Thinking of starting a blog? With the right skills, a profitable niche, and a good amount of traffic, you could start making a viable income from your hobby.
Even if you're an experienced blogger, you can learn how to set up your blog for monetization and start pulling in the traffic you need to start turning a profit. Although monetizing your blog can be challenging, it's definitely not impossible.
In this article, we'll show you just how much traffic you need to start making money and how you can optimize your blog for the best results. Ready? Let's dive in.
How Much Traffic Do You Need To Make Money?
If you're running a blog or a business website, traffic is everything. When the numbers start racking up, you'll also start to turn a profit.
If you're new to monetizing blogs or websites, you'll probably have plenty of questions. Is it possible to make a living from it?
How many views do you need per day to make a liveable income? How can you fast-track your blog to success?
Now, this may be a frustrating answer, but the truth is - it depends. Let us explain.
You can definitely earn money from your traffic - that's a no-brainer. However, there are many other factors at play that can determine just how much you make and how fast.
What Factors Affect Traffic And Profit?
Factors that can influence your traffic and profit include:
To make things easier, let's consider an example. Let's say your goal is to make $100 a day purely from traffic. You'll need to do a few equations to discover how many clicks you need to get there and how much each click costs.
Finding Your CPC (Cost Per Click)
In a nutshell, your cost per click is determined by dividing the cost of an advertising campaign by the number of clicks you generate.
With a cost-per-click model, you'll pay for each click on your ads. When you have these numbers, divide your desired amount ($100 a month) by your CPC. If your CPC is $1 a click, you'll need 100 clicks.
Now, you may think we've gone off on a tangent here, but CPC goes hand-in-hand with traffic and monetizing a blog. If you're going to rely on CPC's to get you to your monthly goal, you'll now need to determine a traffic goal.
To find out how much traffic you'd need to achieve your 100 clicks a month, you'll need to do another formula: the number of clicks / CTR (click-through rate).
If your click-through rate is 2%, you'll do 100 divided by 0.2 (500) - this means you'll need around 500 visitors a day to generate your desired $100 a month.
Remember: these figures will differ depending on the metrics of your own website.
Your desired monthly income may be different, and your CPC and CTR will differ. Follow the equations above to help you determine how much traffic you need.
If you've got this far, there's one final step you need to do - discern the total traffic you need to generate per MONTH to get to your goal. Simply multiply the number of daily visitors by the number of days in a month.
So, if we need 500 visitors a day, we can multiply this by 30 to give us 15,000 visitors a month. That's how many people we'd need to pull in on a monthly basis to make us $100.
What Is Good Website Traffic?
So, our above estimations can generate an income, but what is actually considered to be good traffic?
Well, as you'd probably guessed, the more eyes are on your website the better. This will give you a better chance of making money, regardless of what niche you're in.
Generally, websites that most every single day are more likely to break into the big leagues, which is anywhere between 15,000 and 250k visitors a month. 250k may seem impossible, but it isn't. Many websites are capable of achieving this.
However, if you're new to blogging or running a website, we'd recommend aiming for 10k visits a month first.
This is a big milestone to break - it may take some time, but with a little consistency and the right marketing, you can get there. Once you've hit the 10k mark, you'll be more likely to achieve those higher numbers with time.
How Long Does It Take To Generate 'Good' Traffic?
The definition of 'good' traffic is a little subjective. However, if you're aiming for that big first milestone of 10k visits a month, it can be a slow and bumpy start.
For most websites, it can take anywhere between 10 months and 3 years, depending on the success of your website.
Some niches are EXTREMELY niche. If your website is based on one of these niches, it may take even longer.
If you already have an expert understanding of SEO and content marketing, it could take even less time - but again, it really depends.
Most of it will come down to you, your experience, and your website niche.
How To Increase Traffic To Your Website
Okay, here's the big question - how can you increase traffic to your website?
Whatever niche you're in and whatever milestone you're trying to hit, there are a few things you can do to boost traffic and improve your chances of making a viable income from your blog or website.
If you're writing about the best summer outfits of 2020, your traffic is going to wane over time. You need to create content that will ALWAYS be of interest and value to your audience.
So, for this example, you could skip out the year and change your article to "15 summer outfits you'll love".
Strong SEO is imperative. We'd recommend using keyword research tools to find out which keywords generate the most engagement and which ones you can use for your website.
On the topic of keywords, don't neglect long-tail keywords. It can be much harder to rank for shorter keywords.
Long-tail keywords are easier to rank for (because you'll have fewer competitors), and they can help bring in the most relevant traffic to your website - which improves your chances of people clicking on your ads and boosting your income.
Most website traffic comes from mobile devices, not desktops. When you're building your website, bear this in mind, and ensure your site is responsive and easy to navigate on mobile, too.
Giving people the best user experience possible will decrease frustration and make them more likely to visit your website.
Building a website or blog that can turn a profit takes time and patience. While you shouldn't expect to be earning the big bucks overnight, it's important to set yourself targets, and figure out how to get there.
By using the formulas and tips in this article, you can learn how to
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