I never understood the logic of renting vs buying a home. Yes, there are many cases when you might want to rent or don’t have the available capital to buy but if you have the resources, why wouldn’t you buy? When you buy a property, you are building equity in an asset that over time, if taken care of property, will increase in value. Where is the value in renting a property?
Internet space is no different than the brick and mortar world. We spend small fortunes in PPC, buying leads and renting space in Google’s world. We spend crazy hours following Google’s adaptations to their system that do make it easier but some how seem more complex and time consuming.
At years end, are we any further ahead, not really? Where is the asset? Where is the value and where is the pride in knowing we have built something substantial that doesn’t float into the air the moment a search engine sneezes?
Building a property, on or offline takes time. It takes hard work and focus but in the end you have value, you have an asset and if you are working on a project you love, you have pride in bringing to life a creation you may have envisioned for years.
Why wouldn’t you build? I run numerous PPC campaigns every month. At the end of each month, I look at the results and I can compare Internet marketing campaigns that run strictly PPC campaigns vs Internet marketing campaigns that encompass both PPC and SEO. The difference is crystal clear.
While with PPC campaigns, there are new discoveries we can plug back into the system to increase click through and conversions rates, we are really just renting search engine space for another month.
Meanwhile, PPC and SEO combined campaigns nurture each other. There are numerous discoveries from either strategy that can be applied to both, including converting keywords, better titles and enticing body copy.
The key difference is in the end result. You build out a property, a website, quickly start to reap the rewards of owning an asset. SEO starts to overtake PPC leads and before you know it, your “property” ranks in the top 3 search engine results and not only drives leads but has a value of its own.
You have an Internet property that can drive sales by ranking on Bing as well as Google. It can be pushed into Facebook, LinkedIn , Twitter or the next generation of social media platforms. You can sell the website to competitors if you decide to move into another industry. The point is that you are creating value, you are creating an asset.
As I mentioned earlier, there are good reasons to rent and some people can only afford to rent but if you have the resources, why would you?