aeiouy - 1:55 am on Aug 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

Unfortunately the internet economy is based mostly on who is the cheapest. If a site is having to do PPC for all of their traffic will obviously have to raise their prices dramatically and thus lose sales.

This is a very simplistic breakdown and not accurate in a lot of cases. If I sell a product for $20 over its cost, and spend $10.00 of that on PPC, and you don't spend anything on ppc and pocket the full twenty dollars, why would I have to raise my prices?

What if my ppc campaign resulted in me getting 5x the number of sales as you? I would be making a lot more money, even though I would be spending money on PPC and making less per item.

Your example would require people to be selling items for nearly cost with no room to make money.

I think PPC is a nice controllable addition to work with serps to provide stability.

I know people want to compare the uncertainity of serps and other businesses, but the reality is in most cases, most businesses do not face the chance of total destruction of a substantial portion of their customer base. The odds of having your farm wiped out due to floods is much lower than the risk of having your site knocked out of the serps and losing most of your traffic.

You can make money being a serp based business, you can make more money doing other things to improve upon that. The smart move is to try and take advantage of all those avenues that help make you money. There is no need to limit yourself beyond what is physically impossible.

If I told you, you could sit there and wait.. and someone might ocassionally come by and give you a dime, you would say great. If I told you, that if you give me 50 cents, I will give you 75 cents back, you would say awesome.

If I said you could do both, wouldn't you be foolish not to take advantage of it?

As for Powerstar saying:

How free is the "free traffic" anyway? Is your time not worth some money? building links, content, it's all cost money too

I was thinking about this the other day. When comparing my ppc campaigns with natural campaigns, there is nothing free about search engine traffic. In fact between site building, link building community building and all the rest, free traffic can be MUCH more expensive than ppc traffic in the long-run. You have to consider every expense related to building up your site as a cost to acquiring customers/visitors via search engines. Thus the cost is substantial.