How Much Traffic Does A Website Need To Make Money

It's been seven years since I started my first blog.

From the beginning to today, a frequent question I've asked is, "How much traffic does a website need to make money?"

As the years have passed and I've become a professional, naturally my answers and the question's meaning has evolved. Also my definition of "making money" looks entirely different.

Whether you're a new blogger who wants to start seeing money, or a million dollar business that wants to better monetize its traffic to hit 8- or 9-figures, this one's for you.

Read this to unlock how many page views you truly need to start making major money from your site.

Why Is Website Traffic Important?

Before we answer the main question, let's establish the basics. A general rule is more traffic produces more money for a business.

Now it would be wonderful if every visitor becomes a customer. But no one's that lucky.
The reality is, most websites only have between 1-3% conversion rates from their website traffic.

So if 100 visitors see your product page, odds are only 1-3 are giving their hard earned money to you.

What are the other 97-99% doing? Clicking away without buying.

Your website is also an information hub for all things about your company and what value you offer to consumers.

If people don't visit your website, odds are they won't be aware of your brand, let alone know what you offer. And if they don't know what you offer, they can't buy what you offer.

How To Track Traffic

How much traffic does a website need to make money

Since we've established your traffic is tied at the hip to your website revenue produced, you must know how much traffic your site is generating.

To accomplish this, use the trusted industry tool, and it's a free one, Google Analytics.

By integrating your site with Google Analytics, you now have accurate data measuring:

Number of users who visited your site
Pages they viewed
Bounce rate
Session duration

Use this tool to track progress and make sure you're seeing consistent positive results.

If you see that your traffic is dropping, you can be proactive and analyze what the problem is to reduce the time you see decreasing numbers.

Your long term goals should always be to increase your website traffic, as the money will surely follow.

Now it's time to answer what you've been waiting for: How much traffic does a website need to make money?

How To Track Website Income

The next sections break down how to make money from your site.

Before we go into the calculations, you need to know your company's cost per click (CPC) and click through rate (CTR) to plug into the equations.

A cost per click is how much you get charged for paid advertising. This is the amount that you are paid by the ad platform you use, each time someone clicks an ad on your site.

A CTR is a click through rate. A click through rate is the percentage rate of visitors that saw and clicked your ad divided by those who saw it and didn't click.

Once you know these, you can plug them into the following equations to find your estimated traffic you need to generate.

Traffic Needed To Make Money From Ads

We decided on setting the first bar at $3,000 a month, which comes out to $100 a day.
This a standard salary for an individual that would allow them to replace their full-time job with building their online business.

There are different factors that affect the amount of traffic you will need to generate $100 a day. In our first example, we're only assuming you're using an ad platform like Adsense to make money.

However, having others products or services and the cost you sell them for is a large factor that determines the traffic you need to make money.

Besides blogging to get ad money, you likely also offer products or services like ebooks, courses, or individual coaching. These also are factors that determine the amount of traffic you need to make money.

Below is a model assuming you're needing to make $3,000 a month and are only using ads to monetize your site.

Step One

The first step is to figure out how many clicks gets us to our goal of $100 a day ($3,000 a month).

To find this, you need to use this equation: money desired / CPC. Say my CPC is $2 per click.

The number of clicks I need to generate is $100/$2, which is 50 clicks.

Step Two

The next step is to determine the total traffic you need for $100 per day.

To find this, you need to use this equation: number of clicks / CTR. The number of clicks figure comes from step one.

Say my CTR is 2%.

The total traffic I need per day to generate $100 would be 50 / 0.02, which comes out to 2,500 visitors.

I need 2500 visitors per day to my website to generate $100 a day.

Step Three

The final step is to find the total traffic you need to generate per month to get to our goal.

To find this, you need to use this equation: number of visitors per day multiplied by number of days in a month.

For the sake of consistency, we use 30 days for the number of days in a month.

The number of visitors per day comes from the equation in step two.

For this example, the total traffic needed to generate per month is 2,500*30 which becomes 75,000 visitors to your site per month.

Remember, these are estimates and the number of traffic needed for your business depends on your own CPC and CTR figures.

Traffic Needed For A 6-Figure Business

Depending on how much you charge for products will determine how much traffic you need to generate a 6-figure profit. Like the rule the more traffic generally means more money, a higher sales price for your products or services generally makes it easier to generate a higher annual revenue.

For example, if you sell your products or services for $100, you will need to sell 1,000 units during the year to generate a 6-figure profit.

Assuming your conversion rate is the average 2%, you need to generate 1,000/0.02 or 50,000 visitors to your site.

That can be overwhelming to look at. However, if you sell $1,000 products, you only need 5,000 visitors to your site, in this example.

Use this example to figure out how much traffic you will need to create a 6-figure business.

This is an important exercise because what you sell and where you direct your traffic, to your own products or ads, truly determines what you make.

Traffic Needed For A 7-Figure Business

It's a different game evolving from a 6-figure business to a 7-figure one.

This is why Scott Oldford takes a different approach by stressing the importance of quality of leads over the quantity of leads.

Always remember this idea as your business matures.

To increase the quality of your leads, you need to understand the following:

Who your customer specifically is
What your customer needs
How you can uniquely help your customer

Knowing these answers positions you to win new business once visitors view your website.

Having fewer leads, also means you're filtering out the tire kickers and cheap prospective clients. Then your sales team is only left to get ideal clients for what you offer.

Once they buy and enjoy having their problem solved by your business, a special thing happens. You'll gain loyal customers who keep coming back to you, no matter if your business pivots over the years.

