How many unique visitors a day does your highest-traffic site get?

[accelerator]

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Hi All

I'm interested to know how many unique visitors per day high-traffic sites get, so I've posted an anonymous poll. Please answer based on peak traffic volumes.

I hope this will be useful to others too. My site has started to attract some decent traffic, but I want to put it into the context of what is achieveable on the net.

Cheers all

accelerator

[Edwin]

I don't see a poll... anyway, my busiest site gets anywhere from 8,000-15,000 daily visitors. Average is about 11,000.

[accelerator]

Hi Edwin

You were too quick off the mark mate . I found you could only add the poll after you had submitted the initial introductory post, and it took me a while to think of all the poll options .

Hopefully we'll get some interesting feedback.

Cheers

accelerator

[EyeOfTheTiger]

Morning,

Here's my hungover essay for you to read. Call it my "Sunday Morning Sermon".

I've voted myself in your poll but feel as though the results serve no intrinsic value to other affiliates. While it may be interesting to know how many hits a site gets it is of no commercial value or interest to other companies without conversion rates as well.

As an example a site could get

1,000 visits and acheive an overall conversion rate of say 10% thus making 100 sales from their vistors each day.

However a site with 1,000 visitors could also convert at 1% meaning they make 10 sales but have identical traffic levels.

I feel the real worth of an affiliate is their ability to convert traffic into sales as well as generate traffic and consumer flow through their sites and not just exclusively the ability to attract traffic.

Gone are the crazy days when traffic was the be all and end all and you could could get away with charging £20 CPM just for showing banners. That way, yes a site could be valued on its visitors or daily impressions solely but in todays evolving ROI centric market that is sadly no longer the case.

To be a good site owner/webmaster/business owner (whatever you want to call yourself) to survive in this game as a full-time job you need to make money, sad but true, but how else would you pay the bills?

Thus the real crux of successful affiliation on any level is your ability to convert adapt and react.

While some people may be really proactive as I was in previous years developing loads of sites without any real focus, I soon learned (not straight away but with time) was that conversions were just as important if not alot more so than the level of traffic you attained to your site.

Whereas before my primary concern was getting traffic thus spreading my focus across anything and everything (hey its possible in affiliate marketing - just ask yourself how many "side projects/domains" you are trying to find time to do), I was never good at converting traffic into sales and so wasn't earning what I would say was a salary better than my last full-time salaried post. As my thoughts, ideas and ultimately business model evolved I started to ask myself why if I was getting so much traffic I was still earning close to FA.

I was getting traffic (back in the day it used to be about 10,000 uniques per day - todays poll answer I gave was 2,001-5000 (approx 2,200). So today I have just over a 5th of the traffic I started out with, but now my earnings per click has risen almost 20 fold in itself. In simple to understand terms I hope,

10,000 visitors x 1p EPC = £100
2,000 visitors x 20p EPC = £400

So you can see from the above that although my traffic has dropped I still earn the same amount of money. If however I increase my EPC without increasing my direct traffic I instantly increase my revenue.

So now my focus is increasing my conversions and my EPC and consequently my revenues. I'm capatalisng (converting) on the traffic i receive much better than I was with 10,000 visitors.

I spend a lot of time analysing my stats (not a plug but I use hitslink dot com) I can provide an affy link if you wish. I pay them on a sliding charge scale, if I attract more traffic to my sites it costs me more to use their service, but the service they provide me proves invaluable to analysing and growing my business and I earn considerably a lot more than the service costs me.

I can find out what traffic I am getting. I've slimmed my focus down to mobile phones when before I tried to promote everything and did it all badly.

Now although I started out in contract phones, my stats package indicated that I was picking up traffic not just on the search term "Samsung D500" but also on Samsung D500 ringtones. In the past this traffic would have gone un-noticed had I not seen it in my stats and I'd have lost out on a potential sale. I now offer ringtones as well as contract phones, sim free phones, pay as you go phone, games and accessories so I can maximise my EPV (earnings per visitor) and attempt to convert all traffic I receive.


So now yes I'm interested in traffic but only qualilty traffic as thats the stuff that pays and I now focus as well on quality traffic rather than quantity.

It's like sex I find, good sex is amazing, whereas crap sex is crap sex. The same applies to traffic.

And so ends my Sunday Morning Sermon,

Tiger
==================
Thoughts on traffic and ladies and how they are the same - Remember the old adage boys - It's not the size that matters but what you can do with it that counts, but when you know what to do with it then size is an added bonus that certainly attracts further interest
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[Edwin]

Ok, I've now voted

One good thing about boosting your EPC is that, so long as you can drum up new traffic that's no "worse" quality than your current traffic, you'll very quickly increase your income by a useful amount.

For instance, if you were earning $10 per 1,000 visitors but through a process of repeated testing and tuning have raised that to $50 per 1,000 visitors, then even 200 more visitors per day [same type of visitors] will add $3,650 a year to your bottom line!

Maybe a "revenue per 1,000 visitors" poll would be interesting...

[accelerator]

Hi EyeOfTheTiger

Wow, that's one hell of an essay for being hungover

I agree with what you're saying, i.e. it is traffic quality rather than traffic volume that counts in terms of revenue generation. However, the reason I created this poll was to get an idea of how much traffic was available out there. At the moment, my generalist UK shopping site's best day has been about 2,600 visitors, and it's not converting as well as I'd like. Really though, I'm using the site to gauge what areas are appropriate for niche sites, so I'm now planning a few specialist spin offs

Hope the headache has gone now

Cheers

accelerator

[Azam.net]

Agreed about traffic quality. Net worth of visitors to our freebie site is next to nothing: get a flood of traffic to it, but hardly earns us anything. Yet, we have a literary site which attracts a small number of ABC1's but earns us far more.

