profits from google adsense? i need help!

I need facts and figures for my business plan, would appreciate help.

[ciara_c]

Hi,
I'm starting a content based business, which will be free to its members.
So, my money will be coming from advertisers. I'm writing up my business plan now, and would really appreciate if anyone could give my rough earnings which they get from adsense, or in fact from selling advertising space in general.
I won't use your information in any personal way, I just really need to roughly know the lower and upper limits of what one can expect to earn on a free content rich site.

If anyone could volunteer any information, that would be really appreciated,

thanks,
ciara

[jetteroheller]

What PR have Your current sites?

How many visitors per month from current sites by search engines?

Your SEO experience?

What themes?

Depending on the above answers, Your income can be between $1 and $10.000 a month

[justawriter]

And you already have a lot of competition - there are plenty of content sites in the market place already so that will affect your income from advertising.

You should also check the Adsense TOS if you want to use them - if you have members then you are going to have a restricted members' area and the last time I looked putting Adsense inside a restricted area was against the TOS.

[ciara_c]

Hi, thanks for answering so quickly.
Well, as i said, i'm still very much in the preparatory stage.
Initially, my site will have approx. 300 pages, which will be expanding infinitely (hopefully).
How much traffic I will get, will of course depend. This I don't know for sure.
My aim will be to attract 1000 hits in the first month, then aggressively grow this number.
Does this make things more clear?

[cornwall]

Since you have no idea what you will get, use $10 a thousand page views to give yourself an idea on your plan.

Once you have put AdSense on you can adjust that figure, but it gives you a starting point.

The earnings per 1000 you get will depend on various factors, some depend on the subject of your web sie, and some on how clever you are at getting people to click (without going as far a breaking Google's rules and getting yourself banned)

[ann]

and if you are going to sell ads directly, then you will need a lot of traffic. The more traffic you can show the higher you can price the adspace.

Good luck on getting a thousand visitors in your first month.

[Hobbs]

Hi ciara_c,
If I were you I would lower the expectations down to $1 or 2 per thousand impressions and scale up to $10 with a good topic (for advertisers), good conversion (visits to clicks) and some SEO work, then the sky is the limit really!
Good Luck

[AlexMiles]

If its a content site aimed at consumers the figures are a bit different - although I agree they will start out at $1-2. But anything less than $25 per thousand afrer 6 months and you aren't trying hard enough! :)

Your click through rate might start out at 3 to 4%, but if you experiment with positioning, formats and all kinds of other things it will go up to 15%+

Expect it to take a good six months of constant effort and reading to get it this high. Also much depends on where the traffic came from. Some people like to click ads!

Don't rely on Adsense. Chitika is just as good - in fact its far better if you have a product oriented page. It should not affect your Adsense click throughs either.

[Sobriquet]

How do you plan to get a thousand unique visitors in first month of launch?

The source of visitors han haev a big impact on earnings too.

If you BUY trffic from shady sources, you may not earn at all or something very minimal.

Natural search traffic pays most. Then the traffic from adwords and overture pays good.

My two cents: dont buy traffic from cheap sources.

[AlexMiles]

I think Adwords traffic pays most.

[mzanzig]

ciara_c:

Just a side note - you will not want to base your business plan solely on Adsense. If you are serious about getting a business up and running (and not monetizing your hobby site), I'd recommend to look into various advertising companies and rotate ads and especially at direct sales of ads. Please take into consideration that it is not allowed by Adsense TOS to contact companies that advertise through Adsense directly on your site!

Also, if your content is strong enough, you should consider subscription based models. But except for adult areas or web services, this concept usually fails as there are enough free alternatives for end users around.

[ann]

Another thing that puts me off a site is to get to the front page and you have to "sign up" to read the rest of an article or see the site...Not me, I will leave and find the same stuff on other sites. I don't like signing up as I know full well that I will be in for a bunch of spam as soon as they sell the email list...had it happen when I was "green".

[ciara_c]

No, I won't be buying traffic.
Can I be really stupid and ask you how to use all these 'click through' rates, and such, to create hypothetical facts and figures. I quite honestly don't know what these rates mean.
Thanks.

[cornwall]

What do these things mean?

That was why I simplified it for you at $10 per 1000 pages viewed.

Basically if you (only) have 1000 views a month, then you will (only) earn $10 (or thereabouts)in a month

To earn the minimum $100 in a month that Google require to actually send yu any money, then, all things being equal, you will need around 10,000 page views in a month

You can get $10 per 1000 pages any number of ways, eg you put out 1000 pages with AdSense on and 5% of them are clicked, you get 50 clicks, and if for that site you get say 20 cents a click, then income is $10

It is only when you apply the AdSense coding to your site that you can home in on what your site, with your ad placements will deliver.

But that figure I gave you is a reasonable working assumption.

[oddsod]

Click through rates: You can expect well below 1.0% on forum type sites. Many content sites do between 5-10%. And, if all you've got above the fold is Adsense ads cleverly placed/coloured to trick people into clicking you can go to above 50%.

Payouts: You can get less than $0.05 per click in many, many subject areas. Items that are more profitable for the advertiser tend to get more money per click - from the famous meso*helioma to data recovery, pharmaceuticals, travel, financial and legal services, gambling and match-making. BTW, all of those are very competitive.

Also worth bearing in mind:

I wouldn't talk of unique visitors as "hits".
1000 per month? Don't give up the day job. At a generous CTR of 10% and an EPC of $0.10 you'll make about how much it takes to pay for the hosting.
Chitika and YPN are competitors to Adsense. Design your site so you can test ad spaces between different advertisers to see who pays more.
"Aggresively grow this number": Have you got experience with building traffic and do you know how difficult it is/how much it costs?
Use the Adsense preview tool to see what type of contextual ads a particular content page attracts. Then signing up for an Adwords account will give you a rough idea of how much those words cost (70% of which is apparently paid to the publisher).