WebPublishing.me

If you’re at all interested in making money off your Web site or blog, you should have a good idea of what you can expect to make. Some of the most successful bloggers and site owners have been pretty forthcoming about their income:

One of Frind's $900,000 checks from Google (Click to see a bigger image).

1) PlentyofFish.com, $3.6 million+ per year. Marcus Frind, the founder of dating site www.plentyoffish.com, entertains 900,000 visitors a day. That makes his site more popular than giants like eHarmony and Match.com in the U.S. (presumably because his services are free … at least for now). Frind wrote his own code and handles all technical support. His only employee? His wife who answers customer emails. Starting in 2009 he plans to hire a database administrator, and more support staff as mentioned on his blog, The Paradigm Shift. (Original source: JohnChow.com).

Shoemoney's biggest Google check ($132,000+). Presumably, he uses direct deposit now.

2) Shoemoney.com, $1.6 million+ per year. Regarded as the most-read Web site on making money online, Shoemoney.com has captured 20+ percent of the industry market share (followed closely by JohnChow.com). See the pic at left for an indication of how much he’s made on Google ads in the past. He’s branched out now, though, and makes a large chunk of his income off his own internal marketing of Shoemony Tools. (Original source: JohnChow.com).

3) JohnChow.com, $360,000+ per year. JohnChow.com is run by an Internet entrepreneur who makes it his business to tell others “how to make money online.” I’ve based my $360,000 figure on Chow’s October 2008 “Blog Income Report,” when he made $34,000. I averaged down to $30,000 and multiplied that number by 12 months. In all likelihood, his income fluctuates up or down, so the figure is a rough estimate. According to his report, the bulk of his money comes from affiliate ads.

How likely is it your site will be raking in that kind of cash? Not very, of course, but it’s helpful to know what’s possible. In all reality, monetizing your site will depend on a number of factors, which I’ve ranked in order of importance below:

1) Powerful, targeted content. Yes, powerful, targeted content is more important than high traffic. When I interviewed “Domain King”, Rick Schwartz, he said he’d buy a domain if it got six hits a year, so long as they were the right kind of hits. He used the example of one of his low-traffic domains, www.cubiczirconia.com. It doesn’t get a lot of traffic, but the people who type that domain into their browser know what they want, so they’re likely to click one of the cubic zirconia-related ads he serves up. For one thing, his audience knows how to spell cubic zirconia. And, more importantly, when they buy cubic zirconia, it’s not cheap. That means the money he gets when he ads leads to a conversion is quite substantial. If you’ve got powerful, targeted content, you can offer relevant ads, and that’s the surest way to get clicks and conversions.

2) High traffic on a sticky site. We’ve seen that low traffic is OK in some, highly-targeted instances, but if your blog or Web site is geared at a general audience, say gamers, you’re going to have to compete with a lot of big-budget sites. Slowly and surely building a large audience should be your primary goal. As with any form of advertising, it’s a numbers game, and in the online realm, you’re doing exceedingly well if you can 5% of your visitors to click on an ad. Most sites get about one half of one percent of visitors to click-through. The stickier your site (meaning the longer people stay) will also determine how effective your ads are. If a visitor swoops in for 10 seconds and swoops back out, you’re just throwing away bandwidth.

3) Ads with pricy keywords. This is one of the most important factors in monetizing your site, and, unfortunately, it’s a factor noobs tend to ignore. If your site is about rubber bands, then the ads you serve up need to be related to rubber bands. If one of your rubber band ads results in a sale, you might get 10 cents to add to your bank account. If your site is about diamonds, and someone buys a wedding band through your ad, you could have $50 or more to add to your bank account.

One of the first sites I built in an attempt to make money online was a holiday gift guide. I filled 10 Web pages with 100 of the hottest gifts for the holiday season and linked out to other sites like Amazon.com. Then, I bought Google ads to generate traffic (at the ridiculous cost of $2 per hit) and waited to see what happened. Even with that highly-targeted content and lots of traffic on Cyber Monday, I still ended up with just a four percent conversion rate. That’s when I realized that you can’t expect to buy traffic and convert it all to sales (especially when you go after a broad audience). You’re going to get visitors the old-fashioned way: with great niche content, innovative marketing, and a lot of work.

If you’re not happy with your current ad conversion rates, just visit one of your competitors sites — one that gets more traffic than yours. Chances are, they’re doing something (or a lot of things) better than you, and nothing’s stopping you from using their ideas … so long as you don’t pilfer their content. Genius, after all, is the child of imitation.

To learn more about domainer Rick Schwartz, visit my post, “What is Domaining and How Can It Help Me Quit My Dayjob?” If you’re already up and running, don’t neglect the power of blog titles in driving traffic to your site. Check out my post, “How to Write Blog Titles that Get Clicks; Confessions from a Former Journalist.”