A young PPC newbie wrote me an old-fashioned letter and asked for guidance starting his PPC business- how best to market it, and how to structure payment etc.
Here's part of my reply:
Marketing:
- Best way to market your PPC services to clients: I'd use a combo of PPC and SEO- nothing positions you better for PPC, in my opinion, than people finding you with PPC- via SEO is good because there's more trust, more expertise perceived, while PPC is usually more salesy... then take part in forums like webmasterworld, the google group SEM2.0- linked in... eventually clients will be finding you the way you found me.
- I think also using PPC to promote yourself will hone your skills- and that may also inform your charges (with your cost per conversion and avg. labor time, what do you need to charge?)
- Your blog looks professional, I like it, good start- and the Bible quote ;-) we should exchange blogroll links. Get the adwords certification. Look into some keyword research, e.g. wordtracker (altho nichebot is my tool of choice) and use keywords in your blog post titles. As you may gather from AdWords landing page quality score implications, learning some SEO (don't know how much you know) can only help you.
- You probably need to get some experience and a resume, so plan on charging less now than you will in the future- give your clients a lot and get testimonials from them when you succeed and they feel they owe you.
- I'd suggest using Google Web Optimizer to test various appeals and prices- see what people bite on- pricing is complicated, requires testing-
- Some clients take more work, and the more they have budget specifics and want other things like geolocation and dayparting that require multiple campaigns, the more time it can take.
- An hourly fee makes sense to you as a laborer- please let me know how clients respond to it- it could make you more efficient, but I bet you'll get a lot of "how many hours does it take you to do this?" I think their fear is you spending a lot of time on their dime for unknown results- what's their ROI? When you can answer how many hours it takes you to do some part of PPC, then you end up arriving at package pricing- I found my kickstart program was easy for clients to grasp and the price low enough to get them to try it out. Packaging and pricing your service in a way that's easy for clients will lead to a lot more business.
- Our web marketing company, Fuel Interactive, charges a percentage of the PPC budget (there's a minimum fee) and spends the remainder on the clicks.
- Selling a monthly service long term requires getting them to take it seriously, and talking to businesses with some significant capital- when I was freelance, it was easier to get small businesses, but they didn't have the capital to keep going - so I'd suggest think big, sell big, get confident - charge what you know it requires to do a good job, and when you get a good client, work however much you have to in order to get them results so you can use it as a testimonial, on a results page.
- Small businesses demand results now- bigger clients who've been doing traditional advertising for a decade or more are used to spending $10,000 on a yellow pages ad, and not used to making their advertising get immediate results, so you don't have to take them to the CPA or ROAS metric level before they're ready- that wasn't my approach at first because I'm a scientific advertiser and I want to get them ROI- getting them results is key to me feeling good about the relationship. But I've found that all clients are in different places- some have website design obstacles to conversions which increase their cost per conversion, and getting them to redesign or try MVT can be a long educational process. In the meantime, you have to do the best you can with the KPI you're using.
- Harry Beckwith says the best way to get more business in a service industry is to provide a better service.
- After doing PPC manually (using each SE's interface, some of which are clunky) for years now, looking at tools like Adapt SEM or Acquisio to make our optimizations more efficient makes a lot more sense to me. The more clients you get, and the more you think about the number of hours you spend on each one vs. your fees, and as you see how much time analysis and optimization take, especially in multiple SE's, the more these tools excite me- with these, you can be more effective in less time, which would allow you to not charge hourly, which as above might increase the appeal of your offering. Obviously you need to learn to do it manually first, I believe, but when you have constant client volume, these tools are worth it, and these two are fairly affordable. Adapt is probably easier entry for the new freelancer with few clients, but Acquisio looks more powerful (more options when optimizing for various KPI's), is cheaper when you have more clients and has cool inter-engine tools. We may actually run both head-to-head for a couple months to see which works best for our organization.
