Web Awards? Not sure what you mean. Those little icons mean nothing to me or most surfers. However, buying links is rarely the best result. Read all the posts at WW for more info. Pouring money into a link building campaign that has no focus, or expectation of results, is scary for management. That said, there is no fixed ratio re: traffic, leads, money. If that could be codified we all be doing it.

Where money MIGHT be applied is research of niche and competition, and then applied effort to address those results.

web awards example: seo moz web 2.0 awards.

I didn't ask how to build links, I asked how I can convince my boss to allow me to spend money on building links (not which may or may not include paid links).

that would be impossible to tell, because it would depend on how much traffic each site gets in the first place. and where they put your link. and whether people click on it.

and its not like you can tell your boss you will go up in the search rankings if you get another 50 links. because maybe you will go up for one keyword, when there's only so many sites above you, but for another keyword where the sites above you might be better, you might go up nothing. and each keyword gets a different amount of search traffic.

that my friend is my conundrum.

Most of our traffic is long tail, so there's no real way I can estimate how much SE traffic we can hope to gain. Only thing I can offer him is the number links we can hope to can.

There is no way of knowing how a web page will be affected by link building schemes, whether you buy, swap, list, borrow, steal, dump, extort, solicit, blackmail, beg or any other method of artificially manipulating your off-site ranking factors.

Essentially using any part of a marketing budget for link strategizing is a waste of time and money.

Concentrate on optimizing your on-site ranking factors (content, web page components, sitewide linking structure, logical naming conventions etc). If you are so convinced that some quantity, quality, relevancy and importance of incoming links will help your SEO campaign then just craft web pages worth linking to naturally.

Essentially using any part of a marketing budget for link strategizing is a waste of time and money.

For the record, I disagree with that.

then just craft web pages worth linking to naturally

I agree with the "craft web pages worth linking to" but not the "just" part. Only a hobbyist can afford the "build it and they will come" mentality. The rest of us have to find ways to be proactive about promotion. In my opinion, link development in one form or another should be a constant, ongoing part of the promotional mix..

how do I convert that in to traffic because that's the only thing my manager will look at. How much traffic -> how many leads - > how much money.

Those are wise questions. The whole point of promotional work is to create new profits, after all. They're hard to answer in advance, though, especially as the payoff from link building efforts might take months to become evident.

What does your company ordinarily do to promote the website, and the business as a whole? How are they measuring productivity for existing promotions? That might provide some clues for how to advocate for the work you'd like to do.

Sometimes the key that unlocks management resistance is "small scale testing". Try coming up with a project you could do as a small scale test and see what happens. If the results are positive, you'll have an easier time getting approval for further work.

When most of your traffic is long tail, here are two places to monitor progress:

"Search sent 22,058 total visits via 4,247 keywords"

and

"All traffic sources sent 42,955 visits via 461 sources and mediums"

Intelligent link development should lead to growth in all of those numbers.