Any advice on how to project revenue and traffic for a social network website for a business plan?

Obviously, researching borrowing info from similar sites is the first step, but this is proving difficult information to gather.Any advice on how to project revenue and traffic for a social network website for a business plan?
You must break this down into 2 steps:








Step 1: Estimate Traffic - Do this first, since you are not going to get any revenue with any traffic.





How are people going to find the site. I going to guess and say the following 3 ways:





* Web Advertising or Pay per click - ok what is your marketing budget and how much is the average PPC for social networking sites. A monthly budget of $4,500 with a PPC of $0.50 will earn you 9,000 visits per month.


* General web search - Ok first find the common search terms. Go http://www.bruceclay.com/seo/tools.htm. Or use WEB CEO (www.webceo.com) which says there are 1,865 searches for the term ';social networking'; per day. Add up all the searches for the search terms. Next estimate your page ranking. From there you will need to calculate the likelihood that someone will select your site from the others. So if your site is listed on page 1 you might estimate that 10 percent of these users will clicks on your link. If you are only listed on page 10 then you basically have a 0 percent change that the user will click on your site.


* Referrals from existing subscribers - How may subscribers will refer a friend and how many friends will they refer and so on.








Step 2: Estimate Revenue - Your revenue is 100 percent dependant on your traffic. A user can't sign up (and pay you money) unless they are at your website. Same goes for clicking on a advertisement (in which you will earn a commission).


Now that you have estimated the traffic (Step 1). You need to estimate what percentage of your traffic is going to sign up (should be about 2% for PPC and general web search and maybe 30% for referrals ) and what percentage of your traffic is going to click on an advertisement (should be about 1%).





You need an excel spreadsheet to do this.Any advice on how to project revenue and traffic for a social network website for a business plan?
Most of your information will be based on the social community you're going after....


Social-businesses or professionals


Social-social


Social-dating


Social-Christians


Social-relationship


The point is that the projections come from the size of the market and why you're bringing them together to socialize...





then you look at advertisers that want to be in front of your market