Story Found By: peterdavanzo 1641 Days ago
Category: Link Building
5 Comments
5 Comments
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Comments
Another great interview that certainly opened my eyes to some online properties that I never had envisaged.
Very interesting. I dont know whether this is a one off or the start of something - http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/08/google-bans-pr-7-website-for-selling.html
Good interview. Instead of painting SEO in black and white the interview does a good job of capturing SEO in shades of gray and 1080p instead of 640x480.
Its interesting to see just how many cottage businesses can spring up revolving around link selling and link building. Just when you think its all pretty played out and saturated another angle comes in. These networks are funny because to be quite frank theyre very equivalent to selling a drug such as ecstasy. Theres very little money for the guy with one blog sitting on DP all day selling blog posts with links for $2. Especially since hes basically sinking his only ship slowly (or quickly depeding on his discretion or lack thereof). However, for a bigger player, consider the ROI of spending just 45 days acquiring 200 blogs. It would go something like this: 1. Start by buying a few PR6 and 7 sites/blogs. Spending $500-2,500 is totally reasonable per site if you know where to look and especially considering that you dont care whether its a monetizable topic or what the current revenue/traffic is. Cost: $4,000 for 1 PR7 and 3 PR6s. 2. Then, you are basically going to be spending between $10 to $500 in search of PR2-5 websites/blogs. So now lets say youve got 196 sites for an average of $100/ea and so youve spent $20k on that. Investment so far is ~$25k. You were smart and gave a bit of a percentage to a talented WP/PHP developer with a bit of xhtml/css skill so youve only had to pay him $2,500 over the two months for covering his bills... Now, as you bought the 196 sites you started linking from your 4 higher PR sites to some of them to end up with: 1 PR7 3 PR6 12 PR5 112 PR4 39 PR 3 33 PR 2 Now, you begin selling your link packages and youre getting roughly $150 per set of links posted because youre doing quality control and marketing it as "under the radar". Youre doing 10 sets per day at $1,500 per day total. It takes you about 25 days to recoup your investment, pay for your time (opportunity cost at least) and now you have another 30, 40, 60-100 days to continue before your network gets hammered. Ok, now, lets go back to step one and do 10 times that. For step 2 lets do 20 times that. Yep, that may seem a hefty investment... but its relative to your resources. If you had $400,000 to invest and could turn that into $1,000,000.00 in around three months with relatively little chance of significant loss because of the grand scheme of things... would you not go for it? Now add in the fact that if you were engaged in this type of bulk operation you could also be powering your own affiliate sites, selling SEO contracts, etc, etc and you can see that with ambition and startup capital, or rapid reinvestment you can create millions in revenue.
While I basically agree with your general outline of the mechanics (barring your number which Im taking as mere examples which may or may not be plausible, depending on your sources, strategy, etc.), your phrase "until your network gets hammered" doesnt reflect the whole picture. Yes, you can sink your entire network if youre too greedy, allow for too many subscriptions, cut corners on quality control, etc. No contention with that. However, if you adopt a more sensible, longterm approach focused on quality and investment protection, you will actually see a lot of appreciation in value occurring. Both networks Ive presented the stats of in that interview were indeed hammered in the course of several months - but not entirely so: Most if not all sites retained their PR value (FWIW) and quite a few actually improved on it. This could probably have been optimized a whole lot more and Im fairly confident that their owners will actually do so if theyre smart (and they certainly are, from what I can tell). I know for a fact that its what we will be doing, anyway. As for that ecstasy comparison its really not fair IMV: xtcy is merely for fun (and non-addictive at that), whereas links are for business and - very arguably - for sheer survival online. Big difference!