How much money can I expect to make from my Solo Build It site?

Question - Could you give me any idea what a typical Solo Build It 30-page site makes per month if the site has Adwords and some affiliate programs? Just curious...wondering what a decent benchmark would be.

Answer - It's hard to say how much a site will make, there are just too many variables.

As a guide, I've found that Google adsense revenue across all of my Solo Build It sites and also those of others I know of appears to be consistently between $0.50 and $1.00 per page per month.

It's not much, so you need a lot of pages to make this your main revenue stream.

The guy who owns www.askthebuilder.com reportedly makes over $40,000 a month, but he's got 36,600 pages on his site...

There's a lot of work to be done to get to that stage.

Affiliate programs are notoriously unreliable to predict earnings from. Some are good, some are very bad.

At the other end of the spectrum, I have a friend who has just built a site with my help for a niche where he is a top level consultant.

He has top spot on both Yahoo and MSN, and #3 position on Google for his main keyword. A paper he wrote with a link to his site is in position #1 on Google!

One new client could be worth up to US$200,000 to him, so he doesn't need too many each year to do really well...he hasn't got one yet, but the site is only 6 weeks old, so he should do well over time.

To increase your profitability, look for products that are very high value in your niche (look at www.audiolofftreport.com - he says he makes 8 figures a year in sales from this site!!)

This is a great model to copy if you can work out which high end products to promote and weave references to them and affiliate links to merchants who sell them into your content.

Another good way of increasing your focus on high value products is to do what Nori Evoy has done and try to include some offline referral sales into your product mix.

She refers people to a local real estate agent in Anguilla and receives commissions on sales and property rentals. These can add up if you manage to get a lot of people making purchases from your partner agents.

You could also consider insurance and travel affiliate merchants as many of these offer a payment (sometimes up to $20) for simply having people fill out an enquiry form.

Look through www.cj.com (Commission Junction) and the other affiliate managers to find them.