Do not Buy Links, Buy a Blog!

Buying link still works pretty well, but I think it’s a waste of money for at least 3 reasons:

• The placement is a matter of tactics: the way to the first position involves things like branding, trust, shares dozens of other social and infinite array related to marketing. Spam and links can give you bought just a little ‘traffic, and not as much as he gets a good brand in the same position, with lower conversion rates.
• It costs too much: the travel site to offer my wife receives the order hundreds of dollars to put a few links in a single post. Buy links on a large scale costs thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars per month.
• Dangerous practice: maybe you have not been hit by one of the many penalties of Google, but the risk is there. The problem is that Google has created 2 new types of risk to those who buy links. The first is that the results from the social search do not take account of the old link graph, and then buy link is useless if you want to position yourself between these results. The second is that Google + starts to have enough data to make an analysis on spam. If you bet on links from pages that have no social relevance side, begins to prepare for the worst.

I started to come to terms with what it can cost to buy link in a moderately competitive niche vertical.

• Objective: a single keyword phrase more than a few sentences slightly modified.
• What you need: at least 50 links from different domains. For 35 I hypothesize a one-time cost of $ 100 per year, and 15 good quality links for at least 100 dollars a month on average.
• Total cost for 12 months: ($100 * 35) + ($100 * 12 * 15) = $21.500

For $ 21,500 you can therefore claim to the first 3 posts in moderately competitive SERPs, for example trips (and very niche vertical) or e-commerce (for a product not too common). Many black hat will tell you that the costs are much lower, and they really are if they have networks of their own sites. But if you do not know these times or not you are part of the costs are more or less as above, and if you’re a good marketer can think of to make money, net, a few thousand per year.

But there is an alternative: buy a blog.

When shopping for a good blog, or any online community, simply do not buy links, but you get:

• A system of brand building and customer acquisition
• A system that continues to generate links, tweets, shares, +1, like, etc..
• A system that can expand your audience and your credibility
• A unique opportunity to make public relations
• Content that you already know to be of interest to the public
• A set of infinite array / factors that are loved by search engines

It can all be summed up in this picture:

On the one hand seeking to monetize blogs, other sites seeking content, SEO and Social Marketing. Really strange that these markets have not yet met

For anyone still in doubt, do these 5 questions:

1. What scale better in the long term?
2. What is more likely to work on various channels (content, social, SEO)?
3. What has the best relationship between costs and benefits?
4. What is more likely that increases the conversion rate and the LTV ( Lifetime Value ) of the customer?
5. What is more likely to shine in front of you can give to your community and what is more likely to make you fall on him a penalty in the most inopportune time for your business?

If you’re a marketer who wants to invest money to gain a presence on the engines, and on the social web in general, you can try to create it yourself or you can buy it. I hope to see lots of money flow to those who have been pioneers in the area of content and that have proven over time to be the true owners of the inbound marketing: bloggers.