I've been working for myself for so long that I habitually assess my potential for the new year each January, with revisions in Februrary. This is something I need to do early in the year so that I can set my targets and work towards my goals. In the last post, I talked about some blogging revenue and traffic goals. I revisited my goals earlier today, realizing that I'd neglected some potential sources of income. Here's another (long) look.

Much of my calculations below are based on my own experiences, as well as some data that Christopher Knight, owner of EzineArticles.com, has supplied in several of his articles. You will not necessarily have the same results, so you'll need to adjust the calculations suitably.

First, let's revisit some of the possible sources of income for your posts and articles. Let's clarify here. For simplicity, by "posts" I mean entries in your blogs, as well as any articles on your non-blog websites. By "articles" I mean those articles that you have published on a "free articles" site such as EzineArticles.com.

Here are sources of traffic to your site or blog:

1. Search engine referrals.
2. Blog or site directory referrals.
3. Awards site referrals (obviously, you must have won an award).
4. Backlinks from articles, links (navigation bars), or blogrolls.
5. Author resource link from the bottom of your articles on free-article sites.
6. The same link at the end of your article when it's republished either on another site or in an ezine.
7. Purchased traffic. I ignore this, as I'm trying to show you how to bootstrap your success without a budget.
   

Here's how this traffic can earn you revenue:

1. Your posts earn per-impression ad revenue. Not all of your topics will generate this kind of revenue. They have to be popular, and sometimes timey. This type of revenue is typically referred to online as eCPM, and derives from the old CPM - Cost Per M - rates for print magazines and newspapers. The M is the Roman numeral for 1000. With print magazines, the CPM dropped for higher circulation magazines. For very popular magazines with a million copies per monthly or weekly edition, the CPM might be as low as $5-7. For niche magazines with a targeted readership and lower circulation, CPM could be anywhere from $30-150 or more. But online, eCPM may only be a few cents to a few dollars. It depends on many factors including how topical your blogs/ sites are. Depending on your traffic and/or niche, eCPM is sometimes pro-rated. So if you only received, say, 345 legitimate pageviews on a given day, for a given blog, you would earn 0.345 x eCPM for that blog. Keep in mind that the eCPM that Google calculates for each of your blogs is a weighted mixture of rates from several advertisers. I don't have any further details about this.
2. Your posts earn per-click revenue. Google refers to the weighted average as eCPC (cost per click). This value real isn't of much use if you have a low-volume site. That is, you'll earn whatever you earn based on ad clicks; you can't use the eCPC to predict what you'll earn later in the day.
3. Your articles draws a percentage of some readers to your blog or site via a live link at the bottom of each article.
• You earn per-impression ad revenue from article readers who visit.
• You earn per-click ad revenue from article readers who visit and also click an ad.
  
4. Your articles get republished in various ezines. A percentage of ezine subscribers click on your site/ blog link(s) and visit.
• You earn per-impression ad revenue from ezine subscribers who visit.
• You earn per-click ad revenue from ezine subscribers who visit and also click an ad.
5. Of the people who visit your site from any traffic source, some of them may buy any of the following from your site:
• Ebooks or reports.
• Services, products, or subscriptions.
• Merchandise with your logo(s).

The last item could be paydirt for you. The people that visit you by way of your articles either on the free-articles site or in ezines will be very targeted customers, compared to those who just stumble across your site. Think about how many times they've clicked their mouse to get from a copy of your article to your site or blog. They're determined to find the information they want.

So if you write a niche blog or website, put in the effort to compile and edit your older posts, add some new material, and tie them all together. You've then got yourself an e-book. It has to provide some sort of value for potential buyers, and you have to let them know what that might be. Consider giving away an excerpt of the e-book, in case someone isn't quite ready to buy right then and there. If they like what they read, when they come back, they'll probably buy.

Without these e-books and reports, you'd better be selling something else on your blogs or sites, otherwise all the effort you put into your articles for the free-articles site will be wasted. You might be selling software, t-shirts, or actual products or services. Whatever it is, your article-marketing campaign will funnel targeted buyers.

Now let's do some sample calcuations. These are all made up numbers. (Most ad networks have a terms of service clause that you cannot publicly discuss actual eCPM or eCPC, etc.) Suppose you have an archive of 500 blog posts. Suppose also that you set out to average 10 article submissions to a free-article site per day, 5 days per week, for 5 months straight. That means you'll produce 10 a/d x 5 d/wk x 4 wk/m x 5 m = 1000 articles. That may sound like a lot, but keep in mind that some of these articles can be repurposed blog posts. And they don't all have to be long posts. In fact, short 250-500 word articles tend to get republished more often than longer articles, unless they're very topical.

