We all respect and use SEO in a modern and trendy web 2.0 ways. Sure there are many experienced searh-engine engineers and technicians, but not all of them do SEO as a job. Some of them make money on SEO. These tactics called SEO business models I want to talk you about.
Profit Share
Some SEOs may be interested in working using a profit share business model.
This type of relationship requires a great amount of trust from both parties.
Usually people who do not know you well will not want to work for a potential
share of future profits.
I cannot even tell you how many people set up a generic, pharmacy-templatedriven,
affiliate website and want me to work for future profits for them. I tell
them "no," but someone asks me about every month.
Most SEOs are not going to want to work via profit share off the start unless you
have a REAL tangible brand. If you have an original great idea, some may, but
generally it is going to be hard for most webmasters to find a profit share SEO
partner.
Pay-Per-Click
Some marketers specifically sell services for setting up and managing pay-per-click
search engine accounts. Some people charge anywhere from $300 to $10,000 to
set up the campaign, then 10% to 20% of ad spend for management. Some people
charge for account setup and let you run things from there, and some people
charge recurring fees.
Different business models will be better for you depending on how competitive
your market is and how complex your campaign needs to be. If you have an
exceptionally cheap campaign, then it will be hard to get people to do a quality job
for 20% of a few hundred dollars.
Sell All Clicks as Pay-Per-Click
Some SEOs sell both organic traffic and pay-per-click ads on a cost-per-click basis.
This has recurring fees, but also may limit your down payment risk since you are
only paying for traffic you get.
Some networks that do this have you pay to create content where they also place
ads for others, and they may take years to deplete your initial deposit. Make sure
you define how the ads will appear (i.e., I would recommend buying exclusivity),
and get an approximate time range to deliver traffic. Also ask around to ensure
their traffic is legitimate traffic and not automated traffic bots.
Cloaking and Doorway Pages
Some software allows people to automatically generate thousands of keyword-rich
pages a day. Obviously, search engines do not like this technique. Some people
are exceptionally good at cloaking, but you still may get caught if you use it.
If you find yourself paying only a few hundred dollars, you will want to set up
different sites for those types of services and you will not want to connect those
other sites to your main business site in any way. Multiple sites can get penalized
because one of them was doing something shady. The wrath of Google can be an
unpleasant experience.
Create a Content Network for You
Some SEOs create a content network for you and charge you for the traffic. In a
sense, this is leasing traffic in a way similar to using pay-per-click search engines. If
they know what they are doing, they should be able to provide you targeted traffic
cheaper than pay-per-click search engines do, but there are a couple major
downsides to this business model.
- Some of these networks also sell traffic to your competitors, meaning
that you could be paying to set up networks that drive traffic at
competing websites.
- Some of these networks may require a down payment that takes many
years to pay itself off. After they already have your money, there is no
guarantee that they will care about you.
- When your clicks run out, you have to pay again.
- If you decide not to renew, then, in the end, you paid to create another
competing website that will continue to drive traffic at competing
websites.
If you are interested in this topic I will be happy to provide more techniques and tactics!
Written by:
Paul Shuteyev
