How long does it take to start making money from a potentially successful website?

[Jane]

Best is to start looking at this the other way round. How much money are you looking to make? Let us say $5000 per month. To reach this, how many transactions need to happen (for products, actual number of orders, for services, actual number of leads). Let us say you need to sell 100 products to achieve $5000, so now you need 'X' number of visitors where X depends on your conversion rate. Let us say 5% of your 'relevant' visitors actually convert and give an order, then you need atleast 2000 'relevant' visitors to your website where relevant are those who are looking for something along the lines of your offering. However well you run your marketing campaigns, probably half your visitors are going to be not relevant so you need to hit @4000 visits overall. Now what channels will bring you that? How many from PPC (instant but initial cost per visit will be higher), SEO (nothing in early stages, maybe long term), Social Media (if relevant for your market, good for branding, maybe some traffic), Email marketing (if you have subscribers, great, else need to work up those numbers), other channels (not very predictable, some maybe perfect for your niche though). All these together will get you to your target. Over time as you gain traction in SEO and brand (direct name visits), costs will go down but initially you need to invest.