500 users using up 4-5GB is a good estimate, I think. Although the actual useage would depend on the actual website. Also, if you already have a website attracting 500 visitors a day, you must have access to at least a few weeks worth of traffic stats. You might be able to get an estimate of bandwidth from these stats. As far as making money from your website is concerned, if you are relying purely on adsense etc. to make money I would recommend devoting some time on getting more traffic. As some others have mentioned, don't leave your day job until you sites getting a few thousand visitors a day. 500 a day is simply not enough IMO to make a decent amount of money.
It definitely depends on the type of content. One of my sites gets about 400 visitors a day, but since the content is so specialized, the ads are shown are very relevent, and payout well, so it makes great money. Best advice is to give it a try with a program like Adsense and see how you do. For web log analysis, try Awstats. It is an opensource web log analyzer that will give you numbers about your bandwidth usage, etc.
I'm lurking around and just joined an Affiliate program through CJ. I've been doing Google Adsense since September. January was the best month since then - according to AwStats I only had 100+ uniques and average per day was $1.96; bandwith 1.16Gb... do the math. Now you guys made me think... I do have full time job where I'm running a company web site and averaging 1000+ uniques.. no advertisement all natural - I just got 875 leads in January which will make company at least $30K .. but that's not mine.. I need to work on my 100+ uniques I know what to do with my site but I have never worked with affiliates - can you post a few hints as for CJ? Do I just apply for any related programs and link to them? I would love to get some data feeds, but looks like I have to email the program mangers since they talk about the feeds in the descriptions.
[a little offtopic] btw I don't think AwStats is really that accurate.. I'm using WebLog Expert and it shows total unique IPs 15,370 for the month of January (32,029 visitors, 74,597 total page views and 242,337 total hits) so I'm confused now coparing it to AwStats. Although total hits are very close to the WebLog Expert. Can anyone comment on this?
Gemini: Not sure about the accuracy issue of Awstats. I have only used Awstats and previously Urchin. From my initial comparison, Urchin seemed to log more visitors than Awstats, but the difference was very minute. So I am not sure which one is inaccurate. However if we look at your test, where Awstats was also different from your Weblog Expert, than we could make a guess that Awstats is the culprit... ;-) Are you sure you have Awstats installed properly? I know when I first started using it I was having the stats updated weekly, but there was a problem with some of my log data rolling off before it got added to the stats archive. I changed my Cron job to update the stats nightly, and that seemed to fix the problem of my user counts being low. BTW - Don't bother checking out Urchin unless you want to pay big bucks. It costs around $800 for a license. Ridiculous if you ask me, especially with so many free alternatives. Anyway, hope you get it straightened out!
10000 a day earning 100 bucks sounds very realistic, I earn the same in a month with 10000 in a month approx.
In December, with about 800 uniques a day across all my sites, I finally acheived a $100 a day average. In Jan, I expected a drop, but it actually increased to $113 for 1000 average uniques. In Feb, I'm pushing around 1000 uniques still, and averaging $111, so I'm seeing a slight drop. If I can hit $200 a day and sustain that for 6 months consecutive, it might be quittin' time!
Do I understand you right, you get 1000 uniques a day which is about twice as much as I get on my main page and you earn $100+ a DAY(!) ?? I must do something wrong, I earn around $4-$10 (for very good days) a day
Hrmm.. I don't quite follow here. Could you elaborate a little? how is a "parked" (domain-) name making $$ - Maybe you got an example URL...
