2005 Traffic & Adsense Revenue Growth
January 17th, 2006 by Steve Pavlina
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Last night I presented a 90–minute workshop to a group of about 60 speakers (some Toastmasters and some members of the National Speakers Association) about how to take advantage of internet and blogging technology. I had a great time showing people what they could achieve by putting their content online, and I received a lot of positive feedback afterwards.
As part of my PowerPoint presentation, I included a couple graphs. The first one showed how my web traffic has increased over the past 12 months. In February 2005 this site received about 86,000 visitors, and this month I’m projecting about 715,000. That projection should be fairly accurate, since we’re already halfway through the month, and my traffic tends to be largely predictable over the course of each month now. Even when I get a traffic spike on a certain day, it’s generally not a big percentage of overall monthly traffic.
Here’s the graph showing my traffic growth for the past 12 months from Feb 2005 to Jan 2006. The numbers on the left represent number of visitors.
The only month where traffic actually went down was July 2005, but that was mainly because June saw such a big spike. Other than that though, traffic has increased every month since the site launched in October 2004.
Traffic has been growing at an average rate of about 21% per month. If that rate continues for another 12 months, it will mean a 10x increase in traffic a year from now. I’ve no idea what kind of increase 2006 will actually bring though. Time will tell.
Here’s a graph showing my Adsense revenue growth from Feb 2005 to Jan 2006. The January figure is again a projection, but it should be fairly accurate. In Feb 2005 I made $53 from Adsense — it was the first month I started using Adsense. This month I’m projecting about $4700 from Adsense.
Adsense revenue has gone up every single month, increasing at an average rate of about 50% per month. This has held stable the past couple months as well, so it isn’t tapering off yet.
That’s pretty amazing growth. Imagine getting a 50% raise every month. As you can imagine, I’m excited to see what happens in 2006. The current level of income is OK, but the momentum is incredible. This is one thing I love about being an entrepreneur. Some people think a stable paycheck is nice, but for me it would mean giving up way too much. I’d rather work a whole month for only $53 and be building this kind of momentum than get a flat salary month after month. Security is worthless if you have to sacrifice growth to get it.
I’ve no idea how long this rate of increase will continue. But even a 10% ongoing monthly increase will triple the monthly revenue over the next 12 months, and a 20% increase will multiply it by 9. Check back with me in a year to see how I’m doing.
The chart above is for Adsense revenue only, not total site revenue. I also earn income from Chitika eMiniMalls, affiliate programs, and even donations. I didn’t chart those other sources though because they’re too recent, so I don’t have any long-term data. But they’re already showing promise, and it looks like they’ll be fairly stable too. If I were to include those other income sources, then the income growth rate is even better than 50% per month. But I think it’s interesting just to look at the Adsense data. I expect to have an easy time making six figures from this site this year.
It’s interesting that the traffic growth has been 21% per month while the revenue growth has been 50%. Adsense revenue is obviously a function of traffic, so why the difference? Mostly I credit the difference to optimization work I’ve been doing each month, so the ads get a much higher CTR and CPM than when I first started (CPM has more than doubled). And Google is continuing to optimize Adsense as well, so I gain the benefits of their improvements. I think more ad dollars are flowing online too. Advertisers absolutely love blogs. And I’m OK with the ads because most of them are directly related to personal development. If the ads were worthless, people wouldn’t be clicking on them.
What created this traffic growth? Word of mouth. Nothing I’ve done directly has had as much impact as basic word of mouth. I do virtually no marketing — my visitors do it for me. Blogging technology certainly facilitates this effect (via feeds, pings, and trackbacks), but ultimately the growth comes from people telling other people about this site. And for that I’m very grateful. A referral is the best form of feedback.
This is a fascinating business model. I obviously didn’t invent it, but I’m certainly enjoying the ride. It’s so incredibly simple, much simpler than running my games business was. The risk is virtually nil, and there’s basically no overhead aside from web hosting (assuming you already own a computer and have internet access). There’s no selling, no products, no customers, no order processing, no fraud, no inventory, no shipping, and no deadlines. And yet you earn income 24/7.
