WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

I don’t know much about safariland holsters. After all, this is a blog about making money.

But apparently, LA Police Gear, Inc. does. Founded by Los Angeles area police officers, the company has grown and now serves the general public, military personnel, security professionals, and of course police officers (or anyone else who would like to buy from them). They sell gear, including gun holsters.

Why are we blogging about them?

Well, LA Police Gear is running a campaign on Pay Per Post. For $5, they are buying positive buzz and blatant advertising for their website. The opportunity they listed on the marketplace is simple: “Need links for military website.”

• Unlike some sponsored posts, this one doesn’t require you to disclose that it’s a sponsored post. (But, they also don’t ask you specifically not to disclose, so that’s why we can discuss them on this blog.)

• The opportunity doesn’t exclude any domains. (Some job postings will exclude the free blog accounts at blogger, blogspot, wordpress.com, etc.)
• It’s open to North Americans, Europeans, and Australians - presumably their clientele.

The question is how effective will this campaign be?

Using the SEO for Firefox plugin, and the RankChecker plugin, let’s see how LA Police Gear’s webpage is doing right now.

• The LA Police Gear’s webpage on safariland holsters is on the first page at #7 on google.
• Their competitors (spots #1-6) are all PageRank 3, while LA Police Gear’s site is PR4.
• Position #1 is held by the Safariland company themselves, who hold a PR of 3, but over 3,000 backlinks according to Yahoo. (In comparison, the LA Police Gear site has only 14 Yahoo backlinks)

The campaign is running for nearly 2 months and they seem to have 3 or 4 opportunities posted in the market place. Lets say they get a sponsored post every day in each opportunity. That’s around 180 - 240 links to their page. At $5 a link, that’s around $900 to $1200.

Is that enough to improve their ranking in Google? Would it have been better to spend that money on 10-12 sponsored links at $100 per link, but require that the sponsored link come from a higher quality blog? (Let’s say, a minimum of PR6 or PR7?)

Bottom Line: If you’re into gun paraphenilia, then you probably didn’t get this far in the post, because we lost you with the link to LA Police Gear. If you’re into making money online, we’re going to keep our eye on LA Police Gear’s ranking on the Safariland Holster keyword.

Question: If you had a $1000 for an advertising budget, how would you spend it to get the best return on your investment? Pay Per Click ads? Sponsored links? Link brokering?

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