I assume they have adsense ads or somthing similar on it. Kind of when you accidentaly leave a letter out of a common url and get the generic parked page. ie. http://www.ebbay.com/ http://www.drudgereeport.com/
$50 on a parked page - that's maintenance free money! On my best day, I' made $181, on my worst days now, I clear around $40. It's all a numbers game. If you can build one site that earns 4-10 a day, then you can build 20 or 30 or 40 that earn 4-10 a day each. Get 30 sites each making $4 a day and you are on your way. When I first started, if you took what I made in a month and divided it by my number of unique visitors, I made 3 cents per. Last year, for the year, I averaged 8 cents a unique visitor. So far this year, I'm averaging almost 11. I expect to sink back to the 7-8 cents range. If you are making $10 on 500, you're making 2 cents a visitor. Now you focus in increasing your average either by having more income earning opportunties on your site (more things to convert visitors into buying customers) while at the same time trying to increase your traffic. On quickly looking at your site, I don't really see any sort of push on your part to merchandise it. You have a huge blank area on the right side of the page under your links. Lose the top 2-ad Google Adsense. Put a 4-ad vertical in the right column under the existing links. You'll still have a ton of room left, so under that I would put links to an affiliate (Amazon, Blockbuster, or whatever) for people to click on to buy movies or books or posters. I would put images here, not just text like you already have. I would also put images with the Amazon links you already have under your sponsored links on your home page. When I click on her filmography, you should have a link for each and every one of those for someone to click on to buy. It's all about marketing. You have a great site with focused content, but you aren't initiating action or making it easy on your visitors to spend their money. Right now you have an a site site whose mission is to provide information, with selling things being secondary. Without being too blatant about it, you should turn it into a site with the primary mission of selling things, while at the same time providing information. Depending on how easy this site was for you to build and maintain, you might already want to start thinking about your next. You already built a a site that earns 2 cents a visitor, now go build 10 more just like it
Very nice post :-D I was thinking about the filmography thing to offer an easy way to buy the movies/soundtracks etc. and I also intended to make an affiliate shop. But since I am so focused on the content I always get lost in creating a shop and stop it half way through. But I will add some more merchandising by keeping up the vast amount of information and I am already working on the skyscraper ad instead of the top one, just have to change my css file a bit for that.
I think with your focus being what it is - a fan site - you should build an affiliate shop that doesn't LOOK like an affiliate shop. The kicker, of course, is how to do that, without having CLICK HERE TO BUY links all over the place. You undoubtedly built this site because you're a fan, but now that you've done it and see how things work, give serious thought to your next. First site I built was a science fiction, fantasy and horror book review site, www. sfreader. com - it's still up and running and gets about 500 uniques a day. Overall, it makes about $1 - $2 a day. Why? Not a big market for sf, f, and h books, first off, low paying AdSense, low click through rate (1/10th of my proce comparison sites) and the real reason: A paperback book costs about $7. My average commission is 7%. That's 50 cents a sale. Ug. You'd have to sell A LOT of books to make anything decent. But I didn't really consider that at the time. Now I know. Someone looking for a book is perfectly willing to spend $7 to buy one, because he or she knows that's the going rate for a book. If someone is shopping for a portable DVD player, they know they're going to have to pay around $150, so he or she is prepared to pay that. At 7%, that's $10.50. Big difference between that and a book. I sell 2 books a day, I make $1. I sell 2 Portable dvd players, I make $21. What higher-priced affinity items are there that you can merchandise on your site that won't seem out of place or obnoxious? I'd start thinking about that next....
Thanks gemini - It was a good lesson I learned from an experience: -Identify the interests of your target audience -Build your site to cater to those interests -Market items with an affinity to those interests If someone is prepared to spend $7 on a book, then you can sell them a book for $7. If someone is prepared to spend $150 on a portable DVD player, then you can sell them a portable DVD player for $150. But if someone is prepared to spend $7 on a book, you're going to have a tough time selling them a portable DVD player for $150! Chriscom has a nice, targeted site, but the marketability potential is limited because of the subject. That said, there are plenty of fan sites that have evolved into active, robust communities that draw thousands of visitors a day and make quite a bit on AdSense or other advertising alone without selling anything.
Well I earn around 100 bucks with Adsense monthly but the server I own costs 129 bucks, I earn another 50 bucks from private sponsors who are Sandy fans but that's not too much of a profit. What I thought of just right now was linking the movie name in the filmography to the buy DVD page on Amazon, so people get a better description of that movie but I also have the chance to get some commission. So far I only sold 2 DVDs on Amazon.
DVD links is a good idea, as well as movie poster links and sountracks. The challenge I see with your site is innate: people show up to get info on or a picture of Sandra Bullock. Anything you sell them, or any ad they click on, is most likely pure impulse. So your 1-2 cents a visitor is probably around the best you'll do. With that in mind, your goal should be to increase visitors. For that it's content, content, content. If 500 visitors a day makes you $5 - $10, then 5000 a day should make you $50 - $100. If you don't own that forum you're sending them too, you ought to think about tryig to get your own going on your site. A robust, well-moderated, ACTIVE forum is one of the best methods for generating unique content and fostering repeat visitors. You'll still have a low per visitor revenue, since any ad clicks or purchases will still be impulse, but I'd rather have a penny from a million people than a dollar from 100.