How much traffic do you need to make $1000 a month with an affiliate website?
I already talked about this semi in-depth in the past when I published my guide on how to make money with a small website, but today…
I want to get a bit more specific and give you the actual numbers you need to make $1000 a month possible with your content (affiliate marketing) website.
Now there are many – many – ways a website can make $1000 (and more) but for the most part, I’m talking about “traditional” blog-like websites which use the two major and most popular forms of monetization:
- Banner Ads (such as Mediavine or AdThrive), and
- affiliate marketing.
I’ve been making money online for the past 7 years and I have had a variety of websites in a variety of different niches (and learned a lot of lessons along the way) so you can rest assured that I will be sharing with you is what I’ve known to be true.
How Much Traffic Do You Need To Make Money With A Website?
Down below I’ll share a slightly larger list of ways you can monetize a website (I’ll even include a free training course which will teach you about all of them) but as I said in the introduction above;
I will be focusing on the ever-so-popular banner ads and affiliate marketing, so let’s take a deep dive into both methods here:
How Much Traffic Do You Need To Make $1000 With Banner Ads?
Any website monetization method you pick will have its pros and cons and when it comes to monetizing with banner ads, there’s definitely a lot of both.
Banner ads (such as Google AdSense) have the major benefit that you do not need to convert (sell) to a customer.
All you need to make money is eyeballs on your website (i.e. traffic) and you get paid when those people click the banners linking to advertisers.
The con is that to make $1000 a month with this method, you will need A LOT of traffic.
Google Adsense is the most popular option and a good starting point for many beginners.
The unfortunate thing about it though is that – to make at least $1000 a month – you will need around ~350,000 pageviews a month because on AdSense, the RPM (revenue per 1000 impressions) is not that good.
Of course, I am only speaking from my experiences and my numbers here, but you’ll often find that my results are pretty much similar to what others are reporting as well.
As you can see from the below screenshot – I am earning around $3 (converted from euros) per 1000 impressions:
So with that said, if you average around ~350,000 impressions per month (impressions are best tracked as pageviews inside the Google Analytics dashboard), that RPM will earn you your $1000 a month.
If you’re just starting out seeing that ~350,000 impressions per month target, you may be thinking this is going to be an uphill battle and you’re right; it’s not easy to get to that number (and keep a high-quality flow of traffic)
But the good news is; AdSense is not the only player in the game.
If you have a great website, with great content and a great traffic quality (such as Google SEO), you can potentially join premium Ad networks such as Ezoic and MediaVine.
Ezoic pays around $10 per thousand impressions and I believe MediaVine pays around $15 per RPM so definitely (on average) so that’s way better than AdSense.
To get your website earning $1000 a month with these networks, you’re going to need “just” 100,000 impressions per month with Ezoic and ~60,000 impressions with MediaVine (give or take).
The only minor drawback of these platforms is that to qualify for Ezoic, you need to have at least 10,000 sessions per month and to qualify to MediaVine, you need 50,000 sessions per month.
Of course, these numbers will vary a lot and this is not a math-proof guaranteed income either.
There’s a lot of factors that go into these metrics so the best way to get to the real number is by actually test them out once you’ve built your website to at least 10,000 pageviews a month (300+ a day) so you can qualify for a premium ad network.
How Much Traffic Do You Need To Make $1000 With Affiliate Marketing?
As we agreed already, 300,000 impressions are pretty damn hard to achieve for both beginners and seasoned pros alike.
That kind of traffic takes years to build up, so for beginners, I often recommend not to do any sort of banner ads.
This is because making $1000 a month with the business model I will share next (affiliate marketing) would be way easier and you can pull it off with very little traffic.
Let me explain…
Affiliate marketing is the business model where you sell other people’s products for a commission.
Commission rates vary, but if we go over to Clickbank (one of the leading affiliate programs), you will see an entire marketplace of products that you can sell for about 50% commission (with digital products, you always get a higher commission rate).
To keep things simple, let’s say you decide to become an affiliate for a product that earns you $50 per sale.
To make a $1000 a month with a website promoting this product, you are going to need to sell this product 20 times a month.
Sounds good.
With a decent traffic source coming into your website and a very conservative conversion rate is 0.5% (which can be achieved by just about anyone);
This means that you are only going to need around 4000 page views/sessions per month coming into your website to make your $1000.
Yep – you read that right.
If you have a product that pays you $50 per sale, and you convert just 1 person out of every 200 people that visit your website to buy that product, you are looking at around $1000 a month from a website that gets 4000 people a month.
The numbers don’t lie.
Of course, if you have low-quality traffic coming in (social media traffic tends not to convert all too well), then the conversion rate will be lower.
If you have a product that pays you $10, then you are going to need a lot more traffic (20,000 page views).
What Is The Quickest Way To Make $1000 A Month With A Website?
As you can see, affiliate marketing is by far the best way to monetize a brand new website.
The difference is staggering, and even though it may seem too good to be true, but it isn’t.
