Eric Graham aka Conversion Doctor now charging $500 per hour

Demand for top notch e-commerce consulting services seems to be high, whereas supply is apparantly limited. Eric Graham, aka Conversion Doctor claims that at $500 per hour he is running out of time. Perry Marshall, the Adwords Guru charges $725 per hour for a telephone consultation. This proves how strong the market is for such services. With proper application and the right mindset, one hour of these guys’ time can actually be leveraged to 100x their fee or more.

Article Marketing offers superior ROI over PPC

With PPC traffic getting more expensive and competitive by the day, it now becomes worthwile to examine again the organic (SEO) side of search engines – as with article marketing – aka content marketing - it might be possible to get a higher ROI on your marketing dollar over there.

A quick example: Lets assume an average unique outsourced keyword optimized article costs $10 and on average that article brings  in one unique visitor per day (365 per year) from organic searches. I have verified with several SEO specialists and this is a rather conservative assumption, as some of these guys claim that with good SEO an article could bring an average 3-5 visits per day.

Lets stick with the 1 visitor per day assumption though.

If you ordered 1000 such articles and added to your website, over a year you would expect to have an additional 365,000 targeted visitors - for an investment of $10,000. The cost per visitor would be 10000/365000 - which results $0.027 per visitor.

This is considerably cheaper than what is available on either Adwords, MSN Adcenter or Yahoo Search Marketing PPC.

Furthermore:

1. Organic traffic is supposed to convert better than paid traffic

2. Some of these articles would bring in traffic in the following years as well – driving cost per visitor down even further.

This seems almost too good to be true, and obviously requires more work and an upfront investment in articles, but if the numbers work then the ROI on organic article listings is much higher than paid search. 

Please comment if you have any real data that either supports this hypothesis or contradicts it!

PPC bidding wars causing CPC inflation and ROI decline

PPC advertisers continue to report a decline in ROI on PPC spending. This phenomena is caused mainly by increased competition between bidders, driving keyword cost per click up and reducing profit margins for Search Engine advertisers. The proliferation of quality keyword databases such as Spyfu  - which continuously crawl search engines and expose advertisers’ long tail keyword lists to competing advertisers cause ultimately  additional competition on Google Adwords,  a higher average CPC, lower conversions and a lower ROI. The winners of increased advertiser competition on sponsored links are obviously the Search Engines themselves.

Adwords Booster – Scientific PPC Bid Management

a startup company – www.mediaboost.com claims to have developed a service that uses advanced statistical methods such as data mining, sampling, predictive modeling and regression analysis to determine optimal CPC bidding on Google Adwords. their flash demo looks very promising too. I have applied for a free demo account and I will update if their technology actually delivers the goods.