If I had a nickel for each time I saw this question being asked…. Should I start by telling you there is no right answer to that question or save it for the end of the post?
By the way, if you are asking yourself this question you are on the wrong path already. I bet you hate me right now, but hey, putting it right in your face early in the game is for your own good.
Would it help you out if I said that one blog of mine which gets 10,000 impressions a month is making me 200 euros? No it wouldn’t. That is completely irrelevant.
It is all relative
Your earnings depend on lots and lots of factors like how targeted your customers/visitors are, the niche you are in, the layout of your website or blog, the advertisers you are working with, the product you are selling and so on and so forth.
Let’s take AdSense for example, because I know a lot of people are using it. AdSense earnings are calculated based on the number of clicks your ads get. For each click you get a specific amount of money. That amount can vary a lot from one click to another even in the same niche. For example I have got clicks worth 0.04 € and clicks worth 2 € in the same day on the same website. That is quite a big difference.
Another thing that can vary is the click through rate. Today you may get a 2% CTR while tomorrow you can have a 4% CTR.
See? The famous “How many visitors do I need to make money?” question does not make much sense now, does it?
The right approach
Ok, I understand, but how do I know when I should start monetizing by blog?
What I would do before starting to throw ads all over my website is wait to build a returning base of visitors or a nice number of RSS subscribers. There is no magical number in terms of traffic that you need to reach in order to be able to make money online. Just wait until you get positive feedback from your audience. Wait until you see them asking you for a service or product. Don’t just fill your blog with AdSense ads and make it look spammy. It will put everybody off. You can even show ads only to search engine visitors and maximize your earnings.
One of the advices I would give to anyone who is starting a blog or website is: don’t try to make money out of it. Build your reputation first and then, gradually, start monetizing the traffic you are getting. Think of your blog as a long term business and pay respect to your visitors; don’t try to rip them off.
Give before you ask
Your goal as a beginner is to share useful content with the world. That is where all your time and focus should go. Create free content for your visitors and let them know about it. Write an e-book and offer it for free to your subscribers. Don’t ask money for it. People won’t pay for a product created by someone with no authority.
I like to compare a new blog to a product that is going through a free trial period. The trial period is up to you, it might be just 2 months or it might be 2 years. Start asking people money only if they are dying to get fresh content from you. Let them ask for it.
Your comments
I would love to hear you personal experience on this topic. How long did it take you to make your first 1,000 dollars online? How did your readership react when you first started to use ads?
Great write up. I'm glad your blunt people need to know your need to know the facts and realize a ton of ads, and spamming for visitors is not the right way to do it. Build a quality blog like this one and then gradually try to make income from it.
I fully intend to focus on creating the excellent content I have in mind and building a subscriber base before trying to monetize my blog, but I am trying to decide what platform to use. You can't run ads on a free WordPress.com blog. Will I be able to transfer the contents of a WordPress.com blog to another host later? What about to another platform?
Thanks for sharing this, I actually started blogging three years ago but it was only recently since I added ads on my blog, this information you shared are quite helpful for me. Thanks!
Well said mate ! You are right, building reputation before monetizing a blog is very important.
Nice post.
a slow and bad looking site will not make your readers to stay much longer.
Thank you
Understood… I'm on a special campaign for myself to bring about 1000 visitors a day. I feel that should make my page views explode. But definitely I am staying away from real advertising as I simply don't have any need for it. I think adsense will be ok as many people are use to seeing this on any site so it is really not harming anyone. I guess I will just have to keep making more content and let the SE's find me
I like how you say wait… I mention in my blog that nobody likes to be hassled. walking into a store and being approached is no good the very first second you step in. so as you say what the customer find your worth before they pay.
on another note… I have only been at this for 6 months. I have 40 pages, and about 1000 page views a month… but not a single penny yet from adsense… is it too early in the game?
Sorry Doug Smith, 1000 page views per month is quite low, you can work on getting some traffic right now. Maybe after few months you can expect your desired Adsense earnings. 🙂
In common, ofcourse more visitors , CTR will be higher .
But when i wriote a post related to the niche and put the adsense that related. It actually can earn the same amount with 30 k unique traffic compare to 50 k traffic non unique traffic
But yet i still the greedy one which still get as much traffic as i can while i believe the chances would be higher. .
