What you have said is what I also think keithchan. Without traffic, there is no revenue. I, myself, have been earning more revenue as my traffic increase.
I place them in this order: 1) Niche 2) Optimization Done during the site building process following techniques / layouts that have proven themselves to work on other sites and that you know will pull good double figure CTR's from Day 1. You've got to build the site anyway, so you may as well do it right the first time. Even if I don't place adsense on a brand new site, I already know well in advance exactly where it will go and therefore set up include pages so it can be placed throughout a whole site with only a minutes work. 3) Traffic Which in theory you will be working on from around about the launch date anyway.
pageview of 1-1.5k can brings me average 16/day.. depends on the site and ad optimisation.. as what u all mentioned, traffic is the empire.. in order to have an empire, you need a king, queen and the people.. king is content of cos followed by seo the queen... there are many people.. imagine a single person to be a unique niche to ur website.. if u have all these 3 running together and increasing by the day/week/month, don you think ur adsense empire gonna grow and be established one day? not forgetting the advisor (FREE forums like this and others..) BEWARE and avoid those cunning merchants who gonna sell u something (eg. ebooks etc..).. Just like how all people used to think " All roads lead to Rome"... why? because at that time the Romans are the most powerful because they controls the technology... Same for us now in this modern age, increase the no of roads leading to your Empire and you will be very powerful also..
Nice point, Tarakan. Of traffic being the empire and content being the king while seo being the queen. Bizmart, as we have argued before, there is no point optimizing your site if you don't have traffic and not enough statistics to show a constant trend and visitors. So traffic goes first.
No, that is not necessariliy the case, as others mentioned already it depends on the site. Here's an example of 2 sites I have for today. Site 1 - 7-8k pageviews Site 2 - 800-1500 pageviews Earnings are abour 2.5:1 for the day but sometimes these sites make about the same for the day and site 1 has 7-8 times the pageviews and 10-15 times the amount of clicks.
Ok maybe I should have given a little more detail. Site 1 earned $28 for the day with close to 10,000 views. Site 2 earned $13 with just 1200 views. So while the site with more traffic did earn more it has over TEN times the amount of traffic and on some days both sites earn about the same. Today is rather high for the first site. Site 1 gets about 3-5 cents a click, site 2 gets anywhere from 20-50 cents a click. So my argument is that you can earn more than $10 with a lot less than 5000 pageviews, it just depends on what the site is about and the payouts you will be getting per click
I got another point to add. Many advertisers who earn so much form AdSense use other advertising programs out there (including AdWords) to generate traffic to their site. In other words, the so called earnings per day or per month should minuis the spending. Otherwise, so many people are being mislead.