How much traffic for real adsense income?

This question gets asked a lot, and the answer is: in general, quite a lot.

But why is this? because adsense is kinda designed for that. Advertisers need to get the most prospects to their site at the lowest cost possible, so as to make the most profit. Most topics people write about are either low paying, which happens because there's not much buying going on around that, or are topics with good profit potential but because of that, are heavily competed terms.

Let's take a look at both those scenarios:

First, the worst case scenario: low paying.

Quick numbers that are generally accepted to be achievable and a little on the conservative side. You know that income = clicks * cost per click. Also clicks = pageviews * click thru rate. By setting a target income goal we can find just how many pageviews are needed to get to our target income.

pageviews = income / [ click thru rate * cost per click ]
click thru rate = 1%, cost per click = $0.15, target income = $100
we have: pageviews = 100 / [ 0.01 * 0.15 ] = 66,667 pageviews

You see, 60k pageviews is quite a lot of them. That is because we considered a low CTR (click thru rate) and low CPC (cost per click), the $100 income goal was set because that's the minimum amount to get paid with adsense. Now what if you wanted that amount everyday? multiply by 30 and you see where i'm going...

In order to succeed with this kind of sites, is to have a lot of them, because since they are low competition, they are easy to rank for, and since there aren't many people searching for these low competition terms, you need to have a lot of them. Many of the successful Internet Marketers go down this road.

Now for high paying terms:

We set the same target income, but now with a generally accepted, achievable high paying click of $1, and also a very achievable and real 2% CTR.

pageviews = 100 / [ 0.02 * 1 ] = 5000, which is just over 7% of the required pageviews for low paying terms.

Now why isn't everyone making real income from these terms? because there are way too many people going after them, even unscrupulous marketers that use spam techniques to achieve high rankings in search, making it impossible for the average blogger to profit from them.

Most people will tell you that the gold mine everyone is looking for is a high paying, high traffic and low competition term or niche, because that makes it easy to rank, easy to profit and volume means lots of money.

There you have it, both extremes of the game we like to call make money online, now it's up to you to set your income goal and start building that traffic. Also remember, that not all traffic is created equal, some audiences are less likely to click on ads than others, you can find more on this on How to really make money from adsense, where I explain this in more detail.

Good luck, and see you around.