Lets say you sell SEO services and want to aim for the high end of the market.

keyword modifiers and/or ad copy:

• high end

• complex
• corporate
• fortune 500
• custom
• bespoke (I love that word)
• search brand management

negative ad trigger keywords:

• - cheap

• - outsource (maybe some testing might be needed on this one...depends on their meaning when they type outsource
• - India
• - free
• - discount
• - budget
• - wholesale
• - economic
• - low cost
• - cost
• - price

Content:
Create content designed around being relevant to search queries likely to be performed by desired clients. Best XYZ. Top rated XYZ. Award winning reliable XYZ.

Offer a free or low priced information product to point beginners at. Perhaps get their information in exchange for giving it away, but sometimes it is even better just to give away good value without expecting anything in return.

Make sure you qualify as a GAP and Yahoo! Ambassador and throw those logos on your site.

Cheap Blowhards:
As soon as you realize a lead is a blowhard make it a goal to be off the phone in less than a minute. If via email tell them that you would have no problem answering their questions if they would pay for the consultation time upfront.

Proxy for Search Ad Spend:
Some industries are web only, and thus may not spend much money on traditional offline marketing, but if a lead is in a field that tells normally spends big offline, and they tell you they have no offline budget than they may also have limited or next to no online budget.

Anyone who has excuses about how poor they are or how the search engines are destroying their business typically falls into one of the following groups:

• a person down on their luck who can't focus beyond the past

• a person unwilling to change, stuck with a legacy business model
• a person too lazy to try to build any real value
• a person trying to waste your time making you earn far less than you are worth

Proxy for Their Opinion of Value:
If some told you they just hired someone from India and were rather happy but...

You may as well avoid that lead. Their perceived value bar is likely too low and/or their expectations are probably too high.

If they got burned in the past they may be afraid to invest enough to be able to afford useful services.

Some leads that generally can not afford to competing in marketplaces where the SEO is the only thing that makes it a possibility whine to the SEO about their business being destroyed if things ever slow. Keep in mind that in many of these instances the SEO did create that business opportunity and build those businesses for diminishing scraps as the marketplace and algorithms advance.

List your prices (I am surprised by how few SEOs do this):

• Rand does

• Bruce Clay does
• Jakob Nielson just ran an article about it.

Justifying Your Price:
If the client is exceptionally concerned about how much you make per hour one of the following conditions is probably happening:

• you are selling to the wrong person

• you are selling the wrong stuff
• you have not adequately prequalified them

The amount of time it takes you to do something is irrelevant to how much value you create. For example, on a one hour consult yesterday in a single minute I saved my client over double what the hour long phone call cost.

Peter D pointed at a story about a $10,000 hour recently. Earlier this year I think I had a million dollar minute, but that idea still won't launch for a few months. I sure hope that goes well ;)

If You Suck at Pricing (I Generally do):
If you tend to under-price your services try to bring on a partner who is more business savvy, or created automated income streams that help sell themselves without requiring you to negotiate prices.

I recently took on a trusted friend as a partner for some large scale client work. The details of that million dollar minute were told to a friend because he is much better at executing on ideas of that scale than I am. As a minority stake holder I will likely make more off the idea than I would have if I developed it myself.

Recommend other companies:
That makes you look both reliable AND exceptionally selective. Rand does it.

Customer forms...just ask questions. Good ones. And lots of them!
Have a long customer form on your site that really allows you to learn the client's business. If they take an hour and a half to fill out an inquiry form then the odds are pretty good they are not a cheap ass or tire kicker.

Plus asking questions helps build trust and makes them realize how many things you consider when you provide your services.

I created one for a friend's PPC services, but I have yet to see many of these in the SEO industry. If you wanted to know how to a great customer inquiry form check out the questionnaire on Clear Left. Their customer inquiry form would be a fantastic model for any company selling web development or marketing services.

Say You are Not Available:
Some people have emailed me dozens of time because being unavailable made them more attracted to wanting to hire me. Some of the leads were so appealing that I couldn't say no.

Email Overload:
I am getting exceptionally behind on emails, so my advice probably lacks credibility here, but if it is not personalized delete it.

