Excellent reply mate, I was making about $1 - $2 dollars a day last year, but now I've jumped to $10 - $30 dollars a day.
5k isn't much, especially in english speaken world. 5k is about $160 for daily income. That kind of income could be made with 10k - 15k daily pageview. I'm ready to hit the 1k club and I'm publishing with a language that is spoken only by 5 million persons in whole world. There must be billion persons who speaks atleast bad english
Corinaw, if I may be so bold (but I'm fishing, actually ) : - if your site is a forum, or a directory of links, 5000 pageviews makes you less than $50/day - if your site is made up predominantly of articles, and people find your content through the search engines, and you've managed to get > 10 - 30% CTR, then we're talking big figures, definitely in excess of $300/day. Am I in the ballpark? I actually started this game quite by accident. I maintained a few pages of photography-related links to helpful sites and forum posts, decided to slap up some AS code, and got anywhere from $2 to $10/day, with a few hundred to a thousand page views per day. Cruelio - you remind me of myself - the 2 or 3 dollars a day part . And I started around the same time too, last year. I presume it's your curious contraptions site that's bringing in the dough? If so, that's the type of site I'm aspiring to, but believe me, the thought of developing such a site occurred to me only recently, after my AS earnings started going south. The strategy that made me money (>5k/mth) was the auto-generated rubbish thingy, but I can't rely on it anymore. Add to the fact that something deep inside me wants to build something I'd be proud to show to anybody that asks. Thanks for the inspiration!
It's nice to see so many DP members sharing their adsense experiences, and it's definitely nice to see people actually making such good progress. I'm hardly hitting $10/day but it's been much better now. I never really paid much attention to adsense. Had some sites and I just added in adsense without paying much attention to it. It caught my attention when I realized that there is in fact consistency to the amount of revenue that I'm earning from adsense. So recently, I started putting up more content, polish up my existing sites and putting up more websites. Guess what...the revenues started climbing...not exponentially but steadily. And that's when I haven't even started getting indexed for my new website
Hey - I know that SG Article site of yours - it was mentioned in some ezine from some Internet Marketing Guru (Phil Wiley, IIRC) - the 50% share is a great concept!
You guys sure know how to shoot down the people making a couple grand a month "5000 is a mere pittance". It's still a pretty penny for the amount of work required to be put into it.
CPVR - many thanks for sharing your site and earnings information. The pessimist in me has this to say. Here I am wanting to start proper, kick-a@# sites, with forums and content a-plenty. At least, you already have 4 gorgeous sites already up and running (as linked to in your signature). But I would personally be depressed with only $30/day after having 4 very active forums and puring so much sweat and tears into them. My question to you is this - do you feel positive that your income will reach $300/day with those 4 sites, or are you already developing new ones in new niches? I've heard that CTR is very, very low for forum sites.
5000 a day is normal for many people... some do even more but i agree.... a very busy site with rich keywords is required
Shawn, it's pretty obvious I lost the bet the moment I started the thread It's a good feeling to be amongst winners here. Much better return on time spent in this place than over at webmasterworld
Fish away! I am not a forum or directory. The page views of those kinds of sites blow me away. If I had that kind of traffic (and the same ctr) I'd be piling money away in a suit case. I'm still building content (I'm working with elance right now on another 40 pages) and I have a ctr of between 10 - 20%. You also have to take the cost per click into account before coming up with any rev assumptions btw. I have only 153 major pages for revenue right now all based on keywords. Some folks come here to dp worried they changed ads or whatever and the ctr is 5% and it is so astounding to them. They are worried that they will be banned. Others think the advise or facts that that people give is a lie, I'm not sure why, maybe because their site is a low ctr and they can't believe people are making real money. Maybe the occasional lie gets through, but believe me. This is a forum supported by people most of them with very big mouths and fast fingers and as such, most dishonest people are outed quickly. 5k is totally possible per month. YOU WILL NOT HEAR ONE MAJOR MEMBER OF THIS FORUM CALL ME A LIER ON THIS STATMENT. Only possibly folks who don't knowany better I have no reason to lie. And I'm certain most people do not lie here.(though I know the occasional weirdo lies) I do know that real, honest and very lucrative paychecks are generated w/ adsense each month. I started just last June (2005) DP will tell you all you need to know on optimizing/seo/adsense. This is a complete package to making your site successful. Specifically you cant slap up a site w/ adsense with out promoting or optimization and think the big money will roll in. I think this is where many folks get confused, then start posting how every one is making up revenue because their site sucks. I hope this helps. Good luck to you. PS don't think about high paying keywords, that is the first thing just about every person starting targeting and the competition is fierce. Think about the number of searches vs ctr. My original comment still stands. NICHE NICHE NICHE. It is all really about content. I'm sure you have heard this before, but honestly there is no trick about it.
