Showing posts with label visitors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label visitors. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

The Numbers to $1,000,000: How is Your Blogging Progress?

million-dollars-blogging

My multimillionaire uncle told me to always have three projects: a short term source of income, a medium term project or two, and a long term goal that you are making a reality. And the only way to assess whether this work is making you good, sustainable income is to look at the numbers again and again.

In this post I want to look at the numbers to $1,000,000 and see how your blogging progress is going.

Why a million?

A million dollars is a large number that most people dream about. And while it seems far off and distant for many people, for others it is quite achievable. And as bloggers we have something that other generations did not. The Internet. Google. Facebook. These giants are capable of sending tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors to your blog every week. All you need is a domain and a host and you are on your way.

Compare that to the old days when you needed a railroad or a factory or an entire office building to make that kind of money and you will realize that we have a very unique opportunity right here and now. And if you think its not possible to make a million dollars from blogging alone then you might want to think again. Darren Rowse does it. So do a bunch of others.

The numbers to $1,000,000

Lets take a look at some figures to see whether you are on track for your goal. Remember, you don’t need to make a million to change your life and perhaps even change the lives of others. You might only need $40k or $50k a year to completely change things. That’s what this post is about.

Let’s say you start a blog and you are going to make money by selling an eBook. Here are some very rough, small and static numbers to think about:

  • You write three posts a week aiming to grow email subscribers and build a community
  • You do some light SEO work and begin to get traffic from Google as well as social media
  • You get around 100 visitors a day after six months
  • You convert 10% of those visitors into email subscribers
  • In one year you have (182 x 10) 1820 subscribers assuming none were gathered in the first six months
  • You sell an eBook at $49 to 50% of your list and make $44,590 in your first year (910 x $49).

Sure, the reality could be totally different. It could be better or it could be worse. Some factors will push the income up and others will push it down. On Blog Tyrant, for example, I have written only 20 posts and already get around 40 to 60 new email subscribers per day. So after a year I could have closer to 14,000 subscribers to sell an eBook to. And the above equation doesn’t take into account ongoing sales, affiliates, etc.

As a blogger you need to constantly assess your goals and your targets. If you want to get to a million dollars you need to adjust the numbers and set them as targets. There is absolutely no point blogging aimlessly and hoping that one day you might strike it rich. If you aren’t getting the 1000 or 2000 (or 10,000) daily visitors that you need, then you have to take a look at what is going wrong and fix it.

What is your plan?

I am really interested in hearing about your plan. Are you aiming for a certain level? Do you have the numbers and the strategy all worked out or are you kind of just floating through and hoping that it will all add up in the end? More importantly, are you growing? Please leave a comment and let me know.

About the Author: The Blog Tyrant has sold blogs for large sums of money and blogs about how you can build your blog fast and do the same. He is a 25 year old guy from Australia and answers all the comments on his website.

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Tuesday, November 30, 2010

How to Monetize Your Website While Keeping Your Visitors Interested

Most website owners create and maintain their sites for the purpose of making money. Maintaining a website requires hard work. Since website owners have to pay for website hosting services, it is important for them to make money while providing valuable information to their visitors. However, some people who run websites don’t know how to properly go about this without compromising their viewers.

People surf the Internet either for business or for leisure and it can be incredibly frustrating to have to deal with countless advertisements about topics that don’t even concern them or the topic they are reading about. While your main priority is to make money, you should still take your visitors into consideration. After all, they are the reason that your website continues to exist. Listed below are some tips on how you can monetize your website without driving away your visitors:

Post Advertisements that are Relevant to their Interests

Since you can easily make money off advertisements, you don’t necessarily have to give them up just to avoid alienating your visitors. You just have to be strategic about the kind of advertisements you place on your website.

If you post advertisements that are relevant to your visitors, there is also a higher chance for you to earn more, as they will most likely be encouraged to check out the products being promoted on your website’s ads. Just make sure that the ads posted on your site are related to the content you provide for your visitors.

Keep Advertisements to a Minimum

Some websites are studded with advertisements, it can be very difficult to find the content. Keep in mind that the purpose of your site is to provide content and not to promote advertisements. When posting advertisements, you can keep them on the sides of the page. You can use all sides if you want but try to avoid the center if you can, as this can be incredibly annoying for your visitors. Sidebars are useful for containing ads.

Promote Products and Services that You have Tried Yourself

You cannot promote something and rave about how amazing it is if you haven’t even tried it yet. You have to make sure that you try out everything you promote. By doing this, you can easily sell the product, since you are speaking from experience. Your visitors are most likely going to notice when you are lying so if you want to be more factual about your promotions, try the products first.

Label Affiliate Links

If you want to add affiliate links to your site, label them. It is better to label them for what they are rather than risk losing your frequent visitors. You can add affiliate links at the very bottom of your site.

If you try to mask these links as something else, your visitors would most likely be annoyed. If you want them to keep their confidence in you, be honest about the links you place on your site.

Keep Your Ads Simple

Ads that are presented in very large images, banners and GIFs can be incredibly annoying. Since no one clicks these ads on purpose anyway, except for when they accidentally click on it because of how large it is, don’t bother with them. These ads wont make you any real money. In fact, you may end up losing visitors because of them. Just keep your ads simple and clean.

Monetizing your website is important but you also have to value your visitors, as they are the reason you are highly in demand for ads anyway. By following the aforementioned tips, you can make money effectively while keeping your visitors interested.

Andre Conferido has been in the internet marketing business for over 5 years mainly doing “niche blogging”. Andre is also a writer at the make money online blog http://www.carlocab.com.

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Sunday, August 15, 2010

Repeat Visitors vs New Visitors – Which is Worth More to Your AdSense Earnings?

A few days back I shared a little analysis of my AdSense earnings as it related to sources of traffic and looked at how – for me – traffic from newsletters was actually the most valuable traffic that I get on my photography site.

This dispelled the myth that loyal readers to your site become blind to ads and are not likely to click them – but I wanted to dig down a little deeper to look at the difference between first time visitors and repeat visitors and how they interact with ads. Here’s what I found when I looked at the last 3 months.

adsense-visitor-types.png

On my photography site it is the case the new visitors click ads and earn more per 1000 visitors than repeat visitors.

In addition to those coming from newsletters repeat visitors on my site would include RSS readers, visitors from social media (facebook and Twitter).

This makes sense – those there for the first time are probably clicking around more, exploring and looking for things to click on. They’re also seeing ad units for the first time and are likely to click them.

However repeat visitors are not far behind. I’m not allowed to share the exact figures but the difference in CTR was tiny and the eCPM difference while noticeable was not huge. Repeat readers are still valuable – particularly as many of them are coming back on a daily basis so on a per visit basis they’re not earning as much but over a year they’re earning considerably more than a one time visitor.

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