How Much Can You Earn?

[pab1953]

If I get my content site up to 1k visitors a day and approach someone like Tribal Fusion for advertising, how much can I expect to earn?

[fidibidabah]

Well, that depends. If you're basing your 'success' on how many visitors you have, you want to look at your effective CPM.

In theory, you could get $5CPM, or $5 a day. Realistically, it will be closer to $1 unless you can find an extremely generous merchant, or one who needs your targeted traffic badly. Depending on how targeted, you may be able to get up to $20 a day.

There are other options however, you could get paid per click, or per _sale_, again depending on your site content, and make much much more (upwards in the $50 CPM). You can see this is reasonable, if you're advertising a product that is $250, with 20% commission, and you shove it in the face of 1000 visitors a day, you only need a 0.001 conversion rate (one a day) to make the $50 (250 * 20%)

it's difficult to say, maybe with more information on the subject and type of visitors etc we could give you more accurate reasonings.

[edited by: eljefe3 at 7:54 am (utc) on Sep. 21, 2004]

[pab1953]

Well, I'm "basing my success" solely on how much doh-re-me I can generate from it. I don't care how it comes in -- ads, affiliates, charitable contributions. :)

It's a movie site. Rated a "Hot Site" by USA Today in March. I'm putting in a day a week adding new content. But I haven't found a way to make it pay. AdSense has brought in only pennies.

[fidibidabah]

Hm, hard to hit big ticket items from a movie site. You could try (obviously I guess) selling movies through Amazon, but media commissions are nearly nothing these days. Maybe box sets? That's a tough one.

Your best bet, honestly, is probably something like NetFlix, they'll give you $9-$30 for each sign up. Certainly targeted :)

[howiejs]

"like NetFlix, they'll give you $9-$30 for each sign up."

anyone have any comments / success / feedback on working with NetFlix?

[universetoday]

Well, in my experience, Tribal Fusion paid out less than Adsense. So, if you were making pennies from Adsense, knock that in half for revenue from TF.

[disgust]

I'd try adsense fist, then netflix.

the adsense pay per click may vary a lot though.. even with a 2% CTR and 10 cents a click, that'd only be about 2$/day with that much traffic (assuming your uniques and pageviews are similar)

[pab1953]

Do you have to tens of thousands of uniques to earn any serious money -- or millions?

[howiejs]

"Do you have to tens of thousands of uniques to earn any serious money -- or millions?"

NO - you just need to pick a niche that either from an advertiser perspective has a high CPC buy -- or an affiliate plan that you can actually convert (percentages matter less - its about the conversions)

[disgust]

"Do you have to tens of thousands of uniques to earn any serious money -- or millions? "

is it really that hard to figure out?

100,000 pageviews a day with a 2% CTR at 20 cents a click would be 200$ a day. 10,000 pageviews? a tenth of that. 10,000 pages but 40 cents a click? same, but doubled.

the more of those pageviews are unique visitors, the higher your CTR will be.

what you consider "serious money" may be a lot different from what other people do

[MasterSEO]

You can also sell movie posters.

[juice]

how do you find which ads/niche's have the highest CPC.. are there any tools for this?

[fidibidabah]

Are you speaking about adsense? If so, sign into (or create) an AdWords account. Begin creating a campaign around, add keywords you want to check, then as max cpc, put $40.00, and see what it says your CPC would be for each keyword, if it says $2.86, that means that the highest bidder is at $2.85 - again, not terribly accurate, but it gives you a good idea.

edit: hjooray for run-on sentances!

[nativenewyorker]

There was a similar thread to this with a music site several months ago. From what I recall, the recommendations also included books, magazines and collectibles.

You may want to consider home theater for a chance at the bigger commissions. Promote surround sound receivers, amplifiers, speakers, dvd players, widescreen tvs, flat panel monitors and entertainment center type furniture.

[universetoday]

I think the most important thing is to find the niche that really interests you. Pick one of your hobbies and then build the most comprehensive site you can. Getting high-paying keywords is good, but then it's also very competitive. New people will always be coming into your niche and trying to compete with you. If you pick something that interests you, then you'll have plenty of motivation long after you would have gotten frustrated with anything else. In fact, you'll be amazed how much you get out of your hobby once you develop a site.

Then focus on traffic. I really think that vast amounts of traffic is eventually money in the bank. It's the security blanket that you can use when sponsors change and competitors come into your space. The more people who know about your site and visit, the better chance you have of getting strange and unexpected rewards.

People are so busy starting up new sites, they don't have time to build traffic.