I was wondering if i get enough traffic will clicks naturally come? How many unique visitors should I be aiming for to get a reasonable income?
But once you started getting traffic, you can start optimizing your ad placements. Focus on getting a few hundred visitors a day and than switch your focus on ad optimization and placement. You can then switch back focus on getting traffic again. You can alternate between traffic and optimization or you can work on traffic and optimization in parallel. But, initially you need to get more than hundred visitors before putting your efforts in monetization.
for decent income you need at least 50k page views, 10k unique visitors a day, CTR of 0.5%, CPC of $0.5 then u can make $125/day
I am not knocking anything that seanchan825 said but, to get to these kind of numbers with one site does take alot of work, and time, which many people dont like to deal with. The most reasonable approach to make money with G Adsense is to "network" which in my book means create a network of sites generating income through Adsense, and other options like Kontera. My goal is to build sites that make $2 a day, and then I let it sit, and move on to the next project, and every six months I go back, and promote my old websites more to increase the daily income of my websites. Thats how I do it.
I like the idea However I dont have a network going and im nowhere near getting $2 a day. More like umm 25 uniques day=no clicks
You always start off slow when you first get into the business of web advertising, with companies like yahoo, adsense, adbrite, etc. The money comes from traffic, and targeted vistors wanting to look at things that are on your site, and how relavant the ads on your site are to the content. 25 uniques a day isn't much, but your just starting out. What I suggest doing is registering on sites like HubPages.com, Squidoo.com, Ezinearticles.com, Propeller.com, etc. and start to promote your website throughout the internet. Building links from websites like these help in the ranking of your website in search engines like Yahoo, Google, MSN, Ask.com, etc. and in turn will increase your daily visitors. You just have to implement to righ techniques to your website, to promote certain keywords, and keyphrases that do not have alot of competition, and what people are searching for. You can use webmaster tools like the Google Keyword Tool (Just type in google keyword tool in google search) to look up different keyphrases, and keywords and see which keywords are being searched more often, and which ones have the most advertising competition. Different things like this, and different tricks you will learn along the way will help you grow a successful online network.
I'm in accounting, so I looked up your site. It's pretty good, but there are some things you need to improve. First of all, you should work on optimization for your site. It looks like the description for all the pages is the site name and you use the same single word key phrases. If your page is about small business software, use "small business software" as your keyword. Not business, accounting, principle, information. Your description should also follow suit, and have your keyword phrase in there. There are over 8 million web pages optimized for the word "business" - it's in their title, description and keywords. You need to break this down into a smaller segment where you can compete. I checked your site using SEO for Firefox. There are no links and no Google cache. If you're getting 25 visitors a day, you're doing pretty good. No links - no traffic. Work on one way or clean reciprocal links. (Be very careful about link buying, one of my most heavily trafficked sites is still in the toilet with Google for this.) Web 2.0 - Digg, Stumble, Squidoo Directory Submissions Forum comments and signatures Blog Commenting - but not so many that your site gets labeled as blog spam Reciprocal links in your field Accounting is pretty dry. It is what it is. However, if you give ALL the information someone is searching for on one page, they don't have a reason to click. Keep this in mind when you write articles. Do software product reviews. Negative or positive, they're great for generating clicks. While you have the beginnings of a great authority site, it needs work. The layout is not so hot. Things are too tightly together on the page. Navigation could be better if you broke your menu into - Small Business Accounting, Professional Accountants, Accounting Information for Students,etc. Google loves that kind of crap. Never have your menu longer than the article on the front page - personal peeve of mine. I'm sending an "accounting" top keyword list to you by PM, so you can see what I mean about short and long tailed keywords. I do multiple sites because I'm bored. You have one really great site that you've done a lot of work on. Keep it up.
Wow i appreciate the time you took into writing all that advice for me. Thanks for that. Ill try and do what you say and see if it improves.
Since I will NEVER do an accounting site - just the word GAAP was enough to make me start talking to myself about audits and balance sheet reconciliations - why not? There's enough room for all of us.