But what I like best about this model is that it allows me to share my best content for free, which means it will reach more people. Not everyone is going to buy a book or CD or attend a seminar on personal development. But anyone can benefit from a free article, and this site now has over 300 to choose from, plus 15 feature articles and 9 audio files. All free.
Thanks for helping me achieve my dreams!
Edit 5:08pm: Someone asked me about bandwidth usage. In Feb 2005 this site used about 2GB of bandwidth. In Dec 2005 it used almost 200GB, so that’s a 100x increase. The audio content does require significant bandwidth, but my current hosting arrangement still gives me some room to grow. I can always offload the audio files to a separate server if needed.
January 17th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
[...] Steve Pavlina’s latest post shows the power of Google’s AdSense. In the past 12 months his revenues from AdSense has gone from pretty much nil to almost $5,000 a month! [...]
January 17th, 2006 at 8:44 pm
[...] Read more [...]
January 18th, 2006 at 12:19 am
Blogger Steve Pavlina Shows His AdSense Revenue And Traffic Numbers From 2005
Steve Pavlina did a presentation on blogging and website revenue and put together some slides showing his growth in traffic and AdSense revenue for all of 2005. It is quite an impressive success story and Steve projects he will hit…
January 18th, 2006 at 3:39 am
[...] Dass man als hauptberuflicher Blogger durchaus seinen Lebensunterhalt bestreiten kann, beweist Steve Pavlina. Er zeigt eine Auflistung seiner Einnahmen allein durch Google Adsense. Danach hat er seine monatlichen Einkünfte von 53$ im Februar auf prognostizierte 4700$ in diesem Monat gesteigert. Gleichzeitig stiegen auch seine Besucherzahlen von 86.000 auf über 700.000. Den deutlich höhere Anstieg der Adsense-Einnahmen ist laut Steve auf die fortlaufenden Optimierungsmassnahmen zurückzuführen. [...]
January 18th, 2006 at 5:43 am
[...] Товарищ Стив Павлина (Steve Pavlina) поделился статистикой своего блога и заработка с Adsense. Интересно, что по его подсчетам количество читателей увеличивается на 21% в месяц, а прибыль с Adsense на 50% в месяц. 18.01.2006, 16:43 | Категории: Блоги и блоггеры [...]
January 18th, 2006 at 6:00 am
[...] Siguiendo el tema de ingresos a través de blogs, Steve Pavlina publicó un reporte de ingresos por Adsense y tráfico de su sitio. Las estadísticas son realmente impresionantes - en febrero del 2005 tuvo 86.000 visitas y en enero tiene proyectadas unas 715,000 visitas, con un incremento de tráfico promedio del 21% por mes. [...]
January 19th, 2006 at 6:31 am
[...] Die Einnahmen die man mit professionellem bloggen verdienen kann sind enorm, doch die wenigsten erreichen dies auch da sie zu früh aufgeben. Einen umfangreichen Erfolgsbericht gibt es nun auf StevePavlina.com im Artikel 2005 Traffic Adsense Revenue Growth. Dort beschreibt er sein enormes Wachstum (Besucherzahlen und Adsense Einnahmen) innerhalb eines Jahres. Doch für alle Einsteiger sei gesagt: lasst euch nicht schocken von den Zahlen, es gab auch eine Zeit wo Steve Pavlina angefangen hat, doch diese Zahlen werden hier nicht gezeigt. [...]
January 19th, 2006 at 6:44 am
[...] As I am trying to help my son raise enough for a house depisit, I am willing to try anything legal, ethical and remonerative! Check out guy’s name ? [...]
