No website is perfect – not even one earning high commissions or generating large revenues. There are always improvements that can be made: your website will always need further development and effective optimization. So it makes sense to periodically check for increased revenue potential, then improve the website to that effect.

As digital publishers, you can improve your website earnings by fixing technical errors in your site and by improving your existing content. Add in the right advertising revenue source for good earnings, and you can turn your publication into a recurring revenue machine.

Because if you’re like many websites, you may get 80 percent of your results from 20 percent of your pages. This is especially the case on older or larger sites. Newer content tends to bury older content and make the older pages harder to reach. Also, links and images break. Over time those pages bring less and less value.

But the solution is not necessarily to cut out the old content! Older content has value. Instead, fix the problems and improve your content. And find ways to bring older content out into the light. More revenue potentials will be mentioned in this article.

• How Much Revenue does a Website Generate?
• How do Websites Increase Revenue?
• How Much does AdSense Pay Per 1000 Views?
• How do I find out how much my Website is Worth?
• How much money does 1 Million YouTube Views Make?
• 8 Steps to Developing Ad Revenue from Your Website

How Much Revenue does a Website Generate?

According to Business Insider, over 800 million active websites crowded the Internet as of March 2019. As the Go-Gulf.com website notes, 70 new domains, each hosting a single or many different websites, are registered every 60 seconds.

Read Also: Why Ad Relevancy is Important in Boosting Your Website Revenue

Not every newly created website launches to make money for its proprietor or owner, of course, but many of them actually do just that. How much money the average website owner makes from such sites depends on many factors, however.

Websites and Revenue

Whether a website makes its owner any money depends on the purpose of the website and the effort the owner devotes to making it a moneymaker. A website focused strictly on selling merchandise, for example, depends on sales revenues.

Websites properly set up, or optimized, to attract visitors from the Web looking for specific content are different. So-called content websites use several methods to generate revenue, which generally ranges from pennies daily up to thousands of dollars or more monthly.

Websites and Advertisements

To make money from a content website, its owner first must monetize it, or build it to generate income. Typically, noncommercial or nonbusiness websites attempt to generate income from ads posted on their pages.

Whenever Internet users visit a website and click on a posted ad, a small amount of money, usually about 15 cents, goes to the website proprietor from the advertiser or its agent. A website that generates a thousand ad clicks per day would earn its owner $15 daily or $450 monthly.

Website Affiliate Marketing

Content websites can also attract revenue from what’s called affiliate marketing. For example, a website about golfing could include ads from golf equipment makers.

Website-based affiliate marketers try to make money from commissions paid by hosted advertisers when website visitors click on ads and then buy whatever those advertisers are selling. Owners of websites with affiliate marketing programs can make thousands monthly through earned commissions or even make themselves rich if they work very hard.

Optimizing Your Website

In 2012, 51 million new websites appeared, meaning competition among websites for viewers is strong and becoming stronger. If you hope to make income from a website, ensure potential visitors can find it on the Web through major search engines like Google or Yahoo.

Most website proprietors use a variety of search engine optimization techniques to attract visitors, such as providing fresh, high-quality content that Internet users are looking for. Popular websites usually appear on the first page of search engine results.

How do Websites Increase Revenue?

Publishers were met with a lot of changes in 2019. There were endless Google Core Algorithm updates and preparation for new privacy regulations like the CCPA. On top of that, publishers had to create new content, grow quality traffic, and attempt to increase revenues. Despite these challenges, many publishers want to know how to increase AdSense revenue in 2020 and beyond.

So how did these publishers grow their RPM, total revenue, traffic, and engagement metrics? Now we are going to take you through 5 ways to increase AdSense revenue for your website.

1. Create more Content

One of the most effective ways to increase AdSense revenue in 2020 is to write more content. There’s no secret that websites that produce the most content grow more quickly than sites that produce less. This is why serial site builders tend to outsource their content writing to help scale site growth over time.

The data from the performance report showed that the 10 websites with the highest revenue growth wrote an average of 87 blogs. In contrast, the 10 websites that had the least amount of revenue growth wrote an average of 25 pieces of content in 2019.

