Last week I spoke at Entrepreneur Magazine’s Growth Conference in Atlanta. Many sessions were packed and afterward a group huddled around me and peppered me with questions.

#1 Question: “Why should I spend money buying clicks when I can get traffic from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc? And for that matter, why shouldn’t we just try to get free search engine traffic?”

I said, “Let’s say someone has a website with a #1 listing on Google. You’re selling a million dollars of product a year with FREE traffic. No advertising. The site makes a quarter million dollars a year of pure profit. They’re willing to sell the whole business to you for 1 year of profit. Would you buy it?”

I got puzzled looks. Most said, “Yeah, that would probably be a good deal.”

I said, “Let’s say Google changes their algorithm and your site completely disappears from page 1. Sales drop to nearly zero. What would happens then?”

“If all your traffic is free and you don’t know how to BUY traffic, you’re done.

“Or what if it’s all from social media? What happens when you stop pushing content out there?”

Let’s say that same site makes $125,000 a year profit after paying $125,000 for advertising. How much is that worth?

It’s worth a whole lot more than the free traffic site, I’ll tell you that much.

The ONLY thing you can depend on, ultimately, is the ability to BUY a customer at market price and turn a profit.

Once you know how to do that, you’ll never go hungry.

Your mission is not to put $0 in and get $1 out. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to put $1 in and get $2 out. That’s a business.

Anything else is a bankruptcy waiting to happen.

http://www.perrymarshall.com/personalcoaching

About the Author

Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.

He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.