If it is personalized, but the same person keeps asking you questions that could easily be answered by a search engine politely remind them that search engines exist by answering their questions with a link to a relevant search query.

Use an email program that lets you mark and store messages by priority level.

If you get asked the same question many times create content on the topic so you can answer the question once and have the answer there for many people.

Chat:
Always time to chat with your best friends, but if you sell a cheap product to someone and they want your email to chat for an hour a day for free cut that stuff off right away. It doesn't scale.

If people want to chat to sell you stuff without having met you beforehand tell them you are not interested and never will be. And you have to go now.

RSS:
Sometimes it helps to subscribe to keywords and cut out a few channels. Or, use Google toolbar buttons and just subscribe to your 15 - 20 favorite blogs.

Read through your favorite channels maybe a few times a day. Read through the other ones much more rarely.

Overall Selling Theory:
I won't pretend that I know everything about selling high end client services, but I think some of these tips would be useful to anyone new to the market who wanted to set up shop selling SEO services.

Recently a reader asked me why I didn't have other ads on my blog. My response was:

As a business model most quality SEO services do not scale. Those who really want to provide consumer level services have more referrals than they know what to do with.

Most of the ads in the SEO industry are for scam crap that people do not need. Why diminish my own credibility by plastering them all over my site?

All content, is in some way an advertisement. For example, good comments help add value to content and help the original author learn.

Plus I already sell my ebook on this site. When Threadwatch had AdSense ads front and center (to the point of being somewhat spammy about them) this site was still making way more than that one.

The viability of a business model or publishing model not only is reliant on the quantity of ads but the quality and relevancy of ads.

Giving people other options for other products would likely only hurt my conversion rate and credibility.

Recently I have been getting too much email to keep up with, so I took the send me an email part off of my site. I need to catch up. It may go back up sometime down the road, but if I ask for people to contact me and don't quickly respond then I am just going to piss a lot of people off (thanks to Andrew for the link).

If you are feeling stressed out, sometimes making yourself less accessible will help you build your brand and improve your customer service because you will be able to focus more on each person who contacts you.

I am sure some sociologists have studied the value of strong and weak relationships, but the mind is limited in how many relationships you can keep. If you got more weak ones than you know what to do with and are finding that you have not put as much effort as you would like toward growing some of your stronger relationships maybe it makes sense to try to build a few stronger ones, or to try to hit a different market segment.

As a test, when I pulled down the contact me note I put up a new sticky thingie on the side selling 1 hour of consulting services for $500. In the last 3 days that sticky note has made far more money than I made in ebook sales, and I haven't even marketed it other than putting that note on the right side of the site.

Not surprisingly, a couple of the people who purchased the service were people I remembered emailing back and forth with in the past.

The value in ads is in the targeting. How much more targeted of a prospect can you get than a person who regularly reads and like your stuff? If someone else can get more value out of that ad space then perhaps it is a hint that the business model might be worth changing.

A few big goals most consultants should really want to achieve:

• automated passive income streams

• diverse revenue sources
• creating and/or packaging information in chunks that either need rarely updated or can be sold on a subscription basis (I am screwing up with that idea at this point)
• packaging similar content in different formats
• make sure that if you create good stuff that many people see it (I screwed up so much in the past by answering tons of questions via email and just throwing away boatloads of content by not formatting any of them into articles or blog posts)
• getting so much demand that they can't keep up with the market, to where they can afford to raise their rates and control their ease of accessibility or price point to keep up with market demand
• using price as a filtering mechanism to filter out bad leads

Even though I sent out thousands of emails helping people the free help I gave over the past couple years was a form of selling myself (even if I didn't really know it when I started doing it).

Always sell yourself first. That is especially important if you are trying to break into a crowded marketplace. After you start doing well you need to keep selling yourself, but if you can't keep up with the market demand intentionally filtering some of your relationships (even if only temporary) is much better than doing a poor job of communicating with almost everyone who tries to contact you.

You also have to leave room to invest in yourself. If you stop learning then eventually you are going to be trading on outdated reputation, which may eventually hurt people. Its a hard balance to strike with SEO stuff because you don't know who will read what you write or when they will read it...and the market is growing increasingly competitive and what provides the quickest best ROI today may be a sure ban tomorrow.

