Business Models for Internet Marketing Services

How to structure your customer contracts.

[Jammer]

I was wondering what models were out there to provide Internet Marketing services to customers.

At one end there is a straight commission on sales but what other models are there to increase the number of leads / sales to a businesses web site.

Issues as I see them include the sales not being able to be directly tracked to web site visits.

Possible models include:
1) Outright agreed price based on how good a job you can sell the value of your service.
2) Option 1 with extra metrics around improved visits to site
3) Per hour rate and you just keep working on things
4) Per month rates for an agreed set of tasks (eg so many new links sought or achieved) (& this gets messy trying to determine the value of each link of course)
5) Some percentage based on increase in sales overall.

Any other ideas or refinements on these models?

Anyone out there have experience in offerring or recieving these services and what worked or did not work?

[SEOMike]

Jammer-

I actually just started my own SEO company as a freelancer. I used the same model that works at my day job. It's like this:

Optimization (one price) phrase research and optimization of existing pages
SEO Copywriting (one price) 25 targeted content pages, sitemap and footer
Ongoing Maint. (recurring monthly fee) used to keep pages up to date and content fresh
Popularity Management (recurring monthly fee) optimize existing links, acquire new ones

You need to have reports in place to show the client progress in the recurring actions. You also need to keep them informed with what's going on at other steps. If the client is happy, you can show results, and sales increase, they have no problem staying with you. You need to be sure that if the client isn't educated in how SEO works, to inform them that your optimization is definitely perishable, and needs to be maintained to keep good results.

This type of structure has proved very profitable at my day job... $ for my boss. :-) That's why I decided to do it myself. $ for me!

[streetshirts]

In my opinion, its always wise to get as much up front in cash as possible, and take as little on contingency as possible (in this case a %age of sales). The problem is: sales based fees require too much faith in the customers product and service.

For Example:

You promise to double the number of targetted visitors and the customer wants to pay you an percentage of sales.

Why?

To me this says that they aren't confident enough in their product or sales technique to take advantage of this increase (meaning your share of sales would be small).

If they knew they could sell the product, they wouldn't offer you a %age of sales anyway. They would pay you your fee up front, knowing they could make ten times that off the new visitors.