Patricia's Planet

One of my favourite TV programmes is the Dragons Den. A panel of 5 multi millionaire business people quizzing inventers and entrepreneurs who are hoping for investment and new highly skilled business partners or mentors. Most go away disappointed, but a few manage to make the Dragons believe in themselves and their products.

The only winning product that I’ve actually experienced myself is Toastabags for making toasted sandwiches and yes they do work. At 50p each and because they can be used many times I was surprised that there was enough profit in them to tempt a dragon, but I guess they know more than me.

Last week it was interesting to me because an antiques expert wanted a £100,000 investment in his antique valuation website Value My Stuff Now. It is a great idea and the business attracted 2 dragon investors Deborah Meadon and Theo Paphitis who now hold a 40% stake in the business. Unfortunately I don’t have any antiques to value but I’m sure that there are a lot of people out there who want valuations; whether to sell their antiques, insure them or out of curiousity.

During the pitch I was surprised to hear it said that it would cost more than £100,000 to drive traffic to the site. “How the other half lives I thought”. I have paid very little to drive traffic to my sites yet at least one of my sites gets more monthly traffic than this one that was already having £5,000 per month spent on adwords.

I checked out search queries for the site and found that queries related to the title ‘Value My Stuff Now’ were almost all of the organic traffic. I would have expected to see more related queries like ‘antique appraisal’ which gets 1627 daily searches in Google, or antique price guide which gets 2433 daily searches. ‘Value my stuff’ has 24 daily searches so it was obvious to me that with better SEO the website would get far more organic traffic from the search engines and that would cost a great deal less than PPC.

The site also only has 30 sites linking in (31 with this post). It is so easy and costs nothing to get thousands of backlinks through article marketing, RSS and directory submissions if you do it yourself. Or if you outsource the work it still wouldn’t cost as much as adwords. Text links using the more searched for keyphrases would increase traffic dramatically and the competition to get a place in the top ten for several good keyphrases isn’t that tough.

I don’t mean to critisize the site which I think is great, I just think that it isn’t necessary to spend so much on getting traffic and that PPC should only be a part of an overall traffic strategy using several methods. I wonder if this site owner would be spending as much as he is on traffic generation if he had come into contact with an Internet marketer when he started out.

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