AP 0633: How Much Traffic Do I Need to Meet My Advertising Revenue Goal?

AskPat 633 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 633 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you buy answering your online business questions five days a week. We have a good question today all the way from India, and that's from Sanyog, but before we get to his question I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com.

FreshBooks is awesome, one of my favorite companies. I've mentioned them here many times on the podcast, and so if you aren't yet involved with FreshBooks, you've gotta check them out, because they make invoicing, they make getting paid online very, very easy if you're billing anybody. Plus, they just manage your finances and your books so that you don't have to worry about all that stuff. There's automated expense tracking. Your clients can pay you online. You can send very professional looking invoices. It literally takes less than 30 seconds. If you want to check it out, I highly recommend it. You can check it out for 30 days for free, actually, if you go to FreshBooks.com/AskPat. Again, FreshBooks.com/AskPat. Make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us” section. Thanks so much, and here's today's question from Sanyog.

Sanyog: Hi Mr. Pat, I am Senyog from Rajasthan, India. I wanted to create a website for the preparation of the state exams in India. My state, Rajasthan, has India's largest population which mean the higher hopes for the business. I want to put objective questions and answers for the students, according to different categories like…science, mental aptitude, history, and Indian culture. A question is that to survive first, how many visitors required, average monthly on website, to get advertisement approx four thousand US dollar, by the Google per month? Thanks.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Sanyog. Thank you so much for the question. I love sites that are about exams. I think there's a lot of opportunity there. As you might know, I created one back in 2008. It's still doing very well and people are willing to pay some money for exam material, because they want to pass the exam. It's a big pain and it's very obvious what the solution is. That's why I think it's a very, very, very good solution. For those of you out there who are looking for business solutions, that might be something to consider. Have you taken a test recently or do you know anybody taking a test that is just struggling? Perhaps you could provide that solution for them.

Sanyog, to answer your question, you know it's interesting because you're asking about four thousand dollars USD per month, in advertising support from Google, and wondering how much traffic you'd need for that. You're going to need a significant amount of traffic for that. It depends on, of course, the click-through rates and all that stuff because what I assume you're wondering is if you want to make money off of AdSense, which is a way to add advertising automatically from Google, which is great. I used and continue to use Google AdWords or AdSense but, honestly, I wouldn't even worry about that. What you need to worry about is creating your own products. If you are creating materials for people who have this pain and you can provide that solution to them, why would you want to fork over money and share some of that money with advertisers? You can keep all that money to yourself, and you can do a lot better job of keeping people within your brand instead of sending them off elsewhere. You actually wouldn't need even half or a quarter of the amount of traffic that you would need to amount to the same amount of money that you would need if you wanted to just make money through advertising.

I think you need to be confident in the fact that you might know exactly what it takes to pass these exams and that that content, those products, is worth something. You want to validate this. You definitely want to validate it. What I would do is I would create some sort of free guide or free…Actually, here's what I would do. I would create a question and answer test. I would create a practice exam of ten questions, just ten questions. Make them really good. Make it really interesting and make the answers that you mention at the end very high value, where you're actually teaching people at the same time and see if you can get that in the hands of people wanting to take this test. If you can't do that, then there's an issue. Then there's some sort of disconnect and you don't even have to worry about building a website, yet, or advertising or any of that stuff, because this is something that people who are taking an exam really, really want. If you can't get this for free in front of them then there's problem, but, in all likelihood, you will be able to build an email list by gaining interest for this. Create a landing page for it. Give it away for free. Collect people's email addresses, and then by then you're going to have all these contacts that you can then ask to purchase a product that you might have coming out.

Even if it's not yet available, you can use the tools and resources and the advice in my book Will It Fly?, which you can all find at WillItFlyBook.com, to actually get paid ahead of time for this and actually work with them to create exactly whatever it is they need, a course, a book, study guide, practice exams or all of the above to help them pass that exam in the way that they want to. It'll make them feel special because they're working with you early as you're creating the product, and then when you go and launch live, you can make a lot more money. If you want to make four thousand dollars a month, break it down. That would be, for example, how many dollars a day? Let's do the math. Four thousand dollars divided by thirty. It's about a hundred and thirty-three dollars a day. If you have a product that it, I don't know, forty-nine dollars. Forty-nine dollar book to pass an exam, you would only need to sell about three copies a day to be able to do that. Maybe you sell only one copy of a book that's ninety-nine dollars. That would not amount to four thousand but it would get to three thousand.

Work backwards from that goal is my point here, and you'll see that you actually have a lot…that it's not too far out of reach. Four thousand dollars a month, how much is product going to be? How many hands do you need to get it into? Just again, make sure that you test and validate that this is something people want. Create that free practice exam and you could do really well with it. My buddy Cornelius, from the PM exam stuff, I mention him a lot because he was the one who inspired me to create my exam site for Green Exam Academy for the lead exam. He had built a huge email list by giving away practice exam questions, and then turning those people into customers. You could do the exact same thing too.

Sanyog, thank you so much for the question, today. I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page. Thank you so much and I appreciate you.

Thank you again also to FreshBooks, making it really easy for me and everybody else out there. Three million other small businesses using this tool to manage our expense, our income, our invoicing so check it out for free, for thirty days, by going to FreshBooks.com/AskPat and make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us” section. Again, that's FreshBooks.com/AskPat.

Thanks so much. I appreciate you, and here's a quote, a great quote today, from Fast Company, great magazine. “If you get bored with social media, it's because you are trying to get more value than you create.”

Thanks guys, I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.