I was illustrating the process for an existing SEO expert. I.e., someone who can get a site to #1 Google Position.

Patrick started with product-creation skills and created a product. He then developed SEO skills (as I understand it). I agree with you 100% that this is the way to succeed.

But Patrick was saying that ‘SEO is awash in cash’. I’m just saying there should have been a caveat ” if you have a good product to monetize that SEO.”.

Just look at ShoeMoney’s site to see how difficult that is. He’s got a 99% failure rate
http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/09/04/my-top-10-worst-ideas-to-make-money/

-AdSense dooesn’t pay well, as you pointed out.

-Ccreating a successful product is a non-trivial matter.

Iit requires:
- Knowing enough about programming to make lots of cost/benefit decisions (which features to include and sometimes what approach to take with the program). I’ve tried an outsourced Indian programmer and it didnt’ go well (he wrote unbelievably bad code). I do know someone who has succeeded in doing this but he pays $20/hr or more now for this programmer as a full time employee. Much less expensive than a comparable US programmer, but now he has an ongoing expense.

My point is that if someone is a truly good SEO expert they might not want to do all of the above.

UISV’s are different bunch of people. Patrick, Andy Brice (of PerfectTablePlan.com) and myself are all jack of all trades. We can do all of these things reasonably well. And if that’s the case, then yes, my SEO skills are more valuable to my own company than they would be to somone else *because I can monetize* those skills. Not everyone can.

Most SEO experts can’t readily monetize thier SEO skills (beyond selling Adsense, which, as Patrick confirmed, is worth maybe5 to 10% as much as if you monetized it with a product.

There was originally a sentence right between the factor of 8.5 and the ballpark estimate which explained the imputed factor of 10: other search engines and ancillary queries. I edited it because it was longwinded and forgot to put the shortwinded version back in. Then when I skimmed over the post I probably mentally lost my count of zeroes.

I’ll correct this when I get a moment.

Example: I personally pay, essentially, $2 CPM for bingo card related traffic. That means, when they’re on hypothetical content site A, they’re worth $2 per 1000 visitors. When they’re on my site, they’re worth $40 for 1,000 visitors. (It is actually higher than that these days, but hey, factor of twenty is high enough for comparison purposes.)

So if you’ve got the skills to develop a niche site for teachers, you could either monetize it with fairly poor paying ads, or you could monetize it with a product. And even if your website doesn’t convert as well as it could, hey, that factor of twenty business is pretty hard to overcome.

And if you have no skills in product development or web site design to create sales, all you have to do is buy them. 1 week of an intermediate Indian engineer’s time will run you about $500-$1,000. 1 full web design template will run you another $500 or so. There, you have your own bingo card program and a website to sell it.

(18 months of 12 hour days is a gross exaggeration, I think, especially if you’re going for only good money rather than obscene money, and ringtones are pretty close to obscene money. Most of the 18 months is wall calendar time — what would you be doing for the 12 hours?)

If you read shoemoney’s blog, you see that you start with a winning market that you think you can turn into a high ranking position. You don’t start with a high-ranking site and then try to monetize that.

How do they find good markets? They look at Commission Junction (aka CJ) to see which affiliate segments are bidding the highest. You look at the keyword inventory sites to compare query volume with advertiser competition.

You then do link baiting with several domains and test content. You run these in parallel until one of them is a clear winner. You then invest, say 18 months of 12 hour days–according to shoemoney–before your start to turn a profit. After 18 months in the right market, you start making the big money.

It’s not for the faint of heart.

YOU CAN CREATE MORE VALUE FOR A PRODUCT SITE THAN YOU CAN FOR GOOGLE (VIA ADSENSE)

From your post paraphrasing)’…#1 spot, 50k unique visitors per month would be worth $20k’

According to the blog for the HowThingsWork.com owner (see below), he figures that 1k visitors/day (30k/month) is worth $435 in AdSense (based on his experience and looking at a friends site).

So 50k visitors woudl be about $725/month.

Even if that’s wrong by an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, then adsense would earn you less than half what you’re getting. (Granted, you have a cost to develop a product, provide support, etc. But that’s my point: you *could* make more money finding someone w/ a good product but terrible marketing skills and just splitting it 50/50. In fact you’d make 10x as much in this example.

If you were an SEO expert you can add a lot more value to BingoCardCreator than you can create for Google.

There is the tricky issue of how to share the increase in revenue or what to charge, etc., which you so eloquently described.

HOWTHINGSWORK.com blog
Caveat: this fellow below make be full of BS. I dont know.
http://webkew.blogspot.com/2005/04/lesson-3-how-much-money-can-you-make.html

Merely getting a site to the top of the list only gets the eyeballs to your site. You have to do something with/for them to monetize it. Yes, you could sell Adsense, but I don’t think you’d get a lot of clicks unless you give the browser a reason to stick around. For that you need good articles, a good blog, useful information, something. Even your own website (wich doesn’t have to be “sticky” per-se, b/c you’re selling a product) has to be a well done site that communicates and sells.

But I’m happy to be proven wrong here. I have a friend who has some pretty good SEO skills and is quite interested but our area doesn’t have a lot of opportunities for him to sell his SEO ability. If he could monetize it directly, he could skip the intermediaries and monetize that ability.

So…. what are some options for monetizing that top position?

Many people are risk averse. A smart businessperson would look for SEO folks at the top of their game who can’t imagine taking the risk themselves and have them build high revenue sites in good markets.

Isn’t this how a lot of the most successful software companies operate? You have a person with good business skills pick the strategy/niche, and then you get the best people you can find to give you a real advantage. If you are smart, you pay the top performers very well and do whatever it takes to keep them. This is the opposite of the “developers are a dime a dozen” mentality, but in the right market with the right technical challenges, having a very good team is the secret to success.