After some success running my own AdWords campaigns for affiliate products, I am going to offer my services as an AdWords consultant for other businesses. I would love DP'ers input on these questions, and any other points you feel are relevant: 1. Pricing model / how to charge. My inclination now is a setup fee of $50-500, a monthly monitoring fee of $50, and a percentage of the spend. Charging based on the spend has the benefit of scaling the work and the payment roughly together, however, it incentivizes me to boost the spend, and I want to keep mine and the client's incentives in order. 2. What services to offer? Campaign setup, ad writing, performance analysis, regular ad maintenance, suggestions for improvement, and expansion of campaign after launch are all services that I can perform. What have I missed? What do you focus on? How do you charge for it? 3. How payments are remitted. I could handle all payments myself on my corporate credit card, and send the client a monthly invoice, or set up the campaign on the client's credit card. At stake is the risk of non-payment, and the benefits of churning the money.
Still getting confused about people trying to sell their adwords success. Does anyone can believe it? Prove your success.
Good luck buddy, there are way more reputable companies out there. For example > EngineSeeker that does exactly what you are doing but on a higher scale.
I'd advise you get adwords certified - http://www.google.com/intl/en-GB/adwords/professionals/individual.html that's the answer to the sort of response you got above - proof that you know how adwords works (not the entire answer - but it is the sort of reassurance that potential clients expect and deserve)
There are lots of businesses out there (not talking about affiliate marketers here) using Adwords. Many of them know or realize they can do better. Some just don't want to be bothered to do it or can't find qualified people to do it in-house. I have many such clients. That's why there are people selling their Adwords knowledge. Pricing model. Got to be careful here. If you say you'll set it up for $100 and client turns around and says here's my ecommerce site with 1000 products, you're not going to make money. I don't charge a percentage of spend because that's what everyone else does and I don't think that's fair to them. I charge basically per product/landing page and other variables (using content? is it a service where using geotarget keywords would be used?). I used to not charge a setup fee and make it up long-term. I now charge a setup fee because too many clients want just that, not long-term management. So setup fee per product, monthly management fee based on number of products and search engines. Services to offer. You have to offer it all from start to finish. They are hiring you to look after their campaigns and improve it. You can't just say you'll create ads but not do analysis to optimize the campaign (unless they hire you just to come up with ads). Payments. Most people know and use PayPal. A few larger clients I allow to send a cheque. You could use your own account but you are taking risks. If I did that, I'd ask for a large sum up front. Best if you use their own accounts.
Thanks for the constructive replies, Magda and Lucid Web Marketing. The other concern I have is that half of an AdWords success story is the landing page. In the case of one of my clients, he sells a customized, professionally written, highly analytical quarterly report about commodities trading, which he sells for $1500. Since, at that price, his conversion percentage will obviously be low, I would like him to have a quality email/info collector as well, so he can build a mailing list too. This will also help him see the value of the campaign between conversions. In any case, your advice is well taken and I look forward to hearing more from you. EDIT, also, as Lucid understood correctly, I'm interested in clients with established businesses. Google has explicitly stated that pages selling "ebooks" will be punished on their ad quality scores, so that's a tougher climb, although I would still take the business if offered. But yes, I agree that I am skeptical of anyone who claims to make money selling Clickbank products via AdWords. Not impossible, just not easy, and very difficult to maintain.