I have hired many copywriters over the years...

Your best bet with your skills is to write some killer sales copy for your own copywriting service and promote on Warrior Forum as WSO, and actively engage other agencies and marketers in related forums, subreddits, etc... Post an offer on reddit.com/r/forhire
Just promote yourself as a copywriter... Once you have a basic income coming in you can start finding ways to scale your expertise. (i.e. finding a whitelabel or drop ship provider and list those items as new items on amazon and write better sales copy for your listings.

Shoemoney, one of the best at making money online started off with Ebay arbitrage where we found price discrepencies on electronis on ebay from country to country, bought a cheap item, relisted it as a much better listing with a higher price and sold it before he ever paid for the one he was buying.

A less risky version would be to visit slickdeals and fatwallet. Buy great deals, and list them on craiglist locally for sale. People on craigslist wont really comparison shop and they will assume its cheaper on craigslist than from a store.

IF you need to make real money to support a family... You can find lots of work from home jobs like being a usertester for usertesting.com , writing on textbroker.com copypress.com and the many other writer marketplaces. Post gigs on fiverr. etc... None of these will make you rich, but it will make you a living. Drive from Uber on the weekends, become a task rabbit worker, etc... lots of ways to find work online for offline odd jobs...

Good Luck.

Unfortunately all the numbers are off. Content builds on itself in an accumulative fashion. Much of it is unquantifiable, but the success comes as breakthrough success after building your authority over time (atleast 18 months of consistent publishing content.)

Those 1000 monthly visitors should be growing consistently every month over time. If it is not growing you are not producing valuable enough evergreen content.

The list should be growing your traffic, not just sales...it should be a referral machine.

Are you engaging your audience when they interact with your content across various social channels? Is your content being linked to and shared organically? If not, you aren't really doing effective content marketing.

Are you constantly testing your emails and landing pages for improvements to conversion rates, analyzing which content is producing the most signups, sales, etc... If that is not growing exponentially you are doing something wrong.

Are you advertising your best content using native ad platforms like stumbleupon, outbrain, taboola, yahoo gemini? Why not? If your content is not valuable enough to drive signups and sales when you promote it, you are doing content marketing wrong.

Are you adapting your content into multiple media types and syndicating it? (i.e. a blog post can be shortened into bullets for a slideshare presentation, which can be used a slideshow video on youtube, and an audio reading of your post can be on soundcloud, syndicated as a podcast, etc...

Are you doing blogger outreach to generate interest in your content? Are you guest blogging to leverage other peoples audiences?

Content marketing is an accumulative effort, which when done right builds on itself accumulatively and snowballs into breakthrough success (i.e. look at moz.com and copyblogger.com both massive startups which started with simple content marketing.

I hope this helps.

Hi DC Glenn,

First, a simple best practice: Never invest heavily in SEO before testing the keywords with PPC. If its low competition, the clicks will be cheap...well worth a few hundred dollar test....
Regarding your Goldmine...

The real question becomes commercial intent of the searches as well as the credibility of the keyword tools you are depending on.
There are 3 main types of search queries.
1. Informational - top and middle of the funnel looking for information
2. Navigational - looking for specific content on a specific website
3. Transactional- bottom of the funnel looking to buy right now. (These are the goldmine keywords)

Without knowing what types of keywords you found, I cannot tell you whether you really landed on a goldmine. My instincts tell me that you are probably missing something...but there is a very simple way to find out one way or another.

Run a limited ppc ad test on Bing for those keywords. The point here is not to drive conversions as much as to see how much search volume there really is. The reason I recommend bing over Google for this is because Bing will report to you on unclicked impressions, whereas google will only tell you about the queries that earn clicks. (it is estimated that your ad shows 20x more than you see in adwords due to queries with no clicks.)

Once you have a baseline for the queries and impressions, you can multiple that by 4x and you will have a pretty good idea how much actual search volume there is... vs. what the tools tell you which are algorithmic guesstimates and rarely accurate. You will also be able to see how those visitors behave on your site (or just launch a quick unbounce landing page with a basic sales pitch trying to get some optins.)

Once you run the bing test, you will know if its worth investing deeply in SEO.

A few things I would note...I you did indeed land on a goldmine...expect it to get discovered within the next 4-6 months. These opportunities rarely last. So, prepare for it to dry up.
Two, don't assume the competition you see on your searches are indicative of search behavior across the country. The world and this country are really big places and its easy to get stuck in your own filter bubble and think competition doesn't exist that does. (i.e. they have been investing in SEO for months or are a stealth startup with huge ad budgets... and you just havent discovered them yet.)

