The Affiliate Solution
Have you considered adding an affiliate program to boost your business?
A bespoke affiliate program is a good alternative to having bespoke SEO work done on your site.
Bespoke SEO consultancy used to be the only way to benefit from search engine traffic, and consequently used to be the first thing people thought of when they wanted to tap the power of the Internet for their own business. "We'll get an SEO firm to SEO our website!"
Unfortunately there are many site owners who do not like the changes SEOs make to their sites, and a lot of the proposed work never gets beyond the suggestion stage.
That flash introduction, for instance. That just has to go. The search engines don't like it. I know that your competitors think it makes you look really slick (or rather, you think that your competitors think that it looks really slick) but it has to go.
So, rather than lose sleep over it, why not use the affiliate marketing method.
Affiliate marketing works by an SEO - or any of the many other types of Internet marketing professional - putting up a highly optimised website to capture leads and/or sales enquiries (or however your business works) then sending these over to you, or even directing this traffic to a sales page where a sale is made without anyone even needing to contact your customer.
When the sale is made you give the affiliate an agreed commission for the sale. It's a win-win scenario. Everyone knows what everythings costs beforehand, so the ROI of specific campaigns can be calculated in advance and budgets may be allocated to future growth.
There are several different types of affiliate program management software available, or you can even outsource it to an affiliate network (who will also be able to publicize your affiliate program with lots of seasoned and experienced affiliates). The whole program is transparent to everyone who is involved.
Read more about affiliate marketing and affiliate programs here.
I believe that the old ways of the SEO consultant are giving way to the affiliate solution. Increasingly there is so much that needs to be done to a website, and to get traffic from other sites, including all the new Web 2.0 properties. All that time needs to be paid for, which is why a complete SEO job is so expensive. And who's to say that the search engines won't take a sudden dislike to your website, which has had so much attention and expense lavished upon it, and delete it from their listings.
That can happen at any time. It happens regularly, and without apparent reason.
As opposed to paying huge SEO fees up-front (sometimes with recurring monthly charges) and no guarantee of anything at all, with affiliate marketing the affiliate only gets paid when they make a sale. They only get paid when you make money. Don't you like the sound of that?
If you have any ideas you'd like to discuss about how I can set up an independent website on an affiliate basis to help your business, send me an email.