Mar 31 2009
How Much Would You Pay For 50 Inbound Links
I was looking over a few SEO sites today and came across a major player in this industry with a service of link building. I looked at their pricing and started to think; what is a good price to pay for quality inbound links? I am not talking about buying links, Google doesn’t like that and I understand why. What I am referring to is paying someone to take on your link building strategy.
This company offers to provide 50 quality inbound links for $1,800. That’s $36.00 per link. I am sure this company has a large group of websites that it can draw from to give indusry and topic related inbound links from. 50 inbound links from quality sites can do amazing things to your search return position if done correctly. At the upper end of the spectrum this company offers 200 inbound links for $4,500. Once again I am assuming they have a ready list of websites to draw from.
I wonder if it would be cost effective for me to make the same offer. I don’t have a large number of sites to draw from and what kind of time frame would I be looking at to get 50 inbound links from industry related sites? Maybe I need to experiment and see what kind of time frame it would take for me to get 50 one way inbound links. Once I find out the time then it is just a simple matter of math to find out how much it cost me for my time.
What is your opinion? Does $1,800 for 50 inbound links seem like a good deal to you? What would you pay someone to handle your link campaign?
It largely depends on how much money you make from traffic and how much traffic the links will get you, which, in turn, depends on the keywords, landing pages and the sites/pages you’ll be getting links from.
Technically, I’d invest $2-4k in creation of a single, best of the web quality article, craft a persuasive headline (1-2 benefits with a call to action) and share it on topical social sites, Delicious and StumbleUpon. You’ll probably need to find someone with good profiles on social sites to do that for you, but it’s another story.
Since you’ve researched the SEO field, this is called linkbait, though I prefer it to call link worthy content.
But, if you ask me, if those 200 links do come from authoritative, high quality websites and are natural, with the anchor text you want and to the landing pages you want (ranking at #2-5 before link building), then you can get pretty good ROI on investing in those links, too.
However, what I like in link worthy content, is that you get hordes of targeted long tail traffic to the article, too.