They will also promote your business website through word-of-mouth and social media to encourage their friends and colleagues to visit your company.

Having quality leads and truly understanding those leads will ultimately be what takes your business from 6-figures to 7-figures.

Knowing all of this, how can you increase your traffic? We're glad you asked.

Pro Tips To Gaining Traffic

Gaining website traffic.

There are two main methods to gaining website traffic: organic methods and paid methods.

You can generate traffic organically with search engine optimization (SEO). This is done by using keywords to get your website to show up at the top of Google for specific keyword searches.

We specialize in SEO and would love to help your business with gaining organic traffic.

You can also use paid advertising to generate traffic to your website. This is paying to reach your target audience on Google, Facebook, and Instagram. We also offer paid advertising services. Paid ads are by far the quickest way to get new leads and sales fast.

Know that you can't expect to see immediate results when you're trying to increase your website traffic organically.

You're entering a long-term mission that you should constantly be focusing and improving upon for weeks, months, and years.

Honestly, speaking from experience, it can take upwards of 6 months to see results from your efforts.

But have the patience, and six months from now you'll start to reap what you sowed.

Here are some pro tips to play the long game with generating website traffic and turning that into massive paydays.

1. Know Your Audience

Knowing who your audience is and their interests is extremely important to driving website traffic.

If you don't know who to market to and where to find them, you will never generate website traffic.

Figure out where your target spends most of their time and advertise your content there in the form of free content and ads.

You should also know how people find and share your content before you even create it.

Knowing this helps you create your content to conform to the platform where they're most active.

Another idea is to get in the habit of is to track your audience and how they change over time. Is your content meeting them where they are, and consistently?

2. Promote Existing Content

Don't forget about what you've already created!

Most of what you've produced is still relevant to your followers.

It's okay to promote existing content. Link to your past content in your new blog posts, share on all social media platforms, and do it again since social media is a place where it's fine to post different content leading back to the same blog post.

Doing this will direct the user to your site for information instead of your competitor's site.

3. Focus On Leads You Already Have

It can be easy to get caught up in the excitement of generating new traffic and leads.

However, retention is still a vital component to generating page views and dollars.

Spending serious time figuring out what your existing customers and prospects need is always a profitable exercise.

One successful way we keep a pulse on our customers is asking them three questions.

Customer survey questions

Not only does this show you truly care, it brings new content and sales opportunities to the forefront. (You can ask prospects a different three questions to gauge their interest level.)

When your customers say, "I've really been needing this, do you guys have anything like that?" You can write a post on this topic, and then send it to that customer who will feel like they have an entire blog post dedicated to them. That creates a special bond, and leads to sales.

Studies show when selling to customers you'll likely see about 65% of your existing customers buy your products compared to the estimated 10% of new customers.

You should be giving at least 50% of your focus to this group because they can help you quickly increase your conversion rates.

SEO agency results.

4. Create A Resource Page

Creating a resource page on your website undoubtedly increases traffic and builds relationships with peers.

A resource page is a page on your site that is dedicated to recognizing websites, products and people that you feel your followers would be interested in.

By linking these resources to your site and letting the creators know, you create positive relationships with others and build goodwill in your niche.

Reaching out to these people and saying you admire their work begins the process of creating a mutually beneficial relationship.

They will also often share your website because they're featured on it. Once they share it, you now have a segment of their followers who will visit your site.

Now that's how you spread value and create momentum for your business.

5. Create Collaborative Posts

This is another way to build relationships with others in your industry.

You probably know by now how good blogs are for business. If you don't, publishing new content for your audience should be a huge part of your marketing strategy.

A roundup post, however, might not be a part of your content strategy.

Gather up some people in your industry, the bigger presence these people have the better, and ask if they would be interested in writing a small section for a large blog post. They will get a feature during their section to show your followers where to find them.

If they agree, they're likely to share the post because they wrote a piece of it. Once they share it, your website is now exposed to their following.

Every time you do a roundup post, relationships blossom, traffic spikes up, and business development grows.

6. Repurpose Your Content

One thing a lot of website owners don't consider is many people have different preferences for how they consume content.

Only producing content on one medium is a big mistake and leaves massive gaps in reaching entire customer segments.

The good news is that you can take content that you have posted on one medium and repurpose it to be posted on another medium.

For example, you can take a blog post you wrote and repurpose it as a podcast episode. Now you're reaching a market of people that prefer to get their content on blogs and people that prefer to get their content through podcasts.

Or copy what we do for our customer and friend Dr. David Puder. He records a podcast and then we repurpose the audio and add a waveform motion graphic to serve his YouTube audience.

Repurpose podcast content

Same amount of work for him, with double the distribution.

Increasing your presence on different platforms is one of the most effective ways to generate more website traffic.

7. Turn Emails Into New Traffic

For most businesses, getting people to sign up for their email lists is the first step in converting them to a customer.

You can also use your emails to generate traffic to your website by sharing new content in a newsletter and creating an email signature that links to your site.

The link can be a landing page to a product you're trying to promote, a recent blog post you created or simply the homepage of your website.

And your signature can change as the products you promote change and the blogs you post update.

These are only a few methods to generate traffic to your website. For more, check out our 20 tips to increasing traffic.

Conclusion

Now you have a better idea of how much traffic does a website need to make money.

Remember, this exact number will be unique to your business and goals.

If you need help in ranking on Google and getting prospective customers to visit your site, you're going to love our SEO services. We've made customers and ourselves millions of dollars by ranking their website at the top of Google.

Either way, good luck creating those long term goals and seeing your website traffic soar!

What's your best tip for getting traffic to your website?