[EyeOfTheTiger]

Hi Accelerator,

I find the best way is to carry on drinking through the hangover. It's surprising that my spelling is usually alot better when partially drunk than it is when sober as I tend to re read my posts several times to ensure it's not too drunk a ramble.

Anyway, forgot the point now!

Tiger

[EyeOfTheTiger]

However, the reason I created this poll was to get an idea of how much traffic was available out there. At the moment, my generalist UK shopping site's best day has been about 2,600 visitors, and it's not converting as well as I'd like.

Hi Accelerator,

I sometimes find writing essays when drunk is more creative and fun as it eases my writers block. (Although I never drink whilst at work! - LOL)

In response to your comment quoted above, I can tell you now there are millions and millions of potential visitors out there without having to answer any polls although I have just made my own statement in this thread haven't I?

If however you were to target your poll to those affiliates who run shopping portals like the one you want to compare yours against then it may be of more comparable interest to you.

However, with your poll, interesting as the concept may be, it does not distinguish Azam's huge traffic generating freebie site from my mobile site which doesn't yield as high a traffic turnover as Azam's freebie site. However from all accounts it seems to be a much bigger financial success, but again thats not to say that Azam's book site isn't a bigger financial success than my mobile site or even has more or less traffic than mine.

Now what would interest me is a specialist poll of only mobile phone affiliates, what sites they own, how much traffic they get, what are their best converting merchants and what EPC figures they get for each of them etc etc. But for them to publish such information for free and in a public domain environment such as this would be commercial suicide. Thus I won't be creating a poll on this just yet as I doubt any of my mobile affiiate competitors would directly divulge such information to me. Welcome to PM's guys /gals LOL!

If you are interested though, the site i mentioned in my above post that generated approx 10,000 visitors a day on average over a 12 month period, earned me £28,000 gross profit in that year, (without any advertising costs) so assuming your conversion rates were the same poor level as mine back then, then with approximately 1/4 of the traffic (2,500) hits (I know you say 2,600 but humour me), I would be looking at earning 25% of £28,000 = £7,000, which as a full-time wage I'd assume was a very poor wage if you are spending 40 hours a week like everyone else working on your business.

However, the 2,600 visitors you do have to any site is 2,600 more than you started out with before you owned any site so give yourself a huge pat on the back and a nice cold beer in congratulations of your achievements thus far and look to the future in turning the 2,600 you have at the moment into converting visitors earning you cash, and once you have a bit of cash behind you and conversion rates and EPC figures to make/take some sound financial calculated risks then there are plenty ways of attracting more traffic/new visitors to your site that I could mention (pay to advertise your site on a good looking womens cleavage springs to mind - I think i saw that idea on ebay where a woman fitting that description was offering her breast space to the highest bidder). I'm not going to spoon feed you with other ways of doing this as thats your job to market yourself but I know you will definetely get to where you want to be with it, whether or not that is as a shopping portal directory or to bin that idea and earn money doing Abi Titmuss Video downloads.

Remeber a good business survives on supply and demand. There's plenty of demand out there you just have to know what to people want, where to to get it and how to filter out the window shoppers from the people with the buying/spending power.

Think of your site as a shop. Would you overfill it with products (links) so that your customers (2,600 visitors a day) can't find exactly what they wanted and buy the product ? Hopefully not, so try and clear some of the old stock of the shelves that no one is interested in and get some of the latest stock, to make your shop stand out from the rest of the bric a brac shops out there.

Like I said, you have the aptitude to make a go of it for yourself, you just have to develop your conversion skills. (That wasn't a typo of conversation skills either).

As everyone on here that makes money and works for themselves will testify to, it is a steep learning curve, but once you've steered around the curve and have got both a high yielding EPC, conversion rate and site traffic, you will be laughing all the way to the bank and will be keen to find the next curve to master.

Sorry, I've just noticed how long my rambling is on this one! I guess if you are reading this bit then I've kept your attention for the whole of it so I will end it here and wish you all the best for your business development ideas and the future.

Tiger

[altyfc]

My highest is the travel site in my sig... it currently gets in the region of 120K uniques per month. I have a few others that are around the 80-100K mark also.

Aaron

[ash]

Hi Accelerator,

I find the best way is to carry on drinking through the hangover. It's surprising that my spelling is usually alot better when partially drunk than it is when sober as I tend to re read my posts several times to ensure it's not too drunk a ramble.

Anyway, forgot the point now!

Tiger

Thanks for your length first reply to this thread.

I always amaze myself after a night out drinking how good my grammer and spelling in my drunken text messages are. So much better than when i'm sober!

[Flightmapping]

Ok, there's a few essays here, but all I will say is that just as I was thinking that concentrating all my efforts into one site was working reasonably well as a strategy, I see 3 people with 1m+ UVs/day - or at least claiming to.

I'd love to see that kind of traffic, but as Nadeem says, if it only earnt 0.00000001p per visitor, then it wouldn't really be worth the server load.

Anyone with 1m+ and an overall earnings per visitor in pence (ie not fractions of) needn't be reading this thread. And in those lucrative £1+ per visit circles, you can still be very low on the above poll, but make good money.

So there's plenty to work towards, anyway

[itforumz]

I will say 1500 - 2000 is a very good number.








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[Michael_Anthony]

Yesss O postwhen drubk am i very easy figures essay blah blah text especially grammar and sepelling better is after many pints and a feeeew whiskkysss.

I hobe u fond that helbful.

[realfun]

I don't see a poll... anyway, my busiest site gets anywhere from 8,000-15,000 daily visitors. Average is about 11,000.

Hi Edwin

I was just wondering how many pages your site as. Really aimed at those with over say 2000 visitors a day and how their site has an effect on their success?

Many Thanks

RF