It’s all a numbers game – and if you play the numbers right, then yes;
You can actually make a lot of money with not that much traffic. Four thousand people a month is not hard to do and you can achieve that in 6 months or so (I will show you how soon).
While banner ads do not require you to convert a customer (all you need to do is get them to click on your banners), they do not pay you much for the traffic (eyeballs) you’re getting.
On the other hand, with affiliate marketing, you need to help “convert” the buyer, but if you do (which is not that hard) you are looking for a way bigger payoff.
If you’re new to making money online and you want to hit your first $1000 a month (which is a great goal for every beginner) then affiliate marketing is the way.
While I do believe there’s a product for every niche – there are certain niches (blog topics) where affiliate marketing does not work as well.
For example, recipe blogs – or news websites – tend to use banner ads for monetization because there are likely not too many products they can tie in within their content.
If you want to make money with affiliate marketing, you need to find a niche where there are buyers.
People looking at news are not in the “buying mode” thus banner ads are what works best.
On the other hand, people who are researching coffee machines are in a “buying mood” so for that audience, it’s best to monetize with affiliate marketing.
Do you get the difference here?
Now that we’ve covered that and you now have a roadmap to make your first $1000 a month with a brand new website;
Let’s take a look at how to actually get your site to a certain level of traffic which will then easily give you the traffic needed to make $1000 or more.
How To Get (High-Converting) Traffic To A Website
If you want to go the Banner Ads route, then you need to focus mostly on social media platforms.
As I said, social media tend not to convert as well as other methods I will mention below, but they are great at getting people to your website.
While I would advise you to stay away from Facebook and Twitter, if you want to leverage the reach and viral potential of a social network, I’d advise you to focus all your efforts on Pinterest.
I am a huge fan of Pinterest and yes, Pinterest has a lot of potentials to drive a lot of traffic to your website.
You won’t get to 100,000 impressions quickly, but with consistent effort, you will eventually get there. I have a great guide showing you 5 ways to make money on Pinterest if you’d like to take a closer look.
However, for affiliate marketing, you’re going to need something with a bit more of a punch, then is why SEO and email marketing is where you should place the bulk of your efforts.
All will be explained in my free training course below, but let’s talk about this for a second.
SEO:
Search Engine Optimisation has been a high-quality, high converting traffic source for the past 20 years and as long as Google keeps doing its job, it will remain as such.
This is because people searching on Google have search intent – as an affiliate marketer, you can target keywords who have the search intent to buy something.
Going back to our “coffee machines” example, people looking for “best coffee machines” are more than likely doing so because they intend to buy one today or soon.
Now giving you all the information on how to do SEO could be a whole book in itself, so I won’t be going through that here, but;
I have a free 10-day video training course for you here which will show you:
- How to pick a niche (blog topic)
- How to pick keywords
- How to create websites that rank in Google
- How to find affiliate products to promote & yes:
- How to make $1000 (or more) with your website.
If you’re serious about making money online and you’re finally ready to take the plunge and make it happen.
Email Marketing
Another great way to get traffic and make even more money is through the use of email marketing.
I always advise anyone to start collecting emails from day one as they are just too valuable to anyone trying to make money online. As the saying goes;
The money is in the list.
Email marketing is also covered in your free training course but if you want to learn more about it, then take a look at Ben Settle’s blog. Ben Settle is considered by many as the greatest email marketer of our time.
How To Make More Than $1000 With Your Website
So you now know how to much traffic you need to make $1000 and you also know which method is best to use (affiliate marketing being the clear winner).
But what if you want to make more than $1000?
Well, you should; $1000 (while great) is barely scratching the surface of the life-changing income the internet can provide.
If you can make $1000, you can make $10,000. If you can make $10,000, you can make $100,000.
The internet is so huge that while these numbers may seem unrealistic, they are possible, although yes, it tends to get harder the more zeros you add to your monthly income goal.
However, once you have the numbers down, it all comes down to scaling!
How To Scale Your Website To $1000+ A Month?
If your site is converting as it should be, then getting more traffic is the easiest way to make more money.
If you have the traffic, but the conversion rate is slacking, then increasing your conversion rate is something you should focus on.
If your traffic and conversion rate is great, then you may want to look to sell more products that pay a larger payout. Remember:
It takes more effort to sell a $1000 product than it does a $10 product, but it’s not 100X more effort.
Just something to keep in mind.
How To Make $1000 A Month With Your Affiliate Website (Training Course)
Last but not least, I want to bring your attention once again to Wealthy Affiliate’s free 10-day training course, which you can jump into right now and learn how to create a website that will go on to make $1000+ a month.
In my Wealthy Affiliate review, you can see how this course has changed my life. Thanks to what I learned, I now do affiliate marketing full-time.
If you’re serious about making money on the internet by creating simple websites (which cost less than $100 a year to maintain) and growing them to $1000+ in monthly revenue (which is achievable by anyone reading this);
I highly recommend you give this training course a try.
It’s free to get started with – no credit card required – and in 10 days, you are going to have all you need to start building these passive income assets online.
