Author: Dan Morris

OK. Let’s talk through what we would need to do to make $2,000/month. Looking at the ‘choosing a monetization model” post, there are several ways income can flow to you from your site. How can we make $2,000 per month from each of those sources?

Amazon Affiliate Income

Everything on Amazon is available to affiliates. Many do product reviews and link to Amazon for the sale because of the trust buyers put into the checkout process. But making great money with Amazon isn’t easy.

To make $2,000, we would need to sell $28,571 worth of merchandise (at an average 7% commission). If the products we sold were $50 each, we would need to sell 571 products. Conservatively it would take $57,142 people converting at 1% to accomplish that.

If we were to do that in one month, we would need 2,200 people per day to the page featuring the affiliate link. That’s if the post was a review or recommendation post. A sidebar, banner or footer ad would likely take more people to convert at 1% unless the products has tremendous relevance to the site.

Taming the AdSense Beast

AdSense is a fantastic way to make money, for some sites. I’ve worked with sites that bring in $2,000/month in AdSense revenue with as little as 1,400 visitors per day (averaging $.42/click). But not every site is designed to generate a good income with Adsense. A well optimized AdSense monetized site has all the right ad sizes, colors, fonts and placement.

Typically the goal of a high paying AdSense site is information. Posts are written to provide the reader with information on the topic, not deals, product reviews, recommendations or squeeze pages. When the only goal is information the reader is not “asked” to take an action but is free to click the links on the page that look interesting.

Compared to the information sites I mentioned above, deal sites that get 1,400 visitors per day may only bring in about $300/month in AdSense revenue (with a $.38/click average). And there’s nothing wrong with that. Deal, product review and affiliate sites may employ AdSense but primarily push their audiences to coupons, affiliate links and other monetization sources. They do fine overall, but their AdSense income doesn’t compare to that of information sites.

In either case, AdSense income requires traffic and a good cost per click. Spyfu.com is a great place to determine which keywords generate high paying AdSense ads. For instance “Los Angeles Personal Injury” ads pay $2.60/click. Create a site about California personal injury attorneys and you’d only need 25 clicks/day to make $2,000. That sounds much easier doesn’t it?

Micro Continuity Membership

Ever think about starting a membership site? There are some fantastic money makers out there. At a mere $2.99/month, you’d need 668 members to clear $2,000. Ramping up from scratch, you would need to add 66 new people per month to get there in one year or 33 to get there in two years. But the nice thing about low-price continuity is that few people cancel – which means growth today is growth tomorrow.

There are a great deal of “super advanced training” membership sites that charge $299, $499 and upwards of $1,999/month. Can you move your audience to that level of expertise? People pay a lot more than that for college – so it’s not unreasonable. The question is do you have an audience willing to pay for that level of personalized knowledge?

The good thing about high ticket membership programs is that you don’t need many to make money. In fact, you may need only one per month to achieve $2,000.

Corporate Sponsorship

Corporate sponsors come in many forms. I learned last year at the Savvying Blogging Summit that companies will pay $250 – $300 for Sponsored Blog Posts (not every company of course), but if you can land those deals you would only need to write eight per month (obviously not the traditional route). Some sites have Sponsors that pay a monthly fee for a set scope of work. Often times that exceeds $2,000/month – thus it is worth looking into for sure.

Private Banner Ads

This is the most ambiguous of the lot. I’ve seen monthly banner ads ranging from $35/month to $19,500. This method of monetization is totally dependent on the site traffic, influence, target demographic and overall value in the niche. A site seeing 500 visitors per day could easily sell a banner ad for $50/month. Doing the extra work to include tracking so you could prove your worth to the advertiser in months 2, 3 and 4 is an important component of the long term success. Otherwise, you spend a good deal of time trying to find sponsors each month.

Finally, the Combination

No one hoping to make $2,000 in extra income should put all their eggs in one basket. Similar to relying on Google for traffic, anytime a source goes away your income is at great risk. So here’s a combination of revenue streams that could easily produce $2,000/month for a site getting 500 visitors per day.

Source	Income
Adsense Income**($.40/click)	$210
Sponsored Blog Post	$250
Amazon Affiliate Sales	$120
3 Private Banner Ads	$150
10 Ebook Sales	$90
Amazon Kindle sales of Ebook ($9.99)	$49.95
Amazon Ebook Sales ($7.99)	$39.95
Coupon Banner Ad Commissions	$250
In-text ads	$30
Advanced information membership site 40 members	$160
“How To” Webinar 30 people $22/each	$660
	$2,000

There’s no getting around the “business side” of blogging. If you’re hoping to make $2,000/month there’s little chance you’re going to do so by luck. Putting together a plan like this means you’ll be able to see the growth each month till you get there.