So I have been feeling a bit burned out on the controversy angle and have tried doing a bit less of that on this site...I figure it is better to post that sort of stuff on Threadwatch.

Jakob Nielsen, who is always great at hyping his opinion and putting it out in an informative column, recently wrote an article stating that Hyped Web Stories Are Irrelevant.

He is partially correct. After the hype wears off the only things that are left are a bunch of links and maybe a few new readers, which lead to a few more links and a few more readers. Who knows, after a decade of debunking everything else as hype and painting an industry with your opinion maybe you could have one of the largest newsletters on the web. Like Jakob.

Incredible that he is able to come up with interesting columns every month after a decade of writing them. You need only look at some of those article titles to see how good he is as putting a different spin on many of the hype stories.

You only need to occassionally look in the search results to see how much the hyped stories and hype channels typically outperform the channels lacking hype. Why do they? Because it is easy to argue or agree with something that is full of hype. Stuff that is boring and down the middle typically just isn't all that remarkable.

I not only see lots of Digg pages in the search results, but if you ever try to search for something like "Google + some rare word or idea" you may never find the information you were looking for because Google is unable to get past the heavily linked hype.

The search results are nothing but a popularity content. More bloggers are realizing that. More are writing inaccurate / biased / hyped stories just for the attention it brings. But eventually it wears thin. I have been going a bit lean on my RSS recently because of this sort of stuff everywhere.

With so much bias and hype crowding up the search results eventually good functional ideas and products may need to pay just to get any attention.

Wired has an article about the changing face of the prescription drug market, noting that growth has slowed in established markets while new markets are booming. Worldwide spending has hit over 600 billion dollars, with 252 billion in sales in the US. They also point to Forbes slide show of the 10 best-selling drugs.

The markets those drugs serve probably have other up and coming drugs that few people have been publishing content for. With the kind of money the pharma corps spend on marketing (more here, here and here ) you can be certain that they will create plenty of demand for new drugs as patents for the old ones lapse. This press release (imshealth.com/ims/portal/front/articleC/0,2777,6599_3665_77491316,00.html) points out drug sales by region:

In 2005, North America, which accounts for 47 percent of global pharmaceutical sales, grew 5.2 percent, to $265.7 billion, while Europe experienced somewhat higher growth of 7.1 percent, to $169.5 billion. Sales in Latin America grew an exceptional 18.5 percent to $24 billion, while Asia Pacific (outside of Japan) and Africa grew 11 percent to $46.4 billion. Japan, the world's second largest market, which has historically posted slower growth rates, performed strongly in 2005, growing 6.8 percent to $60.3 billion, its highest year-over-year growth since 1991. That performance was fueled by growth in angiotensin IIs, antihistamines and oncology therapies, as well as significant uptake in geriatric-related therapies such as Aricept®, for treating Alzheimer's, and Cabaser®, Permax® and Bi Sifrol®, for treating Parkinson's Disease.

Pharmaceutical sales in China grew 20.4 percent to $11.7 billion in 2005, representing the third consecutive year that market has achieved 20+ percent growth. IMS estimates that China will be the world's seventh largest pharmaceutical market by 2009.

some blockbuster drugs will be losing their patents this year:

The number of blockbuster products (those with sales exceeding the billion-dollar level) reached 94 in 2005 compared with 36 in 2000 and included 17 new members of the billion-dollar club. While six blockbusters are expected to lose their patents in 2006, the launch of new products and continued growth of those already on the market will result in an increasing number of blockbusters over the next five years.

"The end of blockbusters is not upon us, despite what some analysts are saying," observed Aitken. "In fact, we expect that blockbusters will continue to be an important part of pharmaceutical market growth over the next five years, due to new uses for existing therapies, the emergence of niche/specialty products, and the ongoing demand for chronic disease treatments."

and some of the types of drugs currently in Phase III testing:

In 2005, more than 2,300 products were in clinical development, up 9 percent from 2004 levels, and up 31 percent over the past three years. A promising range of drugs are now in Phase III clinical trials or pre-approval stage, including 96 oncology products, 51 products for treating cardiovascular disease, 37 for viral infections and HIV, and 28 for arthritis/pain. Of the total pipeline, 27 percent of these products are biologic in nature; an all-time high. Biologics also experienced strong growth overall, adding $7.6 billion in sales to the global pharmaceutical market in 2005. Led by Amgen, Roche/Genentech and Johnson and Johnson, this sector grew 17.1 percent in 2005, generating sales of $52.7 billion.

