If you want to make money online, you have to move beyond general goals and statements like “I want to make money online” and get a lot more specific about several key things:
- The amount of money you want to make online
- The timeframe you want to achieve your goal within
- The number of visitors you’re going to need to drive to your website to hit your money goal
And while there may be a number of people who do actually go beyond the general “I want to make money online” refrain by getting more specific about their money goals and timeframes (“I want to make $10,000 a month online within the next month”), very, very few ever actually set themselves up for success by figuring out how much fuel they’re going to need to fulfill their goal of making money online.
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The fuel that powers online money making is, of course, traffic.
So if you’re really going to have any hope of achieving your specific goal to make money online, then you’re going to want to pay close attention to the steps that follow, because they will walk you through a process for taking your money goal and turning it into a precise traffic target.
1. Set Your Money Goal
The first step in your journey to make money online is to set a specific money goal for your online money-making efforts, ideally a money-making goal that meets both of the following criteria:
- It is enough of a stretch goal that it gets you excited and willing to commit the time and effort to achieve
- It is reasonable to expect to achieve it within the timeframe you’re going to set for yourself
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To keep things simple, for this example we’ll use a one-time money goal of $1,000.
2. Break Down Your Money Goal Into Sales
The next step in your journey to make money online is to break your money goal down into a specific number of sales, based on the average commission you can earn from the product/s you will be promoting.
To do this, simply add together all of the commissions you generate, on average, every month and divide the total by the total number of sales you make, on average, every month – e.g.,
$1,000 average monthly commissions / 20 average monthly sales = $50
Your average commission per sale is $50.
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If you have no sales history, then you’ll need to add up the commissions you would make from selling one of each product, then divide that total by the total number of products – e.g.,
- Product A nets you a commission of $90
- Product B nets you a commission of $50
- Product C nets you a commission of $40
- Product D nets you a commission of $20
- A + B + C + D = $200
$200 / 4 = $50
Your average commission per sale would be $50.
Now simply divide your money goal by the average commission you make to determine the number of sales you’ll need to make in order to reach your money goal – e.g.,
$1,000 / $50 = 20
At an average commission of $50 per sale, you’ll need to make 20 sales to earn $1,000.
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You should also factor in a return allowance that takes into consideration the fact that a certain percentage of buyers will ask for their money back.
Since Clickbank is likely to be one of the sources you’ll use to find products to promote, we’ll use their standard return allowance of 10%.
You’ll have to boost the target number of sales you’ll need to make to reach your money goal by 10% so that it reflects the return allowance – e.g.,
20 sales * 10% = 2 returns
Your adjusted sales target is now 22 sales.
3. Determine Your Conversion Rate
The next step in your journey to make money online is to take into consideration your conversion rate, which is the percentage or ratio of the number of monthly visitors to your website who buy something out of the total number of monthly visitors to your website, expressed either as a percentage of a ratio (we’ll use a percentage for our example).
Scroll down to the bottom of the page to go directly to the “Make Money Online” calculator
To calculate the conversion rate, you simply divide the number of purchases by the number of visitors – e.g.,
10 purchases / 1,000 visitors = 1%
This means that, on average, one out of every 100 visitors to your website makes a purchase (note: if your website is highly transactional, you’ll probably want to use “unique” visits rather than total visits, which is better suited to a content site, for these purposes).
If you haven’t made any sales yet, then your conversion rate is, obviously, zero. You are going to have to go to work on this (by making any one of a number of other improvements that are beyond the scope of this article) and use a best-guess for what your conversion rate will be after you’ve turned your website into a “conversion machine.”
4. Determine The Number Of Visitors You’ll Need To Get
The next-to-last step in your journey to make money online is to determine the total number of visitors you’ll need to achieve your money target, simply divide the total number of sales you need to make by your conversion rate – e.g.,
22 sales / 1% conversion rate = 2,200 visitors
You’ll need 2,200 visitors to achieve your money target.
5. Set Your Timeframe
The final step in your journey to make money online is to work out a timeframe within which you’ll work to achieve your money target.
You can do this simply by dividing the total number of visitors you need to achieve your money target by the timeframe – e.g.,
- One Day (or daily) – 2,200 / 1 = 2,200 visitors per day
- One week (or weekly) – 2,200 / 7 = 314 visitor per day
- One month (or monthly) – 2,200 / 30 = 73 visitors per day
Now that you’ve reached the end of this exercise, you should be crystal-clear on what you’re going to have to achieve in terms of traffic generation to make money online.
Make Money Online Calculator
The calculator below should be fairly self-explanatory, if you’ve gone through the instructions in this article. You’ll only need to input data into the grey-shaded cells. The rest of the cells are locked.
You can click anywhere outside of the editable cells to update the calculator or you can click on the “calculate” button below it. To reset the calculate, click on the “reset” button.
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If you would like any further information, please make sure you take your time and look around the site. And if you have any questions about how to make money online that aren’t answered here, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
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