Additionally, our top digital content trends survey found that 71.9% of publishers said writing long-form content was the most successful tactic for their website growth in 2019. Many publishers can relate to this tactic being their top priority. But is long-form content the best way to increase AdSense revenue?

What’s more important is to notice that both the highest and lowest ends of the word count ranges cause earnings to suffer the most. Articles with fewer than 250 words and articles with over 5000 words had the lowest EPMVs.

Publishers using Ezoic’s Big Data Analytics have the benefit of seeing revenue by word count to understand what length earns the most money for their specific audience. They can also see how content length affects engagement metrics like bounce rate and page engaged time.

2. Focus on Video Content

As of January 2020, YouTube is the second-most popular social network on the web. There are over 2 billion users, and over 1 billion hours of video content is consumed on the platform every day.

Outside of creating more long-form content, 45% of publishers surveyed said their biggest priority was to create more video content in 2020. This is a top priority for a good reason. On top of the massive amount of users on the platform, video consumption as a whole is up 59 percent since 2016.

Natively hosted videos will also appear in these search results, too. This is why if you search breaking news, often you find natively hosted videos from news websites.

Backlinko has a fantastic guide on how to rank YouTube videos, and here are the search terms Google tends to use video results in a SERP:

• How-to keywords
• Reviews
• Tutorials
• Anything fitness or sports-related
• Funny videos

Also, there are studies showing that relevant video content embedded in written content drives more engagement and revenue.

3. Improve Engagement Metrics

Most people agree that a “good” user experience is where user engagement is high. The visitor is reading content, viewing multiple pages, and sharing the content across social platforms. Additionally, we’ve known for some time that time on page is positively correlated with earnings.

The same is true for page views per visit and other user engagement metrics. In a recent study, we also discovered that certain categories of websites have better engagement metrics than others.

While certain categories of websites earn higher ad rates from advertisers than others, the relationship between website categories, engagement metrics, and ad earnings isn’t as clear. The one category of site that came out on top on all fronts was home & garden. It was the highest-earning website category with the best average engagement metrics.

How can publishers increase engagement metrics on their site? Here are some proven tactics that improve visitor engagement and SEO:

• Writing long-form articles (Additionally, use the inverted pyramid style of writing)
• If you produce unique video content, embed a video that’s relevant within your post
• Strike the right balance of display ads throughout your site
• Write step-by-step “how-to” content that’s relevant to your niche
• Avoid mobile optimization errors on your site

4. Use Different Revenue Streams

25 percent of publishers surveyed said that diversifying their revenue streams was their highest priority in 2020.

Diversifying revenue streams is becoming an increasingly popular strategy for publishers. Why? Think of growing your website like investing in the stock market. Investing in many different stocks (like an index fund) is far less risky and volatile compared to investing all your money into a single stock.

Some publishers are afraid of display ads affecting their affiliate revenue, or vice versa. In reality, most affiliate sites earn more money from adding display ads than the little they lose in affiliate income.

Serial affiliate website builder Ben Adler has found great success in diversifying his revenue streams. After a year, display ads didn’t affect his affiliate income. His traffic and affiliate income stayed the same, but he just made more total revenue with ads. The benefit of getting more into ads is if you have evergreen content on your site, you could have that information on your site for 5 years and it will never go out of date.

Here are some ways you can diversify your revenue streams in 2021:

• Sponsored/branded content
• Product sales
• Direct deals
• Subscription-based or donation-based models

5. Grow the Value of your Ad Inventory

Growing the value of your ad inventory refers to increasing the monetary value of the physical ad space available on your website to advertisers.

How do publishers accomplish this? There are many strategies people use:

• A/B testing: Are 6 ads on a page better for UX, or is it 7? Let’s say 60% of people prefer layout A with 6 ads, but 40% preferred layout B with 7 ads. If you choose the option preferred by the majority, you’re now losing out on the 40% of the audience that preferred something different.
• Ad-ops shops/third-party monetization: These players jam a lot of ads on the page to gain a higher total eCPM (total price paid for all the ads on a page). This may earn you more money in the short term, but in the long term, ad dilution happens.  Additionally, more ads on the page may cause visitors to visit fewer pages, leading to lower ad revenues.

