What kind of revenue should I be able to get out of my site?

revenue

[jhtyler]

My content heavy site gets around 400,000 unique visitors a month.

What sort of advertising revenue should I be able to get from that sort of traffic?

I've heard of people making as much as $100,000 a year off a content heavy site like that with that much traffic.

But I haven't figured out how to do more than 1/10 that.

What should I expect to be able to make if I'm doing everything right?

[Birdcool]

My sites can make between $4 and $20 per thousand uniques of "lower quality" traffic, depending on the nature of the site. So at 400K uniqs/mo, I would expect you should be able to do $1600 to $8000/mo. Now if you can get 400K people shopping at your site and not just looking at the free info, then that can change the ratio dramatically. So your $10K/mo from 400kV/Mo looks pretty good to me without any more info than count.

My two cents

[jhtyler]

Hm.

Well it sounds like I really should be doing a lot better then.

I suspected as much.

I'm just not sure how to do it yet.

I'm trying to do it through multiple advertisers with good page placement, but it's been a struggle so far to squeeze money out of it, despite the fairly high traffic.

[LifeinAsia]

It all depends on the type of content you have, the type of visitors you get and their viewing patterns of your site, and the type of affiliates you partner with.

With the right combination, someone could be making 10x the revenue you are. With the wrong combination, someone could make 1/10 of the revenue you are.

[jomaxx]

It totally depends on your site's subject and the immediate goals on people visiting your website. Every site is different. All you can do is test different sponsors, different types of placements and (for affiliate programs) different calls to action.

[jhtyler]

Yeah, I'm experimenting with different advertisers now.

It's a dynamic, content heavy site.

My biggest problem is that I've never had ANY success with affiliate programs, even affiliate programs that specifically target exactly the demo of my site.

I've never made a dime off affilliate programs and it baffles me.

I have a hard time finding ad providers that fill all my impressions too, for instance I'm using three CPM banner ad providers right now and even daisy chaining all three I still end up with a lot of wasted space on default ads.

Obviously, I haven't quit figured it out yet I guess.

Any general suggestions?

I'm currently using different combinations of Adsense, Vibrant Media, Tribal Fusion, Casale, and Valueclick.

I'm also using Commission Junction targeted affiliate programs to fill my default ad spaces.. but so far I haven't made a dime off those.