Well I’ve done it! My first ever $100 month… but I needed a bit of help from an affiliate. Adsense earned me just under $100 and the whopping $6.47 I earned from Hostelworld.com bookings gave me that little boost to reach my goal. People with travel websites seem to feel that August is generally a slow month, so I’m pretty encouraged by having my best month yet, even if it is only by a few dollars.
My traffic has been steadily increasing over the course of the year but fell off by a little bit in August as compared with July. Still good though at an average of 105 unique visits and 500 page views per day. My site has been getting a bit of traffic from Yahoo and MSN but has yet to see any action from Google. I’m going to try really hard this month to finally finish this site off completely (there are still those little frustrating bits of research to do and content to write) and put a push on link exchanges to get things going with Google. I expect big things from this site once I get the links out there and start getting traffic from the Goog.
It seems like I’ve been saying this for ages but I’m going to start adding more affiliate programs to go with my sluggish Hostelworld.com account. I might concentrate on introducing a couple a month and really try to get them integrated into my site well rather than just plastering affiliate links all over my site.
I’ll be in Scotland and Spain and away from my computer for 10 days in September so it will be interesting to see what sort of impact this might have. I think I’ll make it my goal to finish the Work Visa site and try and swap 5 links before I head off on the 6th… wishful thinking since I’ve got a bit of a full weekend but ya never know!