Furthermore, some ads can decrease in value and cause your entire site to make less money over time. Why? Advertisers don’t want to pay for ads that people are not engaging with.

The reason behind this is that all visitors to a site behave differently.  We’ve learned some of the visitor behavior and ad attributes that affect the impact of ads on user experience are:

• Time of day they visit
• Day of the week they visit
• Traffic source
• Device type
• Scroll depth
• Geographic location
• Ad color
• Size of the ads
• Ad type
• Location of the ads
• Number of ads per page

How Much does AdSense Pay Per 1000 Views?

You probably know that making money from a blog or website is a very lucrative proposition. Note that Adsense is perhaps one of the best choices for bloggers who would like to monetize their websites and blogs. Google Adsense is a valuable advertising program, and it allows users to run adverts on their site, blog, or even YouTube videos and easily get paid when a visitor clicks on them. 

You can earn $100, $200, or even $1,000 a day using Google Adsense from a home office. Did you know that many website owners and bloggers are doing it? Perhaps the key things you need are planning, determination, work, and passion for both your topic and niche.

Note that Google charges advertisers on the basis of ad clicks. As a publisher, you will get 68 percent of the click amount (and 51 percent when it comes to Google AdSense for search).

The commission you will receive depends mainly on the competition as well as CPC in a niche. In most cases, the commission per click will range between $0.20 and $15. Also, a majority of niches fetch less than $3 a click to publishers.¹ However, remember that some niches can be more profitable.

The amount that you will earn will depend on many factors, and some of them are as follows.

Your Page Content

The content of your webpage drives your earnings more than any other variable. For example, pages that are regarding specific topics and are also high in demand by many advertisers (and hence, there is plenty of “ad inventory”) will likely earn more money compared to generalized news pages or webpages that are “multi-topic.” So, the crux is this: For the highest Adsense revenue, you should have shorter pages which are laser-focused on specific topics.

Ad Placement

There is no doubt that ad placement is critical in Google Adsense. If visitors do not click on your adverts, regardless of how many times they are displayed, you will earn nothing. The location of ads is really important and depends on your website layout and the traffic. However, a great starting point when it comes to the best places to locate adverts is going to the Google Heat Map page.

How do I find out how much my Website is Worth?

There are many reasons why you might be looking to find out how much your website is worth, and it can be difficult to know where to begin placing a value on it.

And, of course, while the true worth of a website is that which someone is willing to pay for it, you can certainly begin to understand how much you should be able to make if you were to sell your site.

 how do you value a website? 

The Earnings Multiplier Calculation

As a quick calculation, the value of a website is often regarded as being between 24 and 36 times your monthly revenue, known as an earnings multiplier.

That means that if your website brings in $10,000 each month, you could expect to sell it for somewhere between $240,000 and $360,000. 

Of course, this doesn’t take into account your net profit, the required investment of time, the business’ structure and set up or the breakdown of traffic sources, and the like, but you can at least come some way to figuring out how much your website could be worth.

For example, a website that has organic as its main source of traffic, rather than paid, will almost always have a higher valuation due to the costs associated with customer acquisition. You may be surprised to hear that most websites are sold for less than $100,000.

A combination of factors goes into the price that is achieved in a final sale, not forgetting that, as mentioned above, a website is only worth what someone is willing to pay.

Yes, there are tools out there that will allow you to understand a rough estimation on the value, using simple formulas as we shared above. Still, the real test is whether a potential buyer is willing to make that investment and if the website owner is prepared to sell at the market value.

It is often the case that it makes the most sense for a website’s owner to retain their assets and receive the monthly revenues than make a sale today; unless, of course, they are going to receive a higher price than market value.

In reality, the sale price of a website usually sits between the market value and the seller’s anticipated value (how much they are prepared to sell for).

How much money does 1 Million YouTube Views Make?

It’s a question that has undoubtedly crossed your mind (and ours) with answers that will differ from case to case, depending on factors such as partnerships, types of content, and especially the individuals behind the channels themselves.

A million views – in this case – is referring to revenue generated purely from the video’s view count, excluding brand deal mentions, merchandising, and so forth. As we all know, the more successful figures out there tend to market themselves across multiple income streams beyond the video itself.

