo:

  • Hosting: $28.36
  • Domain names: $9.99

Profit: $95.17

It’s an improvement over last month, but I really need to up the pace if I’m going to hit the goal of $1,000 a month.

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Header photograph by artemfinland