The Sad truth about earning big money on the internet!

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I just find out this blog post that I wanted to share with you here:

http://www.howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com/informatio...


How Much Money Can A Website Make

If you search the web for “How much can I make online?” The answer you will get is $10,000/month. Or $100/hour. Maybe you can make that much, but I doubt it - especially since they will also claim, “Just by working a few hours a day from the comfort of your living room.” Sounds good, therefore it cannot be true.

That is why this website was created. To answer the question, “How much can you make online?”

How Much Money Has This Website Made Online

In March 1, 2010 this website was live for 15 months. This website's main source of revenue for those 15 months was advertising and the sale of a few WebSite Starter Kit.

Here is the actual data:

  • Days online: 437
  • Visitors: 32,742
  • Revenue: $579.81
  • Hours Worked: 536
  • Revenue/1000 visitors: $17.70

It's not a lot of money but also it is not 0 – so it is possible to make money online with a website.

How Much Money Can You Make Online, Really?

If your website will be similar to this one: 20 pages of quality content, what can you expect?

The first 437 days you will make $580 dollars. Which is $1.32 dollars a day. A coffee and a day old donut a day.

You will work for $1.08 dollars an hour. After 5 hours of work you can buy a Happy Meal.

You will work hard on your website. Tweaking and adjusting, checking and rechecking, making sure everything is just right. You will devote 536 hours to your site. Each visitor will pay you $0.02 cents for your efforts.

Although 536 hours sound like a lot, it is really not that bad. Over the course of 437 days it is only a little over an hour a day. And that includes creating the website, writing all the content, 41 1000 word blog posts and all the promotion. Basically everything you do relating to your website is included in this 1 hour a day.

You will spend $91.78 for a domain name and website hosting. In the first year you will not be making a lot of money but you will not lose money either.

Does the Truth Hurt? It Should, But Don’t Be Discouraged

Lots of hard work, with little gain. That is more like. That looks more like the truth. The real world. But you should not be surprised. That is usually how it is at the beginning. All pain and slow gain.

But this should not discourage you. The important point to remember is that you are building something. At the beginning it is not worth much. Only after it is built into something can you expect returns. The beginning is all, give, give, give. No take.

Once the website is full of content and provides value to visitors they will come. And they will pay you more. Best of all, they will invite their friends. But all of this is later.

How To Make 100 Dollars A Day With a Website

The above results might be a little depressing. They are a lot less than $100/hour. To cheer up we can make some projections into the future.

First lets calculate how much traffic you need to generate to earn $100 per 24 hour period.

32,742 visitors generate 580 dollars in 437 days.

We want to know: how many visitors do you need to earn 100 a day? After doing some basic multiplication:

100 [dollars] / 17.7 [revenue per 1000 visitors] * 1000) = 5882

To make $100/day you need around 6,000 visitors a day.

This is good news because it sounds possible. 6,000 visitors a day is not that much. Out of all the Internet users out there you just need a measly 6,000 to come to your site every day. Then you can quite your day job. As comparison, some of the most popular blogs have 50,000 visitors a day.

But please keep in mind, this is just based on the first year of this website. And it is almost all based on advertising revenue ( I did not have any affiliate sales and only 3 product sales). You might have other streams of revenue so your required number of daily visitors might be a lot less.

It all depends on how much money you can earn for every 1000 visitors. This website does pretty well with $17.00 per 1000 visitors (or $1.70 per 100 visitors). It does well, but there are sites that do a lot better.

Imagine you have a product that you sell for $10.00 How many visitors out of a 100 do you expect would buy the product? If you could sell it to 1 in every 100 visitors then you would be doing almost 50 times better than this website. You would be making $10 for every 100 visitors, compared to this website which makes $1.70 for every 100 visitors.

Of course the challenge is having a product and website which can make a sale to every 100th visitor. But even a sale to every 1000th visitor is not bad as long as you can get allot of traffic.

How To Make 100 Dollars An Hour With a Website

Now just for fun let's see how much traffic we need to generate the golden $100/hour. We know that 6000 visitors a day bring you $100 dollars a day. All we need to do is figure out how many visitors will bring us $100 * 24 hours = $2400 dollars a day. Simply 24 times more visitors. 6000 * 24 = 144,000.

Make $100/hour online. All you need to do is get 144,000 visitors a day to your website. I guess all those wild claims on the Internet are possible. You can make $100/hour from the comfort of your living room. The only catch is that it is very difficult.

