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In a previous post, I wrote about using SEO for affiliate marketing. The basic idea behind the article is that once you have a profitable pay-per-click campaign going, and can see how much revenue each keyword is generating, you should start trying to rank in the natural results for those terms.

I decided to do a small-scale example with this blog to show you how easy it actually is. Normally, you shouldn’t publish information about links that you have purchased, but I don’t care about this ranking, so I am going to.

How To Purchase Text Links

There are a few different ways that you can go about quickly purchasing links for your web pages. The best method, but also the most time consuming, is to individually contact other webmasters with a proposal to purchase permanent links. These links will be untraceable and will have no recurring expenses. Because of this, you can afford to buy a lot more links than if you were paying monthly.

On the other hand, it is just so easy to browse a text link marketplace and pick out what you want. One potential caveat of this is that search engines (Google in particular) could be detecting and devaluing these links. Another negative is that these types of links are sold on a monthly basis (great for publishers, not so great for advertisers). Therefore, it is much more expensive to buy links in this manner.

Regardless of all the advantages and disadvantages, I wasn’t looking for a long-term ranking (only a proof of concept), so it didn’t matter that I was buying traceable, monthly links. I just wanted to spend five to ten minutes picking out some good candidates and trying to get ranked for a specific term.

Targeting A Low-Competition Search Term

I decided to target a keyphrase that is similar in competition to many that I go after when working on affiliate marketing. These are phrases in which the top results are not keyword optimized (title, headings, etc) and do not have a lot of page rank or inbound links. I also had no intentions of optimizing this blog for the exact phrase.

You’re probably wondering what keywords I am talking about. The specific phrase of all my purchased text links is “money making advice.” DerekBeau.com was ranked at the sixth spot on Google after only two days and is now at the second spot (or the top spot when you search with quotes).

I spent about $100 buying links on the following websites: PureBlogging, CarlOcab, JohnCow, 45n5, and EasyWordpress. The spot on EasyWordpress seemed a bit overpriced when compared to the others, but it still wasn’t a bad deal.

Well Isn’t That Great

So what is the point of this post? To show you (and give you the motivation/confidence) that you can achieve niche search ranking for relatively low costs by purchasing inbound links.

I have tons of low volume PPC keywords that make only 1 sale per day, and no one else is trying to rank in the natural search listings for them. Each sale, however, could be worth $5, $15, or $30 in commissions (based on offer and niche).

Additionally, depending on where you are listed in the paid and natural results, your organic ranking could actually bring in more and/or higher converting traffic. Even looking at this situation on an equal basis, a natural listing making 1 sale per day at $30 per sale is worth $900 per month! And that’s just for a single search term. It would be very difficult to rank for all of them, but you could easily go after a few.

With that much monthly revenue, you could afford to buy bunches of permanent links and a handful of monthly links.

Arguments For & Against This Example

Search engine optimization is not a science and there is no way to predict exact outcomes. If you’re an experienced SEO, you probably have a few arguments against the example given here. I’ll admit that it isn’t the exact same scenario as you might face with affiliate sites, but it is similar. Here are some advantages and disadvantages that this example had when compared to the real world use.

Advantages

• This website already has many inbound links. Well, it does have more than a new site would have, but it is by no means at an unreachable level. As long as you aren’t building throw away affiliate sites, those domains could (and should) have preexisting link weight as well.
• The links that were purchased are site wide. Yep, that’s how most links on Text-Link-Ads are sold. You could purchase very similar site wide links for your affiliate sites (at a monthly rate of course). Also, many people believe that site wide links aren’t as valuable as they once were. Instead, you would be more value by purchasing single links on unique domains.
• That ranking could disappear. It could, but that is a risk that I am usually willing to take. As long as you don’t publicize that you have purchased links, and build up a strong link profile with good anchor text, your listing will probably last. We aren’t talking about highly competitive keywords here.

Disadvantages

• This page isn’t specifically optimized for that term. When you are trying get your affiliate site to rank for a niche keyword, you should build a separate page for it. The page should contain all the elements of great on page SEO to maximize your relevancy.
• The links were only purchased on 5 domains. As I mentioned in the previous point number 2, getting links from many unique domains is preferable to side wide links from a few domains. If you were really spending some time on a keyword, you would want to buy permanent links on as many domains as possible.
• The links are expensive every month. Again, if you were spending more time on a keyword, you would negotiate very cheap, permanent links. Think $5-$10 for one link that lasts indefinitely. After your initial investment, everything is 100% profit.

Try It Out For Yourself

I don’t know if I would do this for keywords or affiliate programs that I had no data on, but if you do have some stats, quit leaving money on the table and start getting some *free* traffic. It doesn’t even have to be a profitable keyword or campaign.

Maybe you are losing money on a keyword because the PPC bids are too high or you can’t seem to get a high enough CTR. Just look at you traffic levels and conversion rate to determine how much you can spend up front to buy targeted links. Once you achieve the ranking, the traffic is free.