Thinking of purchasing a link building service? Not sure what service to pick and confused by all the terminology? Put it all to one side for a few minutes and read this and it may help you save your hard-earned cash.

There are too many link building services to choose from, heading over to Warrior Forum will likely give you a headache with the number of offers and crap people are trying to sell you. I read so many times on forums users asking whether or not they should buy xx link building service. The problem is most of these people have tiny budgets and the term ‘you get what you pay for’ could not be truer when applied to link building services.

Personally I think most should stay away from any link building service completely. If you have a budget of $500+ per month, sure, you can probably hire a competent link builder who is nothing like your $50 service on warrior forum. Take a look at the very brief breakdown of what you could expect from a $50 and $500 monthly service.

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$50 Per Month

– Likely to consist of non human generated links
– Poor quality in the eyes of Google
– Likely to be deindexed after xx months, essentially meaning you are paying for nothing
– Will offer no real value to potential customers
– Which could lead to damaging your brand and business
– Would you buy from someone spamming on forums?
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$500 Per Month

– Well researched, coherent content
– Offer value to your customers in the form of helpful articles, ebooks, videos etc
– Outreach conducted ethically
– Positively build your brand and business
– Gain some high quality links (because people will naturally share good content)
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I hope you can understand what I’m trying to get at with these cheap link building services. It’s just not worth your money! They have their place helping boost 3rd, 4th…..8th tier web properties but my advice to you is scrap all the tiers, all the web 2.0’s, forum profiles etc. Just have one tier….your business/website and stick with it, invest all your time and money into it. Instead of wasting time and money trying to create different tiers and then buying link building services to all of those just create a few excellent pieces of content and work from there.

What should we be spending our money on?

In short; CONTENT. Broadly speaking, by content, I mean something that will be useful to your potential visitor. Content comes in many various forms, it could be a blog post, a video, a freebie, maybe even just answering someones question on a forum.

The problem is that those of us with a small budget for link building probably have the same small budget for content creation. This is where hard work and perseverance pays off and is unfortunately the only answer. If you only have $50 to spend on your blog period then don’t bother spending it all, save it and spend it somewhere else in your life. A $50 piece of content is likely to be just as low quality as those links you were going to pay Mr SEO to create for you.

The truth is nothing worth $50 is going to be of sufficient quality and detail to warrant the kind of natural linking you are looking for. For instance, let’s take one of the most common forms of content, its something you are reading now, the tried and tested article. Let’s pretend you hire an article writer, most quality writers will charge at a minimum $0.10-$0.20 per word, so 500 words is already your $50 gone. This here is about 600 words so you can see you can’t really get in much detail at the 500 mark. Now we all know that articles without some sort of accompanying graphic is not going to capture the readers attention (I bet you noticed my dollar bill to the left). So you are going to need to hire a designer to make 1 or 2 small images explaining a few key points in the article in a creative way. Good designers charge $20-30 per hour so for just one short article it is going to cost you roughly $100.

If $50 isn’t worth spending then what next?

Save up till you have more money to invest. Invest in building a quality product and it will reward you for years to come. I know of blogs that are still advertising the same ebooks that they were 2 years ago, ProBloggers 31 Days To Build A Better Blog is an excellent example, it’s a feature packed, highly detailed ebook and resource pack that probably took months to create and put together. Start researching for ideas to create your own ebook or resource. It will be a worthwhile investment that will reward you months and years down the line. Long after those low quality backlinks get de-indexed by Google.

The problem can be broken down into 3 categories:

1. Time
2. Expertise
3. Willpower

These are 3 of the most common reasons why people fail at successfully creating content and growing an online business. There are ways around these 3 problems but a lot of it comes down to you and how much procrastinating you do through the day. If you don’t work hard, or at all for that matter, you won’t get anything.

What should you take away from reading this?

• Don’t waste money on cheap services.
• If you can’t afford quality content, save up until you can.
• SEO is a continuous endeavour, it doesn’t just get fixed in a one-off package.
• Quality content will bring in traffic and leads for years to come, don’t be surprised if it takes months to create.
• Results don’t happen overnight, move on to the next task once you finish one, eventually traffic will trickle in.