Further, if you really think you found a goldmine, dont share it with anybody. Not me, nor anybody on clarity or anywhere else... it is so easy to compete with you without it being able to be traced back to me. so, so easy!

Good Luck.

This really depends on the nature of the industry you are in and the level of loyalty your competitors inspire.

For dentists and other services with immediate need, I find bidding on competitors brands to be very effective.

For industries with minimal demand, like emerging industries is practically a best practice to do this.

The simple reality is that using a broad match keyword will likely surface you on a competitors brand search, so I dont see how it is even remotely frowned upon. Your competitors might not like it, but its very unlikely they'll even notice it.

You should even feel free to use their brand in your copy as long as its not trademarked. Some people use Dynamic keyword insertion to do this.

A few thoughts... First, there is a 20k adgroup limit per campaign.
Second, going in you should assume that 80% of your long tail keywords will not get any impressions.

That being said, this is a common strategy with several different ways to execute on it...

1. The rule of thumb when building out campaigns is being mindful of how you will optimize and manage it. I like to ask myself...Will my ad copy or settings change if I separate these keywords into new adgtoups? If not, group them together(unless you can't on the build out).

2. Become intimately familiar with filters, segments, columns, labels, and dimensions or else managing it can become impossible.

3. There are two common strategies that people use similar to this... One is putting all matchtypes in 3 dif. Adgroups and negated out the other matchtypes... The other strategy is starting a beta campaign with only broad modifier and when you find converting queries in your search term report you move this over to an alpha campaign with higher bids.

Putting both together in the same ad group would be pointless.

As for the effectiveness of using any of these strategies it would really depend on the effort involved in building out and managing it and on how crucial it is you don't miss out on any queries...

I would be happy to explore your specific situation if you call me.

There are third party click fraud and forensics companies that can investigate this for you. You can also call Google (866-2-google) and ask them to investigate...
In the mean time you could block specific IP addresses in your AdWords settings to block your competitor from clicking on your ad...

In general, unless you are constantly optimizing your CPAs will naturally go up as more advertisers enter the auction for your keywords. Take a look at your impression share report and you historical ctr's to see if anything changes drastically....

In general, Google is pretty good about detecting click fraud and not charging you for it, but it can't hurt to verify...

If you need deeper proof you can match up your serverlogs to AdWords reporting and show any discrepancies to Google.

Good luck.

To answer your question, offering a guarantee that minimizes their risk should do the trick... (i.e. if you dont double the money you pay me in 12 months, Ill give you a refund... assuming you don't damage their site, just the time passing and age alone should produce double what you charge them, even without doing any real SEO..)

However...

I don't see any reason why you would need a full year to show results... There are usually low hanging fruits you can uncover and fix for the first crawl google does showing results within weeks.
If you are promoting content to earn links, than I think 4-6 months is reasonable...

Your best bet is to talk about accumulative efforts, and how the value you provide will build on itself, and it would be a shame if you didn't have a chance to see it through. (i.e. building relationships from outreach to earn links will create new linking opportunities in the future...etc...)

All in all, I do SEO month to month, and i have clients that stuck with me for 5+ years... I guess it really depends what you are actually doing for them...

I am not sure what you mean by testing a domain name... I am assuming you want to see if one brand name works better than another... considering the cost of buying a domain name is less than $10 a year, I would just buy the ones you are interested in and try promoting both with adwords...

In general it is a violation of google's TOS if you dont have added value content on your site... so I wouldn't advertise it on google if you are just testing a domain name... I would make sure to have actual content and a functioning website...

I would recommend using Google Consumer Surveys to do a poll of two different names, but make sure to register both domain options or someone might steal them from under your nose... http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home?gclid=CKG_8Kfsv7oCFUfZQgodhS8Azw

It's likely a classic case of control issues tied together with the mentality of "why pay a middle man".

In other words, the lack of transparency and control over your inventory scares them, and they believe they can sell it for more than you can...

It also might cannibalize their existing ad sales if their advertisers can go through the exchanges, as well as possibly hurt their brand equity, and create the impression that their ad inventory is worth less than they sell it for directly.

any hiccup in multi-device, multi-channel attribution, like opt-in default cookies, privacy laws that hinder Data Management Platforms from integrating third party data like credit card purchase data, etc...

or some killer new native ads that change the face of display.