Ad revenue is an important component of content generation. Therefore, I’ve built an ad revenue calculator to help you determine your potential revenue from your content.

Ad Revenue Calculator: Determine If Your Content Will Be Profitable

I’ll breakdown the various ways to help you determine if your content will be profitable or not.

We want to get paid for our hard work and efforts. There is nothing wrong with that.

Blogs have operating costs and a lot of hard work that go into them. Blog owners and webmasters should get compensated for that.

In fact, I’m much more of a fan of allowing an independent blogger get compensated than the big guy that could use questionable methods for journalism.

Or, use methods within journalism that really just regurgitate content.

It’s really disappointing that bloggers don’t get more credit for how much work they put in or how much disrespect bloggers get for partnering with affiliates.

Anyway, if you are a blogger or content creator, you might be asking how much revenue will I generate from a single piece of content?

Or, how much revenue could I generate with X amount of traffic, clicks, etc.?

Making money online requires data-driven decisions about how you build your business. Blogging is great because you don’t need to know everything all at once.

The low startup costs are a huge plus of blogging. You can sort of tinker with your ideas and see what works best.

However, with blogging you trade information, research, knowledge and content for revenue. You should ensure that your revenue is properly optimized to earn the level of compensation for your time.

As I start my quest of starting a media company, I need to get smarter about how I create content and what value I provide.

With blogging, you trade research, information, data, content, time and knowledge for revenue. You should get compensated for it. Click To Tweet

Even in blogging or vlogging, you should make some decisions based on the data. I’ll show you how I think about creating content to determine if it’s worth the exercise of profitability.

What you need to know about advertising revenue

Advertising revenue can come in various forms for various forms of content. There isn’t a true magic number to go off of for every type of content, but there are some things that we know.

The things to consider with advertising revenue are:

Revenue is generated on a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) or Cost-Per-Impression (CPM) basis

Different ad networks have different models on payouts, some are solely reliant on CPM, solely CPC and/or a blend of both CPC and CPM

There are other compensation mechanisms out there, but for our calculator, we will only focus on these two ways to generate money from ads.

You can start a blog with Bluehost for only $3.95/month by using my link. You can easily make that back with ad revenue and I’ll break it down exactly how.

Ways to Determine Content Production Profitability

There are a few ways to determine profitability for your blog post, video upload, etc.

I’ll walk you through the exact steps on how to calculate all from a revenue standpoint to help you succeed.

My free calculator will help you determine your blog post profitability BEFORE you produce the content.



Target a Specific Keyword You Want to Rank for

The first step in this process is targeting an actual keyword you want to rank. Your goal should be to rank #1 for that particular keyword.

Based on some of my internal data, if you rank #1 overall for a certain keyword, you will earn a 20-30% click-through rate. Yes, more than 70% of the time you won’t get clicked on even at the #1 ranking overall.

For example, if you target a 1,000 volume per month keyword you will only receive about 280 clicks per month. This is 280 new unique sessions just for a single keyword.

Most keyword research tools will show what the cost per click for a particular keyword is.

By using the KeySearch bulk keyword research tool, I found that the keyword “tall socks” had a low difficulty for 1,000 searches per month and a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) of $1.25.

We will get into how the CPC plays into all of this.

I like using KeySearch because it’s an affordable alternative to Ahrefs. It’s only $17/month and is a great starter option for new bloggers to identify new writing opportunities.

Target a Particular Conversion Rate and Conversion Value

You should know your rate of conversions for particular posts. It can range depending on if you are targeting a buyer intent keyword or not.

The range should be anywhere from 1-5% conversion rate. The conversion value is simply the payout you get from that particular conversion event. Some affiliates payout conversions at $100 per signup.

For example, if you get 280 clicks at a 5% conversion rate. That means you are getting 14 conversions per month. $100 multiplied by 14 conversions is 1,400 of monthly revenue.

That’s not too shabby. This really shows the power of driving conversion events over display revenue. If you can drive conversions, you can bring your blog or website to the next level.

You can find affiliate partners instantly by signing up for services like FlexOffers. You’ll be landing partners in no time.

Read about the platform in our FlexOffers review.

Calculate Potential Display Revenue (If Any)

Use Your Keyword Research to calculator any additional display revenue. If you are smart, you don’t want to distract your readers from converting by having a display ad.

You will likely turn that off. However, if it is an ordinary blog post and you have variations of affiliates and display ads, you should include both display and conversion revenue.

To calculate the display revenue, you should indicate that you targeted a keyword that pays a CPC of $1.25 (see tall socks example above). You can expect about 1-2% of the people to click an ad on your site.

Back to the 280 unique sessions from the tall socks keyword, that means you will get approximately 2.8 clicks through to your display ads at a cost of $1.25. This results in $3.5 of monthly revenue. That’s not all that much money.

Keep in mind there is additional impression revenue to be had here. With 280 unique sessions, that’s 0.28 thousand impressions at a rate of ~$10 is an additional $2.8/month in revenue.

Again, display advertising is nice because it gives you a nice base of recurring revenue. It’s not going to break the bank though.

Note: I multiply all revenue by 24 months. This assumes that you hold a particular blog post position for that long.

See Related: How to Achieve 100,000 Pageviews Per Month

Cost of Producing the Article

Since you have all the revenue sources compiled in your blog post profit calculator, you simply need to subtract out the cost of your time to produce the article or the monetary compensation you provide to people to produce it.

At the end of producing the whole profit calculation, you will be amazed at how much value can be built off of your blog posts. It is not uncommon for blog posts to be worth $20,000 alone.

What can we learn from that?

Provide outstanding content (here is how to become a content creator)

Don’t publish something just to publish it

Take your time and make sure you are targeting the right keywords

Optimize for monetization

Download Our Free Ad Revenue Calculator

Our free ad revenue calculator will help you understand what you need to create in order to have outstanding blog post revenue and return on investment.

Many bloggers don’t realize the value of certain pages on their website.

If done correctly, certain blog posts alone can have $20,000 to even $50,000+ of value to their site.

To use the calculator, you simply need to input just a few different variables to test and optimize your site. It literally takes only 5 minutes to use.

DOWNLOAD THE CALCULATOR

Conclusion on Blog Post Profit Calculator

Digging into the details before you post something will help you create sustainable value for your blog or website. Give value and you will create value.

Use my calculator to become smarter about how you build your website.

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