In addition to these 1000 articles on free-article sites with a high Google PR (PageRank), you will also be writing at least 5 new blog posts per day, 5 days per week, for 5 months. That's 5 p/d x 5 d/wk x 4 wk/m x 5 m = 500 posts. Each post can eventually be edited to become a free-article submission. (I say "edited" a fair bit because what you write for your blog might not be usable on a free-article site as is.)

This is a very aggressive article-marketing strategy, but absolutely necessary if you want to build your web traffic in a much shorter time. Now given these numbers, how do you determine how much you could earn? Here are some pointers.

1. Income from your regular blog traffic. Consider this: When you reach some unknown critical mass of Google PR and a quantity of blog posts, and after a certain amount of time has passed, each one of your posts will draw in about 2-4 search engine referrals per day. (Initially, you may only get this per post per week or even per month.) In our example, we have 500 posts archived, and we'll be adding another 500 over 5 months. This may not be enough to reach critical mass, but let's pretend it is. That means that when 5 months have passed, you could be getting 2000+ pageviews per day. (Remember, this is more likely to happen if you have a niche blog, and if all of these posts are part of one blog rather than spread out over several blogs.) Those 2000+ daily pageviews may earn you some per-impression ad revenue, depending on your topics. Also, depending on your long-term average daily CTR (click-through rate) on contextual or other ads, you'll earn varying amounts of revenue as well. For example, if your long-term (6 months or longer) CTR is, say, 5%, that means you may get 2000 pv/d x 5% clicks = 100 clicks per day. In addition, if your long-term average eCPC per click is, say, $0.15, then those 100 clicks earn you $15/d, or about $450/m. The per-impression earnings will likely be much lower than this.
2. from free-article site traffic. Christopher Knight says that of each person that views your article on his EzineArticles.com site, approximately 3.30% will click on your website/ blog link at the end of your article. After you've submitted a few dozen articles, you'll be able to determine some average pageviews per article, with which you can guess at how much traffic that will produce to your blog. Let's just pick a number, say 5 pageviews per day per article. (Depending on your topic, this average my grow or shrink.) At the end of 5 months, after you've submitted 1000 articles, you might be getting 5000 daily pageviews in total, but at the free-article site. Of these 5000, 3.30% may turn into clicks to your blog. That means about 165 additional daily pageviews. This amount will taper off, but it's hard to know when.
3. Income from traffic coming from ezines and other websites that republish your articles. It's really very hard to say what kind of income this traffic will translate to. If you write hundreds of topical, well-written articles, many ezine and website publishers will republish your articles. Subscriber bases probably range from a few hundred people to many thousands. The conversion rate for your articles is anyone's guess. I use an excessively conservative rate of 0.5-1.0%. For topical, informative articles, the rate may be much higher. These number are made up, but if you have 1000 articles, each of which gets republished by 5 ezine publishers with at least 2000 subscribers, that's possibly 1000 x 5 x 2000 = 10,000,000 emails containing a link to your blog or site (assuming only one article gets republished per ezine issue). If only 0.5% of those ezine emails turn into a visit to your blog, that's an extra 50,000 pageviews at your blog. However, the timeframe is anyone's guess. I'm using "1 year" for my own calculations, after the 5-month article-marketing campaign. Those 50,000 pageviews may generate some per-impression ad revenue. And at the 5% example CTR we mentioned in item #1 above, this translates into 2500 clicks. We used an example earnings value of $0.15/click, which results in $375. That's not a lot, but that's extra income. Again, this is not daily, repeating income. It might be more, it might be less, and it might take 1 year, 2 years, or just 6 months.
4. Income from sales of services, products, subscriptions, merchandise, etc. Use historical sales conversion rates for your blog or site to determine what the extra traffic resulting from your article-marketing campaign will generate. Any traffic from ezines and from the free-articles sites will be more targeted than those coming from a search engine referral.
   

When you make your rough calculations (for that's about all you can do), keep in mind that when you conduct an article-marketing campaign, some of the high Google PR from the free-article sites you submit to will eventually rub off somewhat on your blog or site. This will likely increase the number of daily referrals that your homepage gets from the Google search engine. There may be no gain from other search engines.

For example, I submitted an article yesterday morning. It was accepted by evening, and it immediately received a Google PR of 6, because of the way the free-articles site is set up. This will eventually produce gains for those of my sites/ blogs that I link to from the article.

Even if you get an increase in just Google traffic, that'll will make a difference in the ad revenue and sales your blog or site could make. This is primarily because Google supplies the bulk of search engine referrals in general. (Note: on one of my old cooking blogs, the bulk of traffic comes from MSN. On another cooking blog, the bulk comes from Google.) So if you do decide to conduct an article marketing campaign, make sure what it is that you want to sell on your blog or site, besides free information.

(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

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