January 19th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
[...] Only recently (about 3 days back), we saw Steve Pavlina reveal his traffic and Adsense revenue growth over the past year. Darren Rowse has covered quite a bit of this at Problogger - highlighting the similarities of Steve’s Adsense growth chart with his own. More importantly, Darren notes that Pavlina’s high growth is an exception rather than the norm with bloggers, especially given the single blog Pavlina’s operates. [...]
January 20th, 2006 at 12:07 am
[...] Now I haven’t dealt with AdWords at all so I don’t know the pricing of it too well but lets do some math with average click through rates for Steve’s recent AdSense results article. If he really has $5,000 in earnings for the same month that he has 700,000 unique visitors and we can consider that each click through might bring him and average of $0.40 per click then he has $5,000/0.40 = 12,500 clicks. 700,000/12,500 he has a click through rate per unique visitor of 1.5%, pretty much average if you read around on the web. That means for $650 you have the potential to get 12,500/4 = 3125 unique visitors, in one week. Of course you could get more or less it all depends on how well your add matches his content to get people to click through. [...]
January 21st, 2006 at 4:02 am
[...] Typ “Outperformer” Seitenaufrufe pro Tag: 10.000+ Google-Anteil: ~50%+ Klickraten: 3 % Einnahme/Klick: ~25 Cent+ Monatseinnahme: über 1.000 Euro Sauerstoffmaske anziehen und viel Spaß. Ein Beispiel für ein solches Blog ist der Breicht von Steve Pavlina. Wenn man ihm Glauben schenken kann, hat sich sein Traffic von 80.000 Besuchern (Februar 05) auf 700.000 Beuscher im Januar 06 gesteigert. Zugleich sind seine AdSense Einnahmen von 43 USD auf fast 5.000 USD gestiegen. Die Einnahmen kommen relativ zum Traffic ganz gut hin (schätze mal ne Klickrate um 1.5% und eine eCPM um 5-7 USD ist ganz nett). Dazu laufen noch Banner von Chitika und eigener Paid Content, die aber in seiner Präsentation aussen vor sind. [...]
January 21st, 2006 at 10:18 am
[...] Es gibt einige Blogger, die mit dem bloggen Ihren Lebensunterhalt verdienen. Mit jedem Artikel, den man schreibt, entsteht auch mehr Text, der in den Suchmaschinen aufgenommen wird. Dadurch kommen im Laufe der Zeit immer mehr Internetsurfer auf den eigenen Blog. Die Traffic steigt und man kann mit Werbeprogrammen, wie beispielsweise Adsense von Google Geld verdienen. Steve Pavlina z.B. hat vor einem Jahr ca 50 Dollar im Monat verdient und ist heute schon bei 4500 Dollar im Monat. Wenn die Einnahmen weiter so rapide ansteigen, wird er im nächsten Monat schon 6000 Dollar verdienen. [...]
January 24th, 2006 at 7:14 am
[...] One of the most successful blogs in the blogosphere owes its success to a great story. I’m referring to Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development Blog, which has grown over the past year from 86,000 visitors in February 2005 to a projected 715,000 this month. That’s almost 10 times. Google ads on the site, however, earn almost 100 times what they did last February: $53 compared to $4,700 this month. [...]
January 24th, 2006 at 2:30 pm
[...] 24.01.06Google Adsense [Business] @ 17:30:13 After reading Steve Pavlina’s article about Adsense revenue, I decided to add Google Adsense advertisements to this blog. These are the ads you can see on the left of this page. I tried to make them as non-intrusive as possible, since I’m not really fond of big flashing banners. A few months ago, I already added adsense to my shareware games site. Up till now, it made me about 10$. So it’s a start. If you’re interested in adding adsense to your own site, you can click on the Google Adsense button on the left, halfway down this page! I realize this blog still has very little content, and as a consequence, very low traffic. But I plan to grow these, and it will be interesting to see the results of this experiment. My hope is to eventually be able to pay my web hosting with it! My current host is Canaca btw, and I’m rather happy with them. Their cheapest offer is 3.95$ per month, for 20GB of web space and 500GB monthly bandwidth! So it’s ideal for hosting shareware and music! TrackBack (0) PingBack (0) [...]