And you may be surprised to learn a million views doesn’t actually pay all that much. In fact, since the platform’s drastic change to advertising rates and monetization, the barebone numbers might even shock you.

Case in point, we have the extremely high-profile David Dobrik. In addition to his wildly expensive antics and active status as one of the better-paid YouTubers going around, as it turns out, the revenue he sees from a million+ video is less-than-stellar.

For context, this is a content creator who boasts of almost 18 million subscribers on his main channel alone, another 8 million on his secondary channel, hundreds of millions in views every month, and has even leveraged his internet celebrity into mainstream fame.

Prior to what many have dubbed as YouTube’s “Adpocalypse“, Dobrik was raking in US$275,000 per month for over 60 million views. Since then, he only makes US$2,000 per month for over 200 million.

This is largely due to the fact that his videos are flagged for being potentially explicit – which can mean anything from containing swears, sexual references, drug references, and even unsavory political stances (not that he has any). You know, things advertisers don’t really want to be associated with their image. On top of that, there’s also the issue of copyrighted music, which only further drains the puddle.

So how does someone like David Dobrik afford to give away Lamborghinis, Teslas, Apple products, and literal piles of cash on regular instalments of his vlog? As he has revealed, it’s mostly due to the partnerships and brand deals obtained with the likes of SeatGeek, Bumble, merchandise sales, and semi-regular physical events.

Business Insider decided to further investigate the matter of how much YouTubers earn for 1 million views by interviewing five (5) current personalities. Here’s what they discovered.

• Jade Darmawangsa – US$3,600
• Austin Alexander – US$6,000
• Marina Mogilko – US$10,000
• Shelby Church – between US$2,000 and US$30,000
• Kevin David – US$40,000

8 Steps to Developing Ad Revenue from Your Website

There are three primary ways to monetize (that is, generate revenue from) a website:

1. Ecommerce . Receive profits from direct sales of products or services.
2. Affiliate marketing. Receive referral fees from merchants when a product or service you linked to results in a sale as a result of your link.
3. Advertising. Receive ad revenue for displaying advertising on your website, blog, or e-mail newsletter.

It’s the third approach that we’ll be exploring in this article.

Your dream may be to build a website, have people visit in droves, and then rake in ad revenue while relaxing at the beach. It’s a common dream, but an unrealistic one — for most people and businesses, that is. If you have the right kind of site and if you work hard and smart, however, you might be able to achieve at least modest advertising revenue from your site. Whether you’ll put in much beach-time, remains to be seen.

Ways of Paying for Advertising

There are three main methods of pricing advertising:

1. CPM (cost per thousand views). This is the traditional way television, radio, magazine, and newspaper advertising is sold. A few higher value sites can sell ads this way on the Internet, but it’s not easy.
2. CPC (cost per click) or PPC (pay per click). In this pay-for-performance model, the advertiser pays only if a potential customer cares enough about the ad to click on it. By far the largest amount of Internet advertising is sold via this model.
3. CPA (cost per action) is either pay-per-lead or pay-per-sale. Affiliate marketing (which we’ll explore in another article in this series) runs on this model.

Now let’s look at the 8 steps to ad revenue generation.

1. Provide high quality content centered around a commercially viable industry

Unless your website is related to an industry that is commercially viable, the chances are you won’t be able to make much money on advertising. Simply speaking, advertisers will only pay you for advertising if it helps them make money.

Imagine a person who is a true expert on English grammar. He has developed a whole website around correct grammatical usage. It’s even getting some traffic. Consider who such a site might attract:

• English teachers
• Non-native speakers trying to learn correct English
• Students who have an assignment to complete for class

Are these people likely to spend money on this topic? Not likely. A dictionary publisher might want to advertise here, but since the book sells for $25 or less and there isn’t hot competition for dictionaries these days, publishers won’t pay much for advertising. If you had online English classes, you might want to advertise. But still, these ads wouldn’t sell for much.

Should my grammatical friend expect much advertising revenue? No.

