Paying for PR and/or visitors

[davewray]

I have a situation and because I'm a novice webmaster, I'd like some opinions. There is a site in my industry that I would like to partner up with. It's main page is PR6 and on its main page there is a listing of "Spotlight partners". I emailed them politely about being included on the list and they wrote back with this...They said that they only list sites that rank high in the SE's and/or have 15,000 unique visitors per month to their website. Neither applied to me. They then went on to say that I could purchase a spot there for $200/month. I did a little research and found that the site they have listed in the top position has a stats package that anyone can view. I determined that if you have a top position on this page that you would average about 100 referrals from this site per day. That adds up to about 3000 per month. Now, my budget is small, but this is my question...Do you think that the 3000 visitors is worth the $200/month (including a bonus PR6). My conversion rate on my site is about 3-4%. And it takes about 20 "conversions" to make a $20 profit. The way I worked it out is that I would make about $100/month with this relationship plus the added bonus of the PR6 link. Worth it? I'm having problems deciding :) Sorry if these post was confusing! Thanks for your answers/opinions in advance.

Dave.

[rfgdxm1]

In terms of PR value, this link isn't worth very much at all. Shouldn't be hard at all to get links from PR6 pages for $10 a month, or even less, if you use some ingenuity. Thus, since you have calculated this links would yield less than $200 additional profit a month, forget about this idea.

[Shak]

It's main page is PR6 and on its main page there is a listing of "Spotlight partners".

spotlight partners, featured sites, premium links etc etc just aint going to be around passing PR for too long (imo)

buy the traffic if it converts, but do NOT base the deal on Pagerank in any shape or form.

also 3000 visitors = $200 = $0.06666666... CPC (corrected)

what is the overall PPC rate for this type of industry

Shak

[edited by: Shak at 7:34 pm (utc) on June 14, 2003]

[davewray]

Thanks rfgdxm1 and Shak...

You both have brought up things that I hadn't thought about! You're right about being able to get PR cheaper than that. I've gotten about a dozen PR6 links for free so far.

In terms of what you'd pay for a PPC campaign for my biggest keyphrase. At Overture that would be around $3 for #1 and about 50 cents for #10. If I calculate correctly, 3000 visitors for $200 is just 6.66 cents per visitor, right? I guess in terms of paying for converting visitors this is pretty good. No for PR, Yes for visitors :) Thanks guys!

Dave.