Actually I would say almost impossible, but only based on advertising revenue alone. Instead of trying to get the unreasonable amount of 144,000 visitors a day, your time will be better spent figuring out a better revenue model for fewer visitors. A way to make more money from say 6,000 visitors a day. Advertising is only one method to make money online. By trying other methods like affiliate sales, or consulting, or your own product sales you could make a lot more money from 6000 visitors a day than a website with 120,000 visitors a day.

For example this website makes $1.70 for every 100 visitors. By changing my revenue methods and increasing it to 5 dollars for every 100 visitors (a realistic goal with affiliate or product sales) I would need 48,000 visitors a day.

Look At Your Competition To Determine How Much Money You Will Make

There is another way to predict how much money you can make online especially if you are planning to make money by advertising - have a look at your competitors' website.

Open your favorite search engine and do a search for your competitors. For example, for this website I would do a search for ‘making money website’. Then click on the first search result.

If the website has advertisements you are in luck. Usually they will also have a dedicated webpage page for potential advertisers. Normally under one of the banners you will find a link called ‘Advertise Here’. Click that link.

This will take you to a gold mine of information. Here the webmaster reveals how much traffic they receive and how much they charge for banner space. All that you have to do is simple math to figure out how much money they make.

Using the data provided on the advertising page (visitors per day * cost of banner per 1000 visitors), figure out how much money the webmaster gets a day for each banner on the website. Finally count all the banners on the website.

Now you know how much money your competitor makes with their website. And now you know how much money you can make with your website.

To provide a specific example, here is the data from my competitor based on their ‘advertising here’ page:

  • Daily Page Impressions: 25,000
  • Daily Visitors: 15,000
  • Cost per 1000 impressions (number of times viewed) of banner: $2.00
  • Number of Advertisements on Webpage: 5

It is important to mention that impressions are not the same as visitors. 1000 impressions does not mean 1000 visitors. Every time the banner is viewed it counts as an impression. So a single visitor can cause multiple impressions. For instance, if the banner is on two web pages, then the visitor creates an impression on the first page, then when they go to the other page this causes another impression. And if they go back to the first page then that causes another impression. Three impressions from one visitor.

For one page, and for one banner, my competition with 25,000 daily page impressions receives $50.00 a day. $50 for 15,000 visitors a day.

But the calculation accounts for only one banner on one page. Since there are more than one advertising sections on the webpage we need to add up all the advertising on the page. The competitor has 5 advertising sections on the page. So if we take $50 a day and multiply it by the number of advertising sections (5) we get a $250 a day.

With a little cross multiplication we can calculate that the competition makes $1.66 for every 100 visitors. This is very close to the known value ($1.70/100 visitors) of this website. So it is probably a very good estimation.

If you would like to make your own estimations of competitor’s (or your) website here is the complete formula:

Required Inputs:
DI - Daily Page Impressions
DV - Daily Visitors
CM - Cost per 1000 Impressions
NA - Number of Advertisements on Webpage

Results:
RDay = Revenue Per Day
R100 = Revenue For 100 Visitors

How Much Money Formula:
RDay = DI/DV*DV/1000*CM*NA
R100 = RDay*100/DV

Conclusion – How Much Money Can Be Made With A Website?

Of course it depends, but…this website makes $1.70 for every 100 visitors on advertising and product sales. The competitor makes $1.66 on advertising alone.

Expect to make around $1.70 for every 100 visitors.

The only thing that determines how much money you will make every day is the rate at which you can get 100 visitors. For this website it currently takes a whole day to receive 100 visitors, but for the competitors' website used in this example it takes just over 2 minutes.

$1.60 every 2 minutes, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year - nothing more motivating than that.

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Recent Comments

7

very nice, very nice Sofiane. :-) The truth shall set you "FREE"...Right? :-) Blessings Greg

Reality hits a lot of people hard. great facts, thanks.

Thanks Sofiane. A very sobering article indeed!

Yes it's hard to make money in general ! Not only online :) that's why we need to be passionned about what we do !

This is a great post Sofiane, very detailed analysis. I am surprised that it has not yet been read by more people as it gives a good reality check on what is required to earn money online.

I should add that the niche you are refering to is very competitive and the people who visit are probably a bit jaded having been bombarded with "make money" offers everywhere.

There are probably other niches which will earn alot more than $1.70 per 100 visitors but may not have as much traffic.

However, if you create alot of long tail content then you would expect to get plenty more visitors.

All in all a really good detailed post Sofiane, well done. I look forward to seeing what other, more experienced members have to say!

Thanks for your post :)

Wow. Looks like it's pretty hard to make money with affiliate marketing!

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