Make SEO Work For You. “SEO Easy Business Models”

    by Paul Shuteyev
    29.04.2008
    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
    Back to blog
    Comments (2)
    Subscribe to our news

    Subscribe to us and you will know about our latest updates and events as just they will be presented