How much should you pay for web content? It depends on what you can expect to get back on your investment. Find out how a web content writer can increase your site's revenue 20% or more.

When web content gets discussed on webmaster bulletin boards, most common question is, "how much should I pay?" That question is both perfectly logical, and perfectly stupid:

• Logical, because biggest expense of any website, with possible exceptions of advertising and promotion, is content. You only have to get web development and design once, but content needs to be added regularly for your site to be successful.
• Stupid, because real question isn't how much you are going to pay, but how much you are going to invest. Your content, if it's done right, will make you money. In fact, it can easily make back its cost within a month. So real question you should ask a web content provider is: how much will it make me?

Calculating Your Web Content's Value

Ultimately, your web content is one part of your site that makes you money. The code, design, and even traffic, while important, are not what ultimately get a visitor to take action. You have to tell or ask visitors to take action. Telling and asking take words.

Small changes in your web content can make big differences in bottom line. Take a look:

Advertising/affiliate revenue

Let's say you have a web page that averages $25/day in revenue from advertising and/or affiliate links. You have a professional writer optimize content on page to get more clicks. Watch what happens:

1. If just 20% more visitors click on affiliate or advertising links, your revenue will increase $5/day, $150/month, and $1825/year. If your page maintains its current level of traffic for three more years, that's a $5475 increase, just for that one page.
2. But it gets better: improvements to page will easily increase traffic by 20%, as more visitors return, more visitors refer your site to friends, and more webmasters, bloggers and others link to your site. That brings a total of $6570 more revenue from that page over three years.
3. If you get same results with 50 pages with similar traffic levels, that's an increase of $328500. Now multiply that by however many sites you or your company owns. Can you say, "early retirement"?

Do you know all major strategies for getting valuable one-way inbound links?

With search engines putting a damper on direct reciprocal links, hunt for elusive one-way inbound link is on.

As someone who works with small business website owners, I've heard just about every inbound-linking scheme there is. In end, I've only seen five strategies that really work consistently for getting hundreds of links.

Yet there's perennial interest in alternative linking strategies. Why? Perhaps because five major effective strategies involve a certain amount of hard work, and for many people, SEO is an endless magic bean hunt. So, before looking at those five most effective strategies, let's look at some of supposedly easier alternatives.

• Link farms never seem to die. The latest variations try to pass themselves off as viral marketing, but are really a sort of endless pyramid scheme: you link to me, so I link to someone else, who links to someone else, and on and on down line. If you think this will work, let's just say I admire your ability to maintain a childlike innocence despite all mean names I'm sure everyone calls you.
• Many one-way inbound linking strategies fall into great-if-you-are-lucky-enough-to-get-it category, such as winning a web award or being featured on a high-PageRank website just for being so great.
• Other one-way incoming link strategies are in this-will-take-forever-to-get-anywhere category, such as offering to provide testimonials to all your vendors in exchange for a link to your site. (Hint: If you can get more than twenty links that way, you probably need to simplify your supply line.)

Now, on to five major ways of getting large numbers of one-way inbound links. Some are better than others, but they all have more potential than some of more madcapped strategies. Of course, none is a good strategy all on its own. You have to understand all five strategies in order to really gain a distinct advantage in one-way link hunt.

1. Waiting for Inbound Links

If you have good content you will eventually get one-way inbound links naturally, without asking. Organic, freely given links are an essential part of any SEO strategy. But you cannot rely on them, for two reasons:

1. Unfortunately, "eventually" can be a very long time.
2. There is a vicious cycle: you can't get search engine traffic, or other non-paid traffic, without inbound links; yet without inbound links or search engine traffic, how is anyone going to find you to give you inbound links?

2. Triangulating for Inbound Links

Search engines will have a tough time dampening reciprocal links if reciprocation is not direct. To get links to one website you offer in exchange a link from another website you also control. This would seem to be a mostly foolproof way of defeating link-dampening ambitions of Google and rest. If you have more than one website, you probably are already employing this linking method. There are only a few drawbacks:

• You need to have more than one website. Stop laughing! There really are businesses that only have one website! In fact, they may be your clients someday.
• The work required to set up this kind of arrangement and verify compliance is not insignificant. The process cannot be automated to same extent as direct one-to-one reciprocal linking.
• As with traditional reciprocal links, a very big drawback is that links are mostly on "Resources" pages that are just lists of links. There's only a small chance of getting significant traffic from these links. Plus, any "Resource" page may well eventually become an easy target for link dampening, if that hasn't happened already.

3. Submitting for Incoming Links

They are legendary fairy lands of SEO: PageRank-passing, no-fee-charging, non-corrupt and actually well-run directories of relevant links. Yes, they really do exist. An SEO friend tells me he knows 200 good ones just off top of his head. Plus, there are other kinds of directories: directories of affiliate programs, of websites using a certain content management system, of websites whose owners are members of this or that group, of websites accepting PayPal, etc. etc.

Ah, a link in a PageRank-passing link directory: it's a good deal if you can get it. But let's say you do get links from all 200 such directories and a hundred more from little niche directories--now what?