Not only do you need a commercial field, you must also provide high quality content:

1. You won’t get much attention if people don’t learn from your website. If they learn, they’re more likely to return.
2. The Google Panda algorithm update tends to give lower rankings to sites with poor content, measured by such things as bounce rate, the presence of obtrusive ads, and evidence of “scraping” or duplication of something on another site.
3. Internet users are getting more sophisticated and won’t settle for mediocre content. They’ll leave quickly if they don’t find what they’re looking for.

2. Optimize your content on high-priced keywords

Assuming that you’ve got step 1 under control, now move to optimize your content around high-priced keywords. You can use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to find out what keywords get the highest bids in your niche.

You optimize your content in two primary ways.

1. Keyword focus. Select the two or three dozen highest priced keywords in your industry or niche. Then write content about these topics.
2. Keyword placement. Put high-priced keywords (wherever appropriate) in your:
   • Title tags
   • Subheadings
   • Alt tags for graphics
   • Filenames for graphics and webpages
   • In hypertext linked words and phrases.
   • In the first and last paragraphs

It’s not enough to have great content. You’ll want to focus your efforts on the most profitable topics, and then make sure your content is indexed correctly by the search engines for these profitable keywords.

3. Generate lots of traffic to your site

Perhaps this goes without saying, but unless you have lots and lots of traffic to your website, you won’t make much money selling advertising. How do you get traffic? This is a complex topic, but mainly three ways:

1. Search Rankings. Get highly ranked on the search engines for your keywords. In part, you achieve this by step 2….
2. Links. Get links and recommendations to your website from other sites, blogs, social media, directories, etc.
3. Ads. Pay for advertising to get people to your site — so they’ll see the advertising there.

If you were to try to sell advertising directly, one of the first questions their media buyers will ask you is: What is your monthly number of unique visitors or pageviews? Unless you have healthy numbers, they won’t pursue you. Get the traffic and you may begin to attract interested advertisers.

4. Determine what kind of advertising is selling in this niche

If you’re pursuing an advertising revenue strategy for your site, you will have done a lot of looking at competition websites to see what makes them good — and to determine how you can be even better.

Type and Size of Advertising. Is most of the advertizing in your industry Google text ads or display ads (that is, graphic ads)? If display ads are popular, what size appears most often?

As of February 28, 2011, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) lists seven standard ad units (dimensions in pixels are in parentheses):

• Medium Rectangle (300 x 250)
• Rectangle (180 x 150)
• Leaderboard (728 x 90)
• Skyscraper (160 x 600)
• Half Page Ad (300 x 600)
• Button 2 (120 x 60)
• Microbar (88 x 31)

One size that’s shown as “delisted” is the Full Banner (468 x 60). You’ll still see this widely on the Internet, but not on sites that are seeking to sell to advertisers that pay well. Sometimes you’ll see other sizes, but for designing your own page, stick to the most popular sizes in your niche or industry.

Source of Advertising. Now look deeper to determine the source of advertising. Most third-party ads have two URLs.

1. Intermediate URL of the ad server. The adserver is the company that displays the ad as well as counting and collecting information on the click-through, then redirects the user’s web browser to the…
2. Destination URL on the landing page of the advertiser’s website, where the Internet user is supposed to end up.

If you can figure out what the adserver company is, you can learn something about the advertising type. The intermediate URL can sometimes be seen by putting your cursor over the ad (without clicking) and looking for a URL at the bottom left of your web browser frame.

However, some types of ad technologies don’t disclose the intermediate URL — and it’s hard to see in the URL in the bar at the top of your browser, since it redirects so fast. Another approach is to right-click to “view source.”

What you’re looking for is the name of the adserving company (not the brand of the ad serving software). For example, DoubleClick (now owned by Google) is often used to display higher-priced ads on better sites.

Ad networks, on the other hand, display lower-priced ads. You’ll see some of the names of ad networks in step 7 below. The detective work you do here may pay off in useful intelligence to help you develop your own strategy.

5. Design your web page template for advertising

Now that you’ve gotten an idea of how companies tend to advertise in your niche or industry, you need to design your webpage template to accommodate the most popular ad sizes.

Be careful not to so overload your webpage template so it looks cluttered. Don’t be greedy. A few ads designed to fit nicely on your webpage will achieve a professional appearance without looking overdone. And only the most prominent ads will get many click-throughs anyway.