What is educated about that guess? I could say the earth is flat if I have never gone out of space and seen it is round... My point is people get tired of people making assumptions and posting stupid stuff before reading. If I wanted I could look through these forums and find plenty of posts where people are making well beyond 5 grand per month. And I don't care if they don't show me their check. It's easy to call everybody a liar when somebody isn't making that much money. Once you get there, it doesn't seem like that much. I'm not trying to mock you or start trouble, just giving my opinion. And I agree that one day PPC will evolve into something better, but for the next X-XX years, this is here to stay. It is still fairly new and the rest of the big SE's are coming out with their own adsense. Things are going to go up more before they go down. IMO...
Corinaw - thanks so much for a great post. I'm taking away the following points from your advice: 1. Content sites can make money. Writing the content can be outsourced. 2. Promotion is super-important 3. High CTRs of > 10% is possible 4. DP is the real deal for ramping up one's knowledge My thoughts. 1. Having stopped building auto-generated sites, I'm left wondering where to go next, and building white-hat content sites was the first thing on my mind. Unfortunately, I started off the "wrong" way and went with various article services which for the most part, provided sub-standard articles that were distributed to hundreds of members. I think it'll be a good idea to reroute most, if not all of the monthly fees towards getting my own source of articles. I'm actually encouraged that this is a perfectly viable way of making an income, because honestly, my writing skills suck. 2. Promotion, research, and managing the entire A-Z would be something of a challenge for me, but I'm determined to learn up and put that to practice 3. My own web pages have seen consistent CTRs of > 20%, so this is perfectly believable. Basically, they were white background, black text, 1 - page title, 2 - horizontal adlink, 3 - one or two paragraphs, 4 - leaderboard, 5 - remaining paragraphs. That's it - no header graphics, no nothing. Ads were also black text on white. CTR? - > 20% easily. I can share an example of the format I'm using, but I guess I can only share URLs after I've met the minimum requirements set by DP - and bummer, I have a red status now 4. I think DP will be the main stopping point for me from now on. No more signing up for paid services after paid services purporting to show members the way to good income - I can tell you that there's nothing much to be gained from those services.
MattEvers - very true that was not an educated guess, more like a challenge. It is better just to ignore a 'stupid post' and let the thread die. I am surprise such a post has generate this much discussion, bravo dlcmh and yes the earth is flat...
by assuming that no one makes serious money here, you're doing nothing but throwing potential for serious income out the window. yes, it's fine to be skeptical; that's a good thing. particularly when someone is asking you for money in exchange for info. but we're not. put as much effort into making your own useful, interesting sites as you do trying to convince yourself none of us make any serious cash doing what we do, and you'd be well on your way to 5K a month yourself. and for the record, I've dipped into greyhatish stuff a few times. mostly just to see what was possible. I made some money here and there, but almost all my serious cash comes from legitimate content sites that offer unique and interesting content. it's cliche, but "focus on the user, and all else will follow" is absolutely true. and a damn nice income is included in "all else," by the way.
Marques - I probably didn't do a good job of picking the title. I had only meant for it to bring in a little discussion so thought to make it a bit more click-attractive. Actually, the meat of my intent is in the body of post #1 of this thread as I was interested to find out what types of sites can command >5k/month. But, silly me for coming up with this thread title (yeah, I got the red status) - any kind souls willing to vote me back into the green? One other good thing that came about from starting this thread (for me at least) is the display of several related threads at the bottom of the page - how cool is that - I clicked through some of them and came across this dude M Henderson who earns 20 to 30k per month (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=714937#post714937 and check his posting history) - clicked his signature and I think I'm gonna buy that ebook mentioned on his site - nothing like buying the good stuff from people who're making that kind of money.
I would say most ebook info is here on DP anyway, certainly enough to make big differences in your traffic/ad placement/income.
this is where you'd want that skeptisim that you had way too much of earlier in the thread to kick back in most likely, anything you can find in that ebook you can also find on these forums, but for free. yes, it's possible to make serious money-- but you don't need to pay money to find out how.