Have you been dreaming of earning millions online? Online businesses are a real way to earn money, but there is no magic formula for earning millions in just a few short months. So how much can you make marketing online?

I use a few techniques to try to evaluate if a new website is going to pay off in the long run.

How Much Can You Make Marketing Online?

The answer depends a lot on your experience and your resources. If you’ve never worked online before and you only have a few hours a week to spend on the business, you’re not likely to start raking in more than a few hundred dollars a month, if that. Of course, you can improve your odds by gaining the appropriate skillset for your business.

So, rather than think about site-wide goals, let’s think about the project in terms of resources and small-task completion. For the sake of argument, I’ll use content creation as an example, but this is by no means the only metric to use.

What if we could figure out a monthly value per article?

Well, in order to do that we need to know 2 things: traffic and conversion.

Generating Traffic

Strong Content = Recurring Traffic.

But how much? This why doing effective keyword research with a strong keyword tool is so important. If you can find keywords that have a potential to drive 20 visitors per month, on average, than that’s a good place to start.

Conversion Rates

The value per visit is dependent upon your site’s conversion rate and the value of each conversion. The value of each conversion depends in turn on commission rates and how effective your partner sites are at turning your traffic into a paying customer.

Imagine your site effectively send 15% of it’s traffic on to one of your partners, and your partners convert on average 10% of their traffic. That means that statistically you’ll be earning a commission for 1.5% of your visitors.

Over time, you can expect your site-optimization to improve, so anticipate lower conversion to start and increased conversion rates in the future.

Show Me The Money!

Ok, so far we’ve outlined 20 visitors per article with a 1.5% conversion rate, but what exactly does that mean?

Let’s imagine we have 1,000 users. If your average revenue is $10 per commission at a 1.5% conversion rate, every 1,000 users will earn you roughly $150. To get those thousand users, you had to produce 50 pages of content (at 20 visitors each).

If you spend 1 hour per page (including developing content and a little time promoting the page), you’ve spent 50 hours earning $3 per hour!!! That’s $3 per month, and lets assume your site will perform for a few years, so that $3 a month becomes $50 or $100 when stretched over a few years.

I hope these numbers give you a realistic glimpse of how much you can earn with affiliate marketing. Possibly earning $50 or $100 per hour (stretched over several years is hardly a get rich quick scheme, but it is a viable source of income.

The question to ask, then, is: does the reality meet your expectations?

See some real world success stories to learn more.