Typically, a site offering advertising will display a leaderboard (728×90) across the top, with another ad size along the right side of the page. Google AdSense ads can be placed anywhere on the page. But too often they tend to clutter the site and make it more difficult for readers to get to the information they desire. Be wise and experiment.

Now consider three types of advertising on your site. You may even end up mixing these types.

6. Consider Google AdSense text and display advertising

Google is the biggest advertising company on the Internet. Their AdWords ads that appear on search results generate a huge amount of revenue for the company. But you can put Google AdSense ads on your own website. To learn more, see https://www.google.com/adsense/

The advantage of AdSense ads is that Google tries hard to display only ads that are relevant to the keywords on your webpage. Also, they have millions of advertisers, many of whom are finding good results advertising on sites like yours. You don’t have to find the advertisers. Google does it for you.

And Google seems to pay publisher sites like yours about half of the revenue it receives from the advertisers. This can be an ideal solution for many small business sites. Since the ads are targeted according to your content, they command a higher bid price than untargeted ads.

Also experiment with display ads (image ads) through Google AdSense.

7. Consider display ads from ad and affiliate networks

A second kind of advertising source are networks beyond Google. There are two main types of networks: ad networks and affiliate networks.

Ad networks. These are companies that you contract with to display their clients’ ads on your website. They may pay you on a CPM basis (perhaps 50 cents to several dollars per thousand ad displays — or less), or they may pay on a Cost Per Click basis. Search on “ad networks” and you’ll find lists of these.

Some of the better known include ValueClick, AdBrite, Burst Media, Casale Media, Kontera, Chitka, Tribal Fusion, and Bidvertiser. Some ad networks are focused primarily on one sector; others offer ads across many industries.

The problem I’ve seen is that ads aren’t usually closely targeted to your content, but only to your general industry. Consequently, the click-through rate tends to be lower and your revenue is lower. If your website isn’t highly targeted on a high priced commercial niche, however, an ad network may be your best source of ads.

Affiliate networks. We’ll consider affiliate marketing in another article in this series. However, affiliate networks fit here, since they offer display ads from many advertisers.

The major difference from ad networks is that, while ad networks usually pay on a CPM or CPC basis, affiliate networks tend to pay primarily on a CPA (cost per action) basis, when a purchase or lead results from the click. Search on “affiliate networks” to see lists of these. Some larger affiliate networks to explore are: CJ (Commission Junction), ClickBooth, ClickBank, Shareasale, and Linkshare.

You can typically choose the ad and ad sizes you want to display on your site as well as the advertisers you think will provide the best revenue for you. However, the individual advertiser may want to approve your site before allowing you to place its ads on your site.

8. Consider employing a sales rep to sell CPM ads

If you’re finding good success in earning advertising revenue on your site, you might consider employing an agency to act as a sales representative to seek advertisers for your site.

Read Also: Choosing the Right Monetization Partner

Sales reps are advertising professionals who are able to work out CPM deals directly with prime advertisers’ media buyers — deals that you wouldn’t be able to land yourself since experienced sales reps have the inside industry knowledge and an extensive network of contacts. If you have relatively lucrative advertising potential, this may the best way to get the most money for your ads.

However, getting a sales rep has three potential downsides:

1. Good sales reps won’t even consider working with you if you don’t have a lot of traffic and potential for a lot of ad sales revenue.
2. Good sales reps demand a hefty percentage of the overall ad revenue for their services.
3. Finding a good, hard-working, productive sales rep for your company is a hit-and-miss venture. You may have to try several sales reps before finding the one that is a good fit for your company.

Summary

Which ever approach you’re contemplating, this type of revenue modeling exercise is useful just to know how many people you’re probably going to have to reach. Beyond that, however, thinking in terms of “visitors” and “traffic” will actually hinder your progress.

Instead, you need to be thinking in terms of “people” and “relationships” and your “audience.”

Your visitors won’t buy anything from you unless you help them out, provide value and think of them as individual people. To really maximize the revenue you earn per visitor, you first have to maximize the value you provide to them through your content, products and services.