Huge markets abound. Here are lists of:

• fastest growing drugs

• more best selling drugs
• how to save money on prescription drugs - even if you hate the vertical you can still make money teaching people how to short change the pharma corps. As the cost of medical supplies and services goes up the holistic health vertical will only grow more attractive.

Where is the separation between teaching and manipulation? While leaving adequate room for profit and learning in a competitive marketplace how do you teach people how to learn without teaching them what they must learn, who they must learn it from, with what biases and from what perspective? As we keep records of the world and it is easier for us to match our exact interests, desires, and biases our standards change.

When we get what we want when we want it far more often many things are considered noise. What was once acceptable tutelage or a normal business practice becomes hypocritical censorship or information as a marketing mechanism with a hidden agenda.

But the large aggregated demand offered by the web (and search) means that even micro niches can be profitable. And the marketing feedback loops get faster while search engines and other information systems are offering up more data to marketers at a cost quickly approaching free.

Even as information systems get better at helping us solve problems quickly marketing gets more sophisticated. The analogy at the end of this post about networks destroying the corporate structure states how hard it may be to have a sense of organization of the chaos of human intentions.

An analogy might explain the concept intuitively: the army is like a corporation. the terrorists are like a network.

Especially since when a competing network gets beyond a certain level it can leverage its efficiencies to destroy competition. For example, Google pays AdSense spammers millions of dollars a month to spam up Yahoo! and MSN search results.

Search systems promote publishing business models founded on marketing through creating arbitrary controversies or mass automation while serving us ads from who can pay the most for our demand (which frequently is based on solutions that fix symptoms instead of going to the core problem - if you never fix the real probably you can create recurring subscription revenues).

A friend recently set up an SEM company. I set up the PPC account for his first client (largely because he wanted to do such a good job that the client would refer others). As it turns out we did such a good job that the client fired him. Too much efficiency was introduced into his business, and without greed business people are just not business people.

What you get a bunch of in search results is:

• an abundance of fake recommendations based on payout levels:
  • direct search ads

  • affiliate marketing - some have even ask Wall Street Journal reporters to plagurize content and/or intentionally bias it to promote things that are 100% bogus
  • content which is monetized largely through search engines teaching people to blend the ads and content
  • quality useful content that solves problems often makes ads less appealing (as they are both competing for attention on the same page)
  • to be fair, in many cases best in class is not profitable
• biased content and content marketed largely through controversy:
  • most people passionate enough to create content at a loss probably have a decent amount of bias they want to express (that is why I got on the web)

  • biased information is easy to link at since it is easy to remark on (person x is right on or person y is full of crap)
  • my income went up when I got sued
  • in one search engine the company that sued me even started ranking for my name
  • even when people talk negatively about stuff they still link at it
  • citations due to search are self-reinforcing in nature
• and whatever content can be created by a machine.
  • even when Google notice spammy AdSense accounts they often do nothing about it

I am not saying that I know the answers to the problems, but I can sorta see some of the ones that exist. Searching for Dummies sorta states that the ease with which we can find things tends to make us lazier and less educated. Is that perhaps because many people lack ambition? Or is it because we settle for good enough more often so we can focus more time on other things we find more interesting?

I guess my real questions are: is there such a thing as pure information? And if yes, are there any viral self-sustaining business models that would promote it to flourish? Is the diversity of biases promoted by search enough? Or am I just biased in my thinking? ;)

I like how Tim Berners-Lee said computers and algorithms can be arranged to solve social problems. It would be a cool topic to learn.

So we could say we want the Web to reflect a vision of the world where everything is done democratically, where we have an informed electorate and accountable officials. To do that we get computers to talk with each other in such a way as to promote that ideal.