Become a PPC consultant?

[simoneee]

I have been working with affiliates for a while now using PPC to generate leads, so I have great experience in using Adwords,FB etc.

So I was thinking about becoming a ppc consultant, but I am not shore if there is a market for a independet consultant? Big company's have their own marketing department or have outsourced the whole marketing to a marketing firm.

And the small business don't spend enough on their ppc campaigns to afford a ppc consultants.

So I'm little confused about if there is a market, and if there is... what size/kind of company's should I target?

Appreciate your help

[topr8]

>>And the small business don't spend enough on their ppc campaigns to afford a ppc consultants.

but here is the niche surely? they are probably spending their money inefficiently - you've just got to persuade them of that.
(lots of big companies with huge budgets doubtless waste money too)

[wheel]

I think he's summed up the problem well. Big companies work with other big companies. Small companies are too cheap to be monetized by providing direct services. If you want to go after the small fish, you probably have to do it indirectly i.e. by providing ebooks or other services like that. Managing a small campaign though? Yuck - 90% of the work of a big campaign for 1/10th the income.

[simoneee]

Thanks guys, I hope I get an answer from another ppc- consultants to

[RhinoFish]

big market with loads of ppc consultants, go for it!

from your typos, i'm wondering if english is your second language... there aren't nearly as many consultants focused on other languages, might make that your specialty.

though we'll compete...

good luck!

[LucidSW]

I estimate there are well over 500,000 PPC advertisers out there, maybe closer to one million, and that's just Adwords. There's other PPC services out there. The ads I see, the vast majority seemingly need help and likely losing money. So there's plenty of work out there for all of us. As Topr said, it's just a matter of approaching them and convincing them you can save them money.

You'll probably not get the big boys right away, unless you're lucky. If you build yourself a reputation, they'll eventually come to you. In the meantime, approach them yourself, join freelance sites such as oDesk and eLance (where I used to get lots of work, clients of all sizes).

You may want to do only certain niches. I know of someone doing only campaigns for lawyers. If you do speak other languages, I'd definitely do that.

Good luck.

[eWhisper]

LucidSW's numbers for advertisers is low. There are quite a few more advertisers out there. Good guess through :)

I know many PPC consultants. They don't manage campaigns at all (or if they do management - it's their affiliate stuff). The consultants just work with other companies in various capacities.

You need to think about your revenue stream. Some people really struggle as they work with someone once, and then the revenue is gone. So you constantly have to recruit new clients.

Others work with retainers or monthly fees, which makes it easier to build your client list and build your revenue stream.

[netmeg]

If you're good, you'll get more work than you can handle. Small businesses are *desperate* for help in PPC. If you can do local too, you can pretty much write your own ticket.

[LucidSW]

What's your guess eWhisper?

The only time I know Google published their figures was around 2005 and they said 250k. As I recall, they expected that number to double over the next year (or was it two?). Doubling every two years would give a figure of 2 million today. Doubling every year would make it 16 million, which I highly doubt this happened.

A year ago, this thread looked into the question:
www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/4103453.htm

I found a NY Times article that said 1 million in 2007 (the article was written in 2009). It shows some known figures up to 2006. Extrapolating and using 50% growth, I get a figure of 5 million to be reached this year. Seems a bit high to me but not impossible given the tens of millions of businesses plus all the affiliate marketers.

However, even in 2005, that was the number of accounts _created_. The number of active accounts is surely less, but by how much is hard to say. Even if half don't use it anymore, there's still lots of advertisers needing help out there.

I also found another article claiming that 80% of Google's revenues coming from 1.35% of the advertisers. Of 5 million total, that represents 67,500 large advertisers and I don't believe there are 67k competent managers out there.

[DanAbbamont]

First off, just a heads up. If you're actually making profit with affiliate programs and PPC, you're cut out to be a PPC consultant.

You can either try to start your own consulting firm, or you can go to work for another firm. The challenge in starting your own firm is finding clients. This can be pretty easy with good references from past clients, but you have to start somewhere. You might start out charging some small businesses $20 / hour or a moderate monthly rate. Not much, but if you're actually good, you can count on the fact that you're sacrificing some money now to build a solid list of references. Your results here will be your sales material for the future and as you work on larger campaigns you can adjust your prices accordingly.

You could also go right from affiliate marketing to getting a job with a marketing firm. This is what I did. I didn't make great money, but I worked on some really large budget campaigns and did very well with them. Having done this, I can either try to advance my career with full time positions at firms that have the authority to acquire really powerful clients, or I can use my experience to pick up consulting gigs and keep all of the profit for myself.

[CainIV]

Once you get 2-3 solid clients under your belt, even if you do not generate alot of personal revenue, you leverage those results against the level of business on tier above on the next rung. And so on.

Until you are working with only big companies, and you are a big company.