I just read a post on One Man’s Goal about valuing your visitors, and I have to say that from my experience, he, or rather Yaro, is very far off on what a visitor is worth.

Yaro Starak once told me (more or less) that the average number of visitors to your site in a single day is roughly equal to how many dollars you make in a month. So lets take One Man’s Goal for example. I get roughly 500 UNIQUE visitors a day so that would translate into about $500 a month right? Well… maybe.

There are so many other factors that have to be brought into this formula that the simplicity sake of saying something like “your visitors per day is how much you could make a month” is ridiculous to me. Your advertisers are going to be concerned about your Google PageRank, Alexa Ranking, Technorati Ranking, and maybe even your RSS subscribers, and so this will effect how much revenue you can pull from your blog and thus it won’t translate over to that simple formula of visitors a day equals how much you can make a month.

If that were true, some blogs would be making a much larger amount each month, and other blogs would be making far less than they are currently making. Your visitors are worth what you decide they are worth. I know it sounds kind of cold, and maybe not as helpful of a metric as Yaro’s advice, but that is really what it comes down to.

If you have a blog with a focused readership and lower traffic, you may make more per advertisement than a blog that has a wide reaching readership and higher traffic in part because advertising to a focused readership can be easier, and also produce better results.

Originally posted on October 24, 2007 @ 4:48 pm