Estimate your income from blogs
Another question I get asked (and even think about myself) is how much can I earn from my blog. While every blog is different, with different traffic patterns, click-through rates, and pay-per-click, I’d like to walk you through an exercise that could help you better estimate your own blogging revenue.
For this example, we’ll assume that you can earn 50 cents for every time someone clicks on an ad you have on your website. I know some of you looking at your AdSense payments think I’m high. Some of you are thinking that it is low. Use your number when you do your own math, but if you don’t have a number, use the 50 cents I just shared with you.
What I’m going to go over is what it takes to earn 50 cents and then we can work backwards from that to get whatever amount you want. So what does it take to earn 50 cents?
Well, if you have an average site, you can expect a 4% click-through rate. That means that for every 100 visitors, it is possible that 4 of them will click on an ad. That’s 1 click for every 25 visitors. Remember, a click costs 50 cents, so that’s about 50 cents for every 25 visitors.
So, if you want to earn $10 a day from a website you run, you might need 500 visitors a day on that website if you hold to the assumptions I outlined above. Is that possible? Yes, very possible.
What if you could reasonably expect to get 5 visitors per day for an article you wrote? Well, then she would need 100 articles, each of which would bring 5 visitors to reach the 500 visitors per day that she needs to earn $10. Can you see how I’m calculating this?
I took a video today of me writing a blog post. I did everything in less than 10 minutes. How can I know? Because YouTube wouldn’t have let me post it if it was longer than 10 minutes. So if I worked an hour a day and wrote 6 articles a day, I could hit my 100 articles in just under 17 hours.
What? 17 hours to write 100 articles that will bring in a measly $10 a day? Realize that you are doing the work up front and getting paid over and over again. It is the cumulative effect over time that has the greatest impact. What holds many people back is the 17 days of putting in an hour for pennies. However, the more you do, the more momentum you gain.
So will you? I hope you will.