Catching up on my email. A reader sent me an interesting question, asking me how many sites would be required to generate $5000 a month. Well, it's almost impossible to come up with a specific number because it depends entirely on how much traffic each site gets, but let's crunch some numbers just for fun.

Let's assume you want to make $5000/month in profit, before taxes. What are you costs? Domain name registration and hosting. For domain name registration, you can get a .com domain from 1 & 1 for $5.99 a year. Pro-rate it on a monthly basis and that's $0.50 a month for the domain name. Now the web hosting. I can host 50 sites for $4.95 a month from ResellerZoom, which comes out to $0.10 a month per site. So the per-site costs come out to $0.60 a month. Round that up to $1 just for ease of calculation.

So $1 a month is pretty easy to recover with AdSense earnings. In fact, I'd say it should be possible to get $1/day in earnings within two or three months if you've got good content that's attracting traffic. Let's say a month has 30 days. At $1 per month in fixed costs, that leaves $29/month in pure profit from AdSense. So one site makes us $29/month.

So to make $5000/month you just divide 5000 by 29 to get (approximately) 172. So you need 172 sites, each earning $1/day, to make $5000 in AdSense profit.

That's a lot of sites. Of course, if you can get your average per-site earnings up, the numbers go down quite quickly. Average earnings of $2/day requires only 85 sites to reach $5000/month. Get $5/day and you need only 33 sites.

I explain more about these mathematics in a free e-book I wrote at the beginning of the year. It's definitely easier to get small amounts of traffic going to a large number of small sites than it is to get large amounts of traffic going to a small number of large sites.

Think about it. This is why all those pre-built AdSense sites packages sell well. People understand the mathematics and think that deploying 100 or more sites is the way to make money. And it is. But these pre-built sites only get you part of the way there. You still need to get traffic to them, and that takes more than just recycled content.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

Excuse me, as this has nothing to do with AdSense, but I just wanted to take a moment to commemorate the life of my wife's father, Bob Munro, who passed away today after a long battle with lung cancer. We were there to witness it and it is truly a humbling experience. You can read about Bob here. We're sad, but he's in a better place now, and that ultimately makes us happy.

One of the readers of my mailing list prompted me to read the survey results from The Death of AdSense (and you might want to read Joel Comm's rebuttal). The survey does make for interesting reading. What I found most interesting is how little some of the AdSense publishers knew or understood about AdSense. If you were making several thousands of dollars a month in earnings, wouldn't you take some time to figure out how the system worked? And especially how AdWords — which is where your money actually comes from — works? Apparently not, and so of course these people were all surprised when Google was finally able to finagle things to stop directing traffic to their crappy MFA sites. Bye-bye big earnings, but don't come crying to me.

Here's the real truth about AdSense: it takes less work than other systems to make money. That's what I like about. I'm a lazy guy. I like to write, I like to fool around with building sites. If I have content, all I have to do is slap some JavaScript code on it and move on to something else. Once you understand the AdSense fundamentals — the importance of the URL and the title in targeting the content, section targeting, what formats work best, what colors to use — then it's easy, real easy to make some money from your sites. Providing you have traffic, of course. But you need traffic for any kind of monetization.

There's no doubt you can make more money with affiliate programs. But it takes more work. You have to find a product to sell. You have to build a site to promote it. You have to create a mailing list to capture leads. You have write sales letters to entice those leads to buy. You have to place ads or do joint ventures to get traffic, or create or find something to give away. Work, work, work. I know, because I've done it. Yes, it gets easier each time you do it, because you develop a system. But there's a lot of upfront work involved.

The idea scenario is to make money using several different methods. So the “click flipping” scenario described by Scott Boulch is something to investigate. As is increasing your AdSense income. As is creating your own infoproducts. As is using alternate ad programs like Chitika. Diversification will protect your income stream, as will constant and continued education.

I'm not an AdSense “guru”, just an average guy who knows how to write. That's why I like AdSense, because it's a complementary program for content creation. I've never said you can get rich doing it, though there are definitely people out there who are getting rich. Even after all of Google's changes to AdSense and AdWords. But you don't hear them complaining. Because they've done their homework.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?