I’m a fan of Craig Campbell and Chris Palmer’s live YouTube streams on a Wednesday (morning US time, evening in Europe). It’s full of SEO and online business nuggets along with multiple servings of banter and crazy stories. They also field plenty of questions - some good, some not so good. But there are some interesting ones!

On yesterday’s stream, someone asked (I’ll paraphrase slightly): “What would you do if you had to start again in the morning and only had $1,000 to your name?”

Like I said, an interesting one!

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What the person was actually asking was how could they make money online in the quickest way possible with the least amount of investment.

They asked about options around affiliate marketing, Ecom and client SEO.

How long would it take? What options would they choose?

The consensus among Craig and Chris was that if they wanted to make money fast, the obvious - and only - option was client SEO. Not just from the list above, but from any list of online business ideas!

Affiliate marketing takes FOREVER to yield anything meaningful. Today more than ever, for obvious reasons.

And even if you do start making decent moolah, who knows which algo will pull the rug out? (Reminder - build an email list from day 1!).

Client SEO is simply the only way to get cash flowing quickly, if you’ve got the chops of course.

When I started rank and rent and leads started flowing on one or two of my gardening sites, I contacted an established garden maintenance company to see if they were interested in taking the leads. They were, but they were far more interested in having me do their SEO.

Especially because they were not willing to pay agency rates (no doubt they were quoted thousands per month for SEO).

I started doing SEO for them before we parted ways a few months ago. In that time (approx. four months), I invoiced just over $2k. Looking back, that doesn’t seem like much, even though I quoted an hourly rate of $86.

That said, it was a pretty decent amount for the amount time I spent working on their site, but I’ve since learned a couple of things I’m acting on now.

Here are my lessons learned - I hope they help you too

-DON’T quote an hourly rate! You don’t want to tie your value to an hourly rate or get into the business of “How many hours did you spend this month and what did you do?”. Of course you will provide details on what you’re doing and include that in your reporting, but instead you want to think in terms of..

-VALUE! If you know how to rank sites, you have HUGELY valuable skill, let us not forget! The value you provide goes WAY beyond time spent. Think about it. Let’s say you quote a roofing company $500/month for SEO, and you do great work improving their rankings and supercharging their traffic (not to mention any branding impact, etc.).

Imagine the company lands 5 new jobs in the first 1-2 months they wouldn’t have otherwise gotten, and their average invoice to a customer is $3k or $5k (or much more). Does that $500/month look like enough now? Course not!

That’s why I’m planning to charge much more now. I’ve started working with this gardening client again, and while I originally started back at a low rate for a small number of hours, I’ve told them I’m increasing my SEO retainer and that I can send on the details…

If they decline, then that’s great - because it’s a great way of filtering clients. You only want those willing to invest at the right level and who understand the value (and if the leads are flowing and jobs are landing, they will!).

Stay tuned for more client SEO updates!

Have you considered doing client SEO in this post-HCU world? Or are you doing it already? If so, let me know how it’s going!

In other news, my HVAC lead gen site is doing nicely…my top ranking is position 14 in my target city / location. Note the image below shows average positions - “HVAC services” is middle of page 2 for my target city!

More to follow on this lead gen project in my next email. I feel like ranking this site on page 1 could be worth at least $1-2K month once leads start to flow.

And remember, all I’ve done so far is create a site on an EMD for around $5 and used ChatGPT to create all the page copy! I’ve also made sure the site is structured correctly and have done some interlinking.

Before I go….links, links, links are beautiful

Oh, and keep an eye on your inbox over the coming week for details on a goldmine when it comes to link-building opportunities. What is it? Well, imagine you had a database of websites that are VERY likely to accept your guest post or niche edit request?

I’ve seen a response rate of around 75% to my outreach emails with this database - an absolutely impossible conversion rate with cold email!

The way it works is you sign up and browse the database for opportunities relevant to your site(s). Once you find some sites you like, you simply contact them directly and go from there. I’ve had plenty of replies and so can choose from multiple sites for new links.

Oh, one FINAL thing below!

Mini-course, anyone?

If I were to create a mini-course at a reasonable price, which one would you be most likely to purchase?

Hope you are having a great week, and take care.

Anton

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