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How Much Traffic Do You Need to Make a Living Off Your Website?

Whilst it is important to realize the quality of your traffic is important (recurring, targeted, motivated visitors, ‘starving crowds‘), and the types of revenue sources also plays a part (private advertising, pay per click, or affiliate sales), many internet investors would appreciate a rough guide to how much traffic is required to make a small income off of a website (or websites).

To answer this, I trusted the wisdom of crowds, and surveyed a number of answers to this question. Wherever possible, we will use $100 a day as a low, achievable target (multiply this figure to get to your daily income requirements), and measure visits in unique visitors per day.

“One site gets approx. 2000 visits per day and makes about $30-$40 per day. Another site gets approx. 500 visits per day and makes about $60-$100 per day. So, you can make more money with less traffic depending on the niche. I’d love to at least double my traffic to each of my sites this year. If I double my traffic, I will double my income. It’s pretty much as simple as that.” HappyWife

“One site gets over 2000 page views per day and makes me a lot of money – all CPA offers. Another gets 400 page views a day and makes quite a bit, whilst another in a different niche gets the same amount of traffic and makes next to nothing (not a buying niche).” Barb Thornback

“One person is enough. It depends on what you are selling and how well it converts.” jazbo

“According to many bloggers and me, a minimum of 500 visitors a day (That is roughly 15,000 visitors a month) is required to make fairly average income from a website every month. However, this is also depends on the quality of web traffic. And the type of income you are going for. If the web traffic is not buyer traffic then your website will not make good Income.” MyTimeMatters

“If your website makes 20,000 visitors (a day?), you can make $500 per day.” (4,000 to make $100) subesh06

“DogForums.com gets 1800 daily unique visitors. I can almost guarantee that this site doesn’t make any more than 5-10k a month ($160 – $330 a day).” Which would give us a figure of 1100 a day to make $100. phpnetpro

“On my site I need 10,000 views (not unique) per day to make $70 a day. I have an advertising agreement for $4 CPM and another one for $3.25 CPM. Those ads are both on the same pages, that means for one page view I’m getting $7.25 CPM or $7.25 for each 1,000 views.” Ron Douglas

“CPM Advertisers want to reach a large audience, and they don’t deal much with sites which have less than 100k page views per month. Typical CPM rates (the amount an advertiser will pay you per thousand page views) might be around $5 or less, depending on the size of your site, your topic and your visitor’s demographics.” So, to earn $100 a day, you’d need about 20,000 impressions per day.

But, other income streams earn more. In my experience with affiliate marketing (such as talking readers into purchasing an ebook or other purchase), I’ve had results as good as $500 per 1000 visitors for a well-targeted product to a very specific audience.” Or 200 uniques per day to make $100. ThinkTraffic.net

“From my own personal experience one hundred unique visitors a day is plenty to start making money, albeit a small amount. Five hundred visitors a day can generate around $250 a week with proper advertising and visitor management. And by visitor management I mean blog design, advertising choice and placement, reader engagement, that sort of thing. One thousand visitors a day buys you a ticket to the $500 a week club, again with proper advertising and visitor management. It’s simply a case of picking the right affiliate programs and keeping your traffic engaged and on target. Sure, you’re never going to do anywhere near that figure with Google ads, but 1000 genuine unique visitors a day is plenty to make upwards of $25,000 per year, per blog. And from there, the sky’s the limit.

If you want a rough equation take the amount of unique visitors you have per day, and divide it by two to get a weekly income estimate. This will work for blogs that have good content, a targeted audience and good advertisement choice and placement.” ie. 1,400 a day for $100 Upstart Blogger

I’m getting $2-$4 per day from 80 visitors.” (2,000 to 4,000 a day) mnemtsas

The last quote is a good reminder. Just to check out your current income, and divide by current page views. That way, you can come up with a figure that is relevant to you. For your worst performing program, you might need 20,000 visitors a day to get $100.

However – remember that doubling your ads, adding on different or changing your selling strategy a little can easily double your profits, bringing your required traffic a long way down. You can easily make multiples (up to 30 times) of what you’d made with advertising, just by selling your own products and services.

We can see that getting 500 to 2,000 uniques a day (or around 1,000 uniques a day), is a good ballpark figure. Which is close to Upstart Blogger’s idea that 1,400 would bring you $100. If you are getting less than $100 a day with 2,000 uniques a day, it is time to think about optimizing this traffic.

On a personal note, at the time of writing I have a gaggle of small sites with about 2,400 uniques a day, one that gives me 1,300, another 2,400 (combined about 6,100). These are dwarfed by one that can give me anything up to 10,000 a day. For 10,000 a day, properly optimized, I should be aiming for about $5,000 a week.

How Much Traffic Do You Need to Make a Living Off Your Website?

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