January 28th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
[...] Steve Pavlina runs a blog call StevePavlina.com, where he “turns Bears into Eagles”. I’m not 100% sure what that means but I do know that Steve is turning his blog into a highly profitable venture. On a recent blog entry, Steve posted a graph of his Google AdSense income since Feb. 2005. [...]
February 1st, 2006 at 11:14 am
[...] Bloggers, by their very nature, are very forthcoming with sharing their success stories. Here, Steve Pavlina share about his traffic and Adsense revenue growth rate. [...]
February 4th, 2006 at 10:29 pm
[...] Steve Pavline shows his adsense revenue growth from $53 per month to $4,700 per month in only 12 month. [...]
February 7th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
[...] After reading Steve Pavlina’s article about Adsense revenue, I decided to add Google Adsense advertisements to this blog. These are the ads you can see on the left of this page. I tried to make them as non-intrusive as possible, since I’m not really fond of big flashing banners. [...]
February 20th, 2006 at 12:37 am
, . Steve Pavlina, , . ,…
February 25th, 2006 at 9:45 pm
Growing a Blog’s Subscriber Base
While reviewing some of Technology Evangelist’s web site stats today, I was reminded that success is not something that happens over night in most cases. While this may come across as a fairly obvious statement, seeing graphs that support is really ma…
February 28th, 2006 at 10:00 am
[...] La notica completa pincha aqui No hay comentarios todavia Deja un comentario RSS feed para comentarios en este post. URI para TrackBack. Deja un Comentario Las lineas y quiebres de parrafos son automaticos, no te preocupes tu e-mail no sera mostrado, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong> [...]
March 4th, 2006 at 8:30 pm
[...] 2005 Traffic & Adsense Revenue Growth [...]
March 20th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
[...] For his highly volume website traffic, Steve Pavlina have to manage the comments and that it’s rather draining to moderate large volumes of comments for his incredibly popular and valuable personal development site. That’s why has turned off comments and turned on trackbacks for his website. [...]
March 26th, 2006 at 9:08 pm
[...] Товарищ Стив Павлина (Steve Pavlina) поделился статистикой своего блога и заработка с Adsense. Интересно, что по его подсчетам количество читателей увеличивается на 21% в месяц, а прибыль с Adsense на 50% в месяц. [...]
April 9th, 2006 at 12:07 am
[...] From:http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/2005-traffic-adsense-revenue-growth/ [...]
April 24th, 2006 at 10:32 am
[...] stevepavlina.com : This is a fascinating business model. I obviously didn?t invent it, but I?m certainly enjoying the ride. It?s so incredibly simple, much simpler than running my games business was. The risk is virtually nil, and there?s basically no overhead aside from web hosting (assuming you already own a computer and have internet access). There?s no selling, no products, no customers, no order processing, no fraud, no inventory, no shipping, and no deadlines. And yet you earn income 24/7. [...]
April 27th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
[...] Inspired by Steve Pavlina’s success with different ventures, I’ve been considering a variety of ways to generate passive income. Ideally, it would be something that I could allot a minimal amount of time to each day, but that could show results within several months rather than several years. Anything that would allow me to still devote the majority of my time to game development while putting me closer to the day when I can drop the teaching role forever is something I am certainly interested in. I think I have a solution. Steve’s recent post about his traffic and Adsense revenue growth in 2005 helped cement the idea in my head. Sometime within the next couple of weeks I will launch a new website to put my little idea to the test. Wish me luck! [...]
May 3rd, 2006 at 10:31 am
[...] You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it. I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. More on that later… [...]
May 10th, 2006 at 6:35 am
Adsense Revenue- who cares?
Today is a good day, I actually found a usefull website that wasnt cookie cutter made to get adsense revenue. I actually cant wait to finish my 4 hour shift as a personal trainer so that I can get home and see what else Steve has to say.
