Today I want to take a look at how much traffic you really need to make money online?
This is a short series of articles, aimed at helping you to understand some of the fundamental issues concerning why some websites do very well with low levels of traffic. Whilst others that get tons of traffic can struggle to achieve decent results.
Once you get a good understanding of this, it can greatly increase your chances of achieving the results you want from the type of website you’re building, or already have up and running.
I read a blog post a while ago where this person was asking for some help, they had a website that was nearly two years old, fairly well put together, and looked very nice.
They’d been doing a lot of work to get traffic to the site, and it was now getting about 500 visitors a day!
It wouldn’t be fair to name the site here, but suffice to say that it was a competitive niche, selling gadget related products, so 500 visitors a day was pretty good going by anyone’s standards.
Now if you’ve read the article I wrote about the differences between selling physical, or digitally downloadable products, then you’re probably thinking that website must have been making a ton of money?
Fifteen thousand visitors a month, maybe 4% conversion at the low end, so about 600 sales a month.
They must have been making a ton of money just off that one site?
Sit back, feet up, and just chill out!
“I thought you just said they’d asked for help?”
So what was the problem that they needed help with?
Apparently, despite getting 15,000 visitors a month to the site, it was only producing one or two affiliate sales each month, and about $120 from adsense.
I know that might be hard to take in, but the site was only making about $150 a month from over 15,000 visitors!
If you where just starting out and came across that, why would you even bother to give internet marketing a try?
I mean how much time and effort does it take to get over 500 visitors a day?
If you used PPC you’d probably have to be spending over $9,000 a month in that niche, but if you only make $150 back you’re going under fast!
Or if you want natural traffic, how many keywords would you need to rank high on page one of Google for, and how many thousands of links will you need to build to get there? It would probably take months of consistent effort to get that sort of traffic.
All for just $150 a month!
So what the heck could be going wrong, surely with that amount of traffic it should be easy to at least make a couple of hundred dollars a week. Those gremlins are starting to wake up again, you know, the ones in your head that start you thinking that this doesn’t work very well at all!
If you where in that position, would you just quit, or is there an answer?
Well the answer is obviously to do with the website’s so called conversion rate, “so no rocket science there then” I hear you say, but would you know what to do about it, or just how you might be able to improve your own website’s performance?
Read the next article – why you want to improve your website’s conversion rate?
It’s nice to find sites like this that share helpful information. I agree conversion rates are an important factor in your business. 500 visitors per day is a great accomplishment. Optimize those visitors to tightly targeted visitors is important also. The other option is try offering different physical or ditigal products. Change ONE variable at a time and track your results.
Mike Sweeney
Two things spring to mind here:
1. niche – some niche audiences are so jaded they simply don’t respond to ads anymore, which makes it very difficult to convert them into revenue.
2. traffic source – search traffic in general is way better quality than social traffic – it’s not that hard to get a ton of traffic to your site, but if they’re just out for a giggle it’s going to be hard to genuinely engage them.
The amount of traffice you need depends on two things. 1. Site design and 2. what your selling. If your selling a product that someone really needs and cant find anywhere else but your site and maybe a few other you can expect great conversion with very few visitors.
Getting good targeted traffic is very difficult. Lots of visitors in nice, but most of them probably weren’t even looking to buy the kind of product being advertised.
I’ve seen a lot of sites in this niche, but I must say that his is one of the best. I’ll definitely be checking back for more good posts. Thanks
This is why you have to target traffic using specific keywords. SEO is the key to getting rank in the SERPS. Backlinks is also the key in your ranking for targeting traffic and gaining the right converting traffic.
Wow, it’s pretty rare to see someone put things into perspective the way you just did. I wish that other bloggers and people that post content to the web would take a page from your book! Do you have any other sites that I could visit or could you possibly make a recommendation as to where I might be able to find some more information? Either way, thanks for an excellent resource and I look forward to being a repeat reader!
Affiliate marketing is a great way to generate money and be your own boss, investing your skills and creative knowledge to work for you and not others, but affiliate marketing does need work and time. You must develop like any other business.|By far the biggest reason why people do not succeed in the online business is that they never develop a business mindset. In order to be successful one has to be able to commit to a plan, products and strategy until one achieve success. What happens in reality is that people bail out at the first sign of an obstacle.
I really like the style and layout of the site? Can you tell me which wp theme your using or is that this something one has created from scratch?
Making money in the Internet isn`t so simple as many people think, make money working online with simple membership websites, or CPA is one of the most often choices, but this is not so easy . One of the fastest ways, maybe not so profitable as CPA is Google AdSense websites, there are a lot of great templates optimized for this , promotion of niche keywords in search enginesis is very simple.
Thanks for all the comments.
Rosaura – the theme is called Flexsqueeze and is a paid theme but very worth it, you can make a lot of changes very quickly and I use it on quite a few affiliate sites. There is also a free version called Flexibility that has a lot of the same functions available if you want to try that first.
You can get it here: Flexsqueeze Theme
great stuff… got any sources for this blog post?
People are more web savvy now as well and can spot affiliate ads a mile off. Many websites just plaster their site with affiliate links even if they are of a different topic and hope that some sales will come of it.
Beneficial info and excellent design you got here! I want to thank you for sharing your ideas and putting the time into the stuff you publish! Great work!
Hi
Thanks for this, the general consensus seems to be you need at least 500 UV’s per day.
After 3 months we’re starting to get some traffic and I’m already seeing where we need to some work.
I think we need to improve our targeting and get more niche in our space.