The Cost of Pay Per Click Vs. Building Authority Sites
Let's compare the costs involved with two popular internet marketing strategies, pay per click (PPC) and authority site building.
For the purposes of this discussion, building authority sites will be defined as an authority blog that ranks well in the search engines and provides useful and informed content.
As you can see from the outset, we are comparing the difference between using paid advertising to achieve a top spot in Google Adwords versus using authority blogging to obtain top results in the organic search engine results.
The Cost of Pay Per Click
Sam Clark, a trainer with the Authority Site Center, recently posted some interesting numbers regarding the costs of using PPC on his 16 Steps to Success blog:
Let me explain this by using some numbers…Let's take the phrase "Wrinkle Cream"
This is a product in the skin care industry that is pretty popular and many, many purchases are made to prevent wrinkles.
The term "wrinkle cream" has numbers that I will explain that look like this:
wrinkle cream - $3.22 - 113 - 2,250,000 - $1,062,471
Lets break down the above numbers:
$3.22 is the cost per click to be in the top spots on Google for that term.
If you have a wrinkle cream product and want to be number 1, 2, or 3 on google adwords, then you will pay $3.22 per click to be in that top spot, so EVERY click is $3.22.
On the average you could expect to pay around $363 dollars per day to own that spot on google search engine:
Thats $10,915 dollars per month.
Thats $131,000 dollars per year….to buy that ONE phrase to get the traffic from Google, the traffic equals 40,680 clicks: (113 (from above) x 30 x 12).
There are 2,250,000 competing websites for the term "wrinkle cream".
Now companies are paying this everyday. Fortune 500 companies with deep pockets and much more resources than you or I.
So playing the adwords game is hard and you better have some deep pockets and be VERY smart about the PPC game.
The top google adwords advertiser for Wrinkle cream is http://www.Neutrogena.com.
A little research using spyfu.com reveals:
Neutrogena is spending between $1300 and $8000 dollars per day in advertising on Google adwords.
If we take middle of the road and say $4000.00 a day:
That's $120,000 per month, or, $1,400,000 per year.
The final number above is $1,062,471.
What that number represents is the value of the keyword phrase "wrinkle cream" in the market.
If you owned the top spot for wrinkle cream then the value in the marketplace for your site would be approximately $1,062,471.
Note: the above data just looks at advertising costs and does not take into consideration the revenue generated from website traffic.
The Cost of Building an Authority Site
As opposed to PPC, building an authority site is more an investment of time and energy.
You would need to learn:
- market and niche research
- how to use and optimize a wordpress blog
- social power linking strategies
- publishing tactics
- marketing strategies
- remote blogging
- and much, much more
These topics are all covered in detail by the Authority Site Center in:
- the 16 Steps to Success
- the 60 Day Marketing Plan
The cost? A membership in this site would cost about $3.23 per day - the same as one click for the term "wrinkle cream".
Points to consider:
With an authority site you can achieve high rankings in the SERPs for more competitive (and more expensive) keywords than "wrinkle cream".
You can also rank for many keywords and keyword phrases, with one site.
The question to ask yourself is, "Is it worth my time and energy to spend 12 to 18 months to build a site that could potentially be worth over a million dollars?"
There is an old saying in internet marketing:
To be successful, find one membership site that you like and stick with it.
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