In my last post, I wrote about the search engine pipe dream because I see a lot of core issues that hold most bloggers and webmasters back. Today I’m going to tell you something that’s probably going to hurt a little, and I’m hoping that no one will take offense. Here’s the silver spike:

Your Visitors May Not Be Worth Hardly Anything

As you can imagine, I visit an awesomely ridiculous amount of blogs and websites everyday. I see sites that really have a chance (with enough dedication), but the honest truth is that most sites I come across are built on very faulty principles. If you have a site or blog that is built upon bad principles, it’s going to be up to you to change paths or you will probably never make much money.

Many of the new sites I find each day don’t know their purpose - most of them are actually personal blogs. I think it’s awesome if you have a personal blog but if you’re trying to make money with a personal blog you’re making a huge mistake. If you’re in that situation you need to ask yourself how much each visitor you’re attracting is worth to you. If you’re blog is very personal in nature, what kind of people are going to be finding your site? People that want to be friends! That’s cool everyone wants friends. However, if you’re trying to make money you’re going to need a totally different type of visitor and that leads me to my next point:

What Are People Looking For When They Come To Your Site?

I can tell you from experience that if they come to your site looking for a loan, they’re worth a lot. If they find you looking to find a person to be friends with…. hopefully you get the idea. I know that I’m going to have people in the comments saying, “What’s wrong with finding friends?”. My answer is nothing. I like finding new friends and find them all the time. If that’s your purpose great! If your purpose is to make money, read on.

If you’re trying to make money the friendly visitors aren’t going to be worth as much as someone who’s looking for something of value. I bet there are plenty of people out there that average $0.10 per click on Adsense and wonder why. If this is the case for you, you’re probably covering a topic that isn’t worth that much.

What To Do If Your Visitors Aren’t Worth Much

This depends entirely on what your goals are. Do you want to make $500 per month? Do you want to make $5,000 or $50,000? Let’s assume for the purpose of this lesson that you would be happy with $5,000 per month. If your site’s visitors are the type that aren’t worth that much (in terms of monetary compensation for you) you basically have two options:

1. Get a boat-load of the hard to monetize traffic. You will probably need in excess of 1,000,000 impressions per month. If your goals are a lower than $5,000 per month, you will obviously need less traffic. If your goals are higher, you will need more. These numbers are blatant estimations and I’m not going to say that they’re 100% accurate. The point here is that you’re going to need to get a really high amount of traffic to make $5,000 per month with that type of visitor. This may be the right option if you’re extremely passionate about a topic that you’re covering. If you don’t care about your topic and it attracts a less valuable audience then I would honestly move on to number two.
2. Start a second site that attracts a more valuable visitor. There aren’t many reasons why you would ever delete a site, so I would recommend keeping the first one. You can still make money with it, it just won’t be as much money per visitor. With the new site, you will choose something that makes more profit. Topics that have done well for me are loans, cell phones, computers, credit cards, and real estate. There are plenty of other topics out there if you look hard enough. If you choose this option it will probably be a little harder to build traffic but it will be well worth it when it comes.

What’s Your End-Game?

Most people don’t realize that they can turn their blog into a full blown business. Let’s say you have a blog about the loan industry. How valuable would that be? Once the traffic is there and you have established a good reputation, you can partner with a mortgage lender and start selling loans that pay $1,000-$3,000 in commission. Between now and then you can make $0.50 to $2.00 per click on Adsense. There are a lot of topics that have a product or service that could eventually be sold. Don’t choose a product that sells for $1.99.

It’s Time To Evaluate

Now is the time to decide whether your niche is a profitable one. If it isn’t don’t be discouraged. Most people in the industry are in the same boat. Instead of letting yourself get down you should get excited. You may have just figured out why you haven’t been able to make money online and that means that you’ve made some great progress.