How Much Can a Website Make with 1 Million Published Words?

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Not my idea

• Ashley Pearce of Future State Media posted this info in the Fat Stacks Forum.
• He said I could tell you about it. 
• So here it goes...

Question: How much does my site make per 1 million words?

• Answer:  $40,000 to $70,000
• Type of site: Amazon Affiliate
• Question: Is this good?
• Answer: Yes

The breakdown

• So from 1,000,000 visitors:
• 200,000-400,000 clicks
• Resulting in 20,000-40,000 sales
• Take an average product value of $30
• An affiliate commission of approx 5%
• 5% of 30 = $1.50
• 20,000 * $1.50 = $30,000
• 40,000 * $1.50 = $60,000
• Assume $10 per 1,000 visitors in display ads (assuming worst case of 1 page view per visitor)
• That’s also $10,000 in display Ad revenue.
• Assuming $50 per 1,000 words budget for writing.

That’s $50,000 to get the site to 1,000,000 words.

Applied to Jon’s biggest niche site

Analysis (Case Study)

• Here are my numbers for 2019:
• Total words published on the site by December: 7,100,000 (this is total words published, not just the number of words published in 2019).
• Total revenue in 2019: $568,624
• Revenue per 1 million published words in 2019: $80,087 ($568,624 / 7.1)
• Revenue per 1,000 published words in 2019: $80

Which means...

• Paying my current average rate of $.06 per word is worth it. 
• I’m earning that back inside of one year. 
• Of course, that’s partly a result of having plenty of older content earning quite a bit… but that’s the point. Aggregate content value grows as earnings stack.

What about traffic from 1 million words?
Ashley’s goal (that he achieved):

• 1 million words =  1 million annual visitors

Jon’s results:

• Total words published: 7.1 million words
• Total traffic in 2019: 9.3 million

Considerations

1. Site size: This analysis is much less helpful for sites less than one year old and/or with less than 100,000 words of content. However, keep this email in your hip pocket for when you get there.

2. My site earns above-average ad revenue per 1,000 visitors. It also earns a little from affiliate promotions. The analysis should result in more money per 1 million words for sites focusing on affiliate promotions.

3. Established: My site has considerable domain authority which helps in ranking. It’s an established site which skews the results favorably.

4. Site sale: The above analysis doesn’t take into account the additional proceeds realized when a site is sold. It merely looks at revenue generated, but as you can see, when also including the value of the site, content sites can be very lucrative.

5. Passive income: I use the term loosely. Over time, older content will be less effective. I do not suggest that content will earn forever.

How to count ALL the words on your site?
Very carefully - one by one.

There’s a plugin for that:  
WP Word Count at wordpress.org/plugins/wp-word-count/

Learn more by getting my free 6-Figure Blogger Course.