One thing that is often difficult to gauge is how much traffic you need before you can start to make some money out of your site from adverts. Of course, if you allow Google to place Adsense units (adverts) on your site you can, at least in theory, start earning money from day one. The reality though, is that you need to get some serious traffic before this type of advertising will reap any real financial rewards.
For example, as a rule of thumb, you can reckon on one ad unit being clicked for every 50-100 visitors to your site. So, by applying very simple math, if you get 1000 visitors per day, you'll probably get between 10 and 20 click throughs (a click through is when someone clicks an ad unit) per day.
Now, if you also bear in mind that you might make as little as 1 cent per click through, you might get as little as 10 to 20 cents from your 1000 visitors. In reality, you'd be very unlucky to get 20 click throughs at 1 cent per click; you're much more likely to get quite a wide range, with some clicks generating maybe a few dollars and others generating a few cents. If every click through generated £1, then your 1000 visitors would bring in between $10 and £20 dollars per day, which is a lot better than 20 cents.
Even so, £20 a day is not going to make you rich! Don't get me wrong though - I think Google Adsense is a great thing - it's easy to set up, it's free to use, and it does bring in some revenue.
Other Advertising Revenue
Once your site starts getting about 500 visitors per day, you can start to look at other advertising revenue streams instead of, or more likely in addition to, using Google Adsense.
You might find that companies start to contact you directly, wanting to place adverts for their companies or products on your site. I know from my own experience that even if you are only getting 300 or so visitors per day, this might be enough to generate some interest from potential advertisers.
But how much money can you expect to earn? Well, for a site receiving 500 visitors per day, you could expect to get $50-100 per month for a 4cm x 2cm (button) advert placed on one of your site's better performing pages, that's to say a page that probably has a Page Rank (PR) of at least 5. This might not sound like very much money, but if you have 20 or 30 pages that have a good PR, and you can place three or four adverts on each page, your advertising revenue will soon start to mount up.
Naturally, as the amount of traffic your site gets goes up, the more you can charge for placing adverts on your site. If you can get up to about 5000 visitors per day, you could easily be looking at charging updward of $1000 per month for button adverts or banners, and then you're talking serious money!
About the Author: John Dixon is a web developer working through his own company John Dixon Technology. In addition to providing web development services, John's company also provides a free accounting tool called Earnings Tracker, as well as other free software downloads, various tutorials, articles, and several news feeds.
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