How many website visitors to make money does it take? This will of course depend on many factors. However, let’s assume for the sake of argument that you are selling products from a website which make you $100 per sale. Let’s imagine you want your website to make $100,000 a year income, which is 100 sales in a year, given this example.
The average conversion rate on a website is just 2%, but this will of course vary from site to site. So to make 1000 sales in a year you can find the traffic you need by dividing 1000 by 2% (or 0.02). This gives you a figure of 50,000. So in this example you’ll need 50,000 website visitors in a year in order to make this much in revenue.
That sounds like a lot, but divided by 365 (days) means you’ll need 137 visitors a day in order to earn this much money over the course of a year. This example remember stipulates a 2% conversion rate and a $100 income from each sale.
How Many Website Visitors To Make Money: Monetisation Methods
There’s a variety of monetisation methods you can employ from a website. The most common ones (if you don’t have a business/product or service yourself) are affiliate marketing and advertising. With affiliate marketing you sell products from your website, either directly or through email marketing. With advertising, you place adverts on your site and earn a percentage of advertising revenue from each click you get on an advert. If you’re using advertising on your site, you’ll need a lot more traffic to become profitable because ad clicks are worth only tiny amounts.
So affiliate marketing is often thought of as a better way to monetise a website. There’s a huge variety of affiliate marketing products too, so depending on the one/s you choose for your website, it can be more or less profitable. For example, many affiliate products only pay tiny amounts too. By using subscription affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate marketing products, you can earn a lot more per sale. In the above example, you earn $100 per sale. However, most affiliate programs pay much less than this, so you should choose carefully which products to promote.
How Many Website Visitors To Make Money? More Sales, Same Traffic
You can of course increase your sales from the same amount of traffic which will result in your conversion rate percentage going up! With a higher conversion rate you need less traffic to be profitable. This can be done through your targeting, advertising and content marketing. By getting to know your target audience better, and bringing more buying customers to your site, you can effectively turn more visitors into customers from the same or a similar amount of website traffic.
In terms of content this can be done through creating content which is very targeted towards your perfect customer avatar. For example, a review of a particular product will convert more visitors into customers because it’s a very targeted piece of content. Reviews attract buyers looking for a specific product. They are in their last stage of the “buying cycle”. With a “how to” guide, you may attract less buyer traffic with your content. That’s because that kind of content is absorbed by a different type of visitor; one who is looking for a DIY guide, for example.
Another way to convert more traffic into sales is to build an email marketing list. With a list of subscribers you can turn visitors into customers over a long time span. On a website, a visitor only has a few minutes to make a buying decision. But on an email list this timespan is dramatically increased.
Summary
You can of course get lucky and make some money with very little traffic. However, in order to make the most from your site you should look carefully at different monetisation strategies and at your marketing strategy. The factors at play are your conversion rate and how much you can make from the sale of products from your site or from advertising clicks. Traffic isn’t the only consideration.
For a site to make money consistently, you need a good consistent flow of traffic because only a small percentage will convert into sales/clicks (2% is standard). You can increase this number by learning how to target your perfect customer and through building an email list from your website. See target audience for affiliate marketing and the power of email marketing.
Affiliate marketing is generally a better way to monetise a website than through using only advertising. With Google Adsense, you place code on your site which is converted into adverts. When visitors click on them, you earn advertising revenue. But this is usually only tiny amounts so you need a lot more traffic. See also Google Adsense vs affiliate marketing for two main monetisation methods.
Ideally, increase your sale value, conversion rate and traffic all at the same time. That way you guarantee that your website will become more lucrative over time.