We'll Make it up on Volume

I'm sure you've heard the old joke about the accountant who tells his boss that the company is actually losing $10 on each product they sell.  The boss thinks for a minute and says "That's OK, we'll make it up on volume!"

Business majors often don't see the humor because they understand that increased volume can lead to lowered production costs, so you sometimes really can "make it up on volume". In a slightly different way, raw volume can help with Internet advertising income too.

We've all heard of people who make a lot of money with one or perhaps a small handful of webpages. "He only has 10 articles and he is pulling in five grand a month!", someone gushes in a forum post.

That's wonderful, but if I were that article writer, I'd be worried.  It's just like the independent computer consultants I have known who have locked in work with one or two big customers. These customers are keeping them very busy, and the money sure is good, but what happens when the customer goes out of business or decides to hire their brother-in-law to replace the consultant? The money flow stops rather suddenly.

The same thing can happen with high earning web pages. I've had pages cruise along for years getting very high traffic and of course good earnings to match only to see them suddenly dry up and become insignificant.

There is an important difference. The consultant tied up with those customers only has a limited amount of time to sell. Once the writer posts an article, his work is pretty well done. Oh, he'll want to keep up with back link and promotional work, and some pages may need updating now and then, but usually there is nothing preventing our author from publishing more articles. Indeed, some part of his linking work is likely to be based on a constant flow of new posts.

I have approximately 7,000 articles published. That figure doesn't include many thousands of newsgroup and forum posts, so the total bulk of my writing is much larger. Whether we include the handful of magazine articles I wrote prior to becoming active on the web is unimportant - I write more in any given week than all of those taken together. I have some load of words piled up behind me!

As I started doing this almost twenty years ago, there's nothing to gasp at when contemplating that number. It's less than one article per day, on average. Hardly a strain. I'm not some mad article writing machine, I have just been at it for a long, long time.

There is more to be aware of in that number. Only a few hundred of those posts earn any significant money and less than a dozen are responsible for half of the total advertising income.

I guess I could have saved my fingertips quite a bit of wear by only writing those well performing posts!

Sure - except that I only have the vaguest notion which posts will be successful and more importantly, the top ten list changes all the time.  Posts that were going gangbusters five years ago are stagnating now, but something that attracted no attention two years back has suddenly found an audience. Moreover, those other "unimportant" posts are often gateways and funnels to the posts that do earn money. If I didn't have those thousands of other posts, Google would send me less traffic and those top ten would surely earn much less.

I also have other reasons for writing. Much of it helps establish my reputation as a Unix consultant and promotes the mail server and firewall products I sell. The income from that activity far exceeds Adsense income. I also sell a small number of e-books each month, and those "unimportant" pages are often the gateway to those sales.

You can see that volume is very important to me and why it is likely to be important for anyone who hopes to earn money from Internet activity.  I hope you can also see that I am definitely not suggesting that pouring out mountains of junk is a substitute for quality - or if it is, I am not interested in being a part of that production. I am only saying that even if you are successful with a small number of posts, you would be wise to keep posting.

You really can make it up with volume!

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