Some great comments on here, and confirms what I have intuitively felt – don't baboozle your readers with AdSense if at all possible since blogging is meant to be a pleasurable experience. Anything that exhausts or irritates the reader is likely to turn them off for good.
well i m getting 60 visitors daily and my blog is one and half months old……do u think i m on right track???
I'm only getting half of that and mine is twice as old as yours so I think you must be doing something right.
I started blogging may of this year, can you give me a tips on how to build a good reputation?
Thanks Pradeep.. 🙂
I think this must be our personnel decision when we want to monetize our blog, when we think we have a sufficient number to readers and visitors from search engine , we should concentrate on CTR and eCPM.
More visitors mean more money but visitors should be relevant to the products and services
money before reputation===lonely blog
I must say this is very helpful for every new blogger as well as for the senior ones. It is a very fabulous approach
yep cristian you are right…making money with a blog depends on various factors…
and also we shouldn't stuff our blog with ads..
Hey, great article! I started my blog 4 months ago, I managed to get 500 unique visitors per day, but still haven't start earning money. I have put some adsense ads and for 4 months I have managed to earn only 45 euros. So I agree with you, we should wait the time when we will start getting positive feedback from our visitors.
Totally agreed with the statement that it depends on what niche you are and what type of product you sell. also we have to keep in mind about the site loading time and layout. a slow and bad looking site will not make your readers to stay much longer.
Never abuse ads, everyone hates seeing ads everywhere… I've seen loads of people making this same mistake.
Being too intrusive with ads makes a blog look cheap. I would rather promote my own products and services than throwing ads all over the place.
My answer is the more visitors the better, of course. Anyway, we have to think about targeted visitors, these will mostly buy stuffs from your site. If the visitors are not targeted then they will not likely to buy anything and will less likely to click on the ppc ads.
Yep, targeted traffic is the key. Also, you need to interact a lot with your readership, make them trust you.
You are right. Build up your readers, traffic and reputation before thinking about monetization. Be patient and write good content. 🙂
The patience is the hardest part if you ask me.
thats all about, targeted traffic and targeted visitors
Hi Christian,
I am not the blogger of my family, it is my girlfriend. She has started blogging about home decore and our house, we have found a huge jump in traffic recently, do to her being featured 7+ times on other blogs that get anywhere from 10 to 40 times as much traffic as her site is getting. We are at a point now of trying to figure how to take it to the next level. She has someone who is helping her with CSS because frankly she has no time to work on the CSS because she is focusing on the content and trying to get more quality posts up.
She didn't look at it as something to make money with at first, it was more or less a place for her to share what we were doing on our house we bought about a year ago. She is going to graduate from the University of Oregon with a Degree in Architecture in June. She made the blog as a piece to go along with her portfolio and resume. But now that it is really taking off we are not sure what the next step would be. Any info from you or anyone else would be great.
Also a side note. I lived in Iasi, Romania for a year (2007) living with an ex-girlfriend working for her father's company. I loved my time in Romania.
hope to hear from you.
Thanks
TJ
Hi TJ,
Your girlfriend blog is the perfect example. Quality content is all that you need. By the way, I like what you did with your house and glad you enjoyed Romania.
All you need is targeted traffic and the numbers should be 2 sales out of 100 visitors if the price is right.
"Black Seo Guy "Signing Off"
Wonderful information…. It is really helpful to understand the broad area of earning….
Well said mate ! You are right, building reputation before monetizing a blog is very important.
Nice post 🙂
Thanks mate!
Hi,
It would probably be my mistake to put ads on my blog after i could get up-to-the-standard traffic to my blog. According to your "theory", when should a beginner start to advertise in his/her blog? How much traffic must obtained in order to start advertise,
Thanks
Regard,
Ricky
Hitechblast
Hi Ricky,
As I said, it depends on lots of factors. I would say you need to get at least roughly 10k unique hits per month before starting to monetize.
Agreed! The question "how many visitors do I need to make money?" is indeed irrelevant in the world of blogging. You're right, we need to make good reputation first and one way to do it is to give before we ask. The main goal in blogging is to share information or experience that can help others so much and money comes along the way. We must be enthusiastic enough with blogging to be able to make good content from relevant topics. Then targeted traffic follows effortlessly.
I'm glad that you agree. 🙂
Many people have asked same question from me, and I have replied exactly the same as you written in the post 🙂
I too think that you should first make reputation before putting ads and also don't just place ads all over the website and annoy you visitors