Forum Moderators: martinibuster
We've been approached by a new client that has an ecommerce store for a quote on researching various sites and directories we could submit their site to.
Research and Submission would be the actual services involved for this.
Generally we do this for clients when we develop their sites and not as a stand alone service.
Can any offer some ideas on how they cost out something like this? By the hour or what?
I don't want specifics but perhaps a general direction.
I suppose one could simple indicate there would be 3 hours of time involved in researching targeted (and vertical target markets) to submit to.
Then offering a complete price to try and submit to those targeted sites or handing them the report with the sites listed and they can attmpt to do it them selves.
Any thoughts on this?
Looking forward to a good discussion.
Some firms quote a fixed price per number of links, but I'd recommend that approach after you have developed some history as well as a database full of relatively friendly sites.
From the client standpoint, a pay-for-performance deal would be attractive. You could be rewarded for productive links (ones that produce good traffic) or high PR links (if Google rankings are important). The difficulty of explaining, selling, and managing this would be enormous, though.
Sure it can be very profitable but the management and then proving then the client owes you $10,000 for the links when it might have cost them $1000 would be difficult.
I think perhaps my approach with an hourly rate would be best, done in 2 phases.
Phase 1: research and reporting
Research out all the possible directories and industry and vertical sites the client could be linked from in the purchased hours (minimum 3?)
Write a report detailing which sites you have researched that will link to you, which require a link back and which you have to pay to be in.
After the report.. they are free to take it and do the submitting and emailing themselves or they can again, pay us (hourly) to make the contacts for them and do any backlinking that is required.
What do people think?
Aaron
for commerce they don't care about hits really, I would think they'd care about more sales .. so maybe there's room to add more conversion techniques to the portion you're dealing with, i.e. broaden the scope a little.
If you can take a piece of the site like this, you can kind of figure a price cap for you, and reason with them that it's an experiment (for them), and as they start to see increased sales in the more optimized section of the site, well then you both know something about the value of proceeding further.
I agree.. pay for performance sucks.
I will second that.
"We will devote __ hours to identifying potential link sites and performing site submittals and link requests".
Does this happen? We do only link popularity campaigns and the clients are only interested in how many Actual Links i am going to give them.
To marketbiz:-
When we do link popularity campaigns we generally ask for an email address from the domain of which we are doing Links campaign. That adds to a bit of authencity to the people we are approaching. If you are giving targeted (and vertical target markets) Links then you should charge a bit more. Generally clients want links from sites with PR 4 and above (if the page from which they get a link is PR4 or above then it is an added bonus). They consider them valuable. You can then try to get them maximum no. of links with their custom anchor text. This helps in overall customer satisfaction. These are a few things which clients look for. Hope this helps your Link campaign.
Happy Link hunting!