I know the pow…
May 11th, 2006 at 9:51 am
[...] Ihr glaubt nicht das man kontinuierlich ein Wachstum von 20% erreichen kann? Dann schaut euch folgenden Artikel von Steve Pavlina an: 2005 Traffic Adsense Revenue Growth. [...]
June 3rd, 2006 at 1:07 am
[...] Revenue Growth [...]
June 12th, 2006 at 4:09 am
[...] Let’s take my blog as an example. I began it as an experiment to see how well I could do in this realm, after seeing so many other bloggers succeed by writing honest high quality content and taking advantage of online revenue models. Before installing WordPress I had a clear vision in my head of what I wanted to write about and what kind of readership and revenue I aim to achieve. Inspired by Steve Pavlina’s amazing path, I decided that I want to give myself a year to directly earn a minimum of $2000 every month from this site (this would exclude side-benefits like this blog driving new customers to my other ventures). To do this I need to focus on obtaining a high readership rate and a high return on advertising, Amazon referals (I don’t lump this in with advertising as I only use this program when I’m already recommending a product independently of desiring monetary gain), or other revenue models that I may implement in the future such as a donation link. [...]
July 9th, 2006 at 11:54 pm
[...] Does that make me a bad person? My site gets thousands of visitors per day, and every time I turn around there are guys getting four, five, and even six figure checks from Google for doing nothing but running their web site. [...]
August 19th, 2006 at 3:20 pm
[...] Well, if you’ve read Steve Pavlina’s statistics, you’ve realised that you’ll probably need some 70k visits a month to earn $50 for starting up blog or 250k visits to earn $500. Way to go, way to go… [...]
October 6th, 2006 at 3:52 am
[...] Check out Steve Pavlina’s site statistics for a perfect example of this. I’ve read other blogs where people criticize him, or call his success an anomaly. They fail to see his daily efforts, minute ‘tweaks’, and patience that have caused the huge momentum that his site is enjoying today. [...]
October 19th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
[...] In one of Steve’s post, he talks about how well his site has grown in 2005 and also shows traffic and Adsense figures. The article can be found on his site and is entitled: “2005 Traffic & Adsense Revenue Growth”. [...]
January 14th, 2007 at 7:14 am
[...] Its so bizarre but maybe there is a hidden message in there somewhere. The power of intention maybe? If I keep going this route though I’ll be stepping into steve pavlina territory, so I leave that to him. Check his site out if your getting into the thought/matter “think and grow rich” sort of stuff. It’s a great site. [...]
January 21st, 2007 at 3:06 pm
[...] Look at other people’s progress and learn from them. Steve Pavlina has an excellent article about his blog’s evolution in terms of traffic and revenue, and he is not the only one. Steve Olson tells the story of his blog attracting 100000 visitors in the first 30 days. Dan Raine takes us through the adventure of the 15k challenge: he made a bet with his friends that he can make $15000 from a completely new internet business, in one month time, with $150 starting capital. He was very close to winning the bet, and he tells the whole story, step by step. It is quite a lesson of creativity and hard work. [...]
February 2nd, 2007 at 5:43 am
[...] I may not be able to produce similarly accelerating results for 2007 as Steve Pavlina did for 2005, but I’ve got a long and promising year ahead of me and I’ll be pushing toward the goal of reaching a retaining $500 or 200,000 page views per month before the year ends. [...]
April 11th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
[...] Steve Pavlina from StevePavlina.com made $53 USD in the first month he made something with his blog. Twenty months later he was doing $1000 every day. [...]
April 23rd, 2007 at 6:33 am
[...] Steve Pavlina reported in January 2006, that the first month he made any money from his blog was February 2005, when he made $53 five months after he launched his blog. In that report, Steve said his income grew at a 50% pace every month so in April 2005 he was able to make at least $119 out from his blog, that’s it he had to wait 7 months to surpass the $100/mo barrier. [...]