Monetizing SEO/ the Moz method

[earlpearl]

Frankly, guys I admire Randfish as someone who has learned a lot, has a different and rare method for accumulating information, shares information, and as a business person. I am also well aware of the "other" feelings and comments about him. I don't disregard those at all.

On the other hand he has pioneered a new model for monetizing SEO via seomoz and his blog at moz describes it here with financial and statistical information through November 16.

Pretty interesting in my mind. Through 11/16 he had sold over 2200 premium memberships. (I had joined some months ago) for over $400,000.

He doesn't publish financials, but assuming there is no debt he moz went from $64,000 cash in the bank at end of 2006 to $80,000 as of 11/16/07. I assume they are making money.

They continued to do client work, but at a slower pace than the year before. It looks to me that monetizing through creating moz membership is working for him/them.

As far as comments about Rand, his knowledge, motivations, actions etc. I'm pretty aware of them and have had some comments with some folks on those issues. I simply don't have the same opinions on all those issues as some others, and I don't have arguments with others over those issues.

Having been a moz premium member for a while I've seen some of (but not all) of the stuff on the inside. Some helps me, and some that I know a lot about I may disagree or acknowledge their comments to others. In fact I've sent him emails about some of the stuff. How he treats that is his business.

In any case it is a unique and interesting way to monetize seo.

I have to log on from a different computer to see what an annual membership is, but between $50/month and a semi-annual or annual membership the trick is to do two things; get existing members to renew and add members. So time will tell how well they do that.

I also think that in a world where there is plenty of free information available its remarkable they have that many existing members and that kind of income to date. More power to their sales/marketing efforts.

And I know that one question would be are they giving accurate and vital information to those that pay!!!!

I'd be interested in your comments.

Dave

[rmccarley]

It is an interesting way to do it but...

1. I don't think it was his idea. I believe he hired someone to audit his business model and they came up with that concept. I could be mixing facts though.

2. To continue to give high-level SEO knowledge means you have to encounter it "in the field". So Moz will always be reliant on *some* client work, just to stay relevant and groundbreaking.

3. Don't forget about the investor money they took.

And I don't have a problem with Rand either. I like the guy when he wears the right shirt.

[skitzzo]

There's a pretty interesting course on this type of thing available called Teaching Sells. It talks about monetizing information etc. and is really quite interesting although I haven't had time to get into it as much as I'd like.

[randfish]

Dave - fun topic, and obviously interesting to us. If any questions are around what we're up to, I'd be happy to tackle those

[earlpearl]

It looks to me like the marketplace is another way to monetize the site. Its a classified section ready to be made active.

How much daily traffic is the site seeing now? how much 6 months ago, 1 year ago and 18 months ago?

[okguyjames]

great post rand, thanks for sharing!

[randfish]

The marketplace is actually more of a branding move than anything else. It's possible that if, in 6-12 months, it gets incredibly popular or overrun with spam, we might try to make job posts cost a nominal fee of $20 (like Craigslist), but our plans for now are to keep it entirely free.

As far as traffic stats - I'm planning to make an end of year blog post with a full breakout of all our data from Indextools' tracking, but generally, I can say that we were averaging around 8,000 unique visits/day at the beginning of the year and are now up to around 12,000 visits/day (weekdays - weekends are probably 30% lower).

[skitzzo]

Rand, any tips for anyone thinking about a similar monetization model?

[randfish]

Wow.. I'd say - have lots of developers. Many more than you think you'll need - that and plan that every product launch deadline will be at least a few weeks behind its initial schedule. Webdev takes time, and edits and fixes are always necessary.

Producing tools that people pay for means demanding accuracy and when you're pulling from inexact sources and sources that you can't always count on, you've got to have a lot of good ideas and good failsafes to back yourself up.

As for getting folks signed up, I think we had a really good system because we started so organically - providing advice and education and tools for free, then adding more and more behind the wall over time.

Since it's only been 9 months that we've been at this, I'm not sure I'm really qualified to give out advice - I'd much rather be receiving advice from folks who've done this before

If there's specific points, though, I'm happy to talk about those.

[randfish]

Should have addressed this before:

1. I don't think it was his idea. I believe he hired someone to audit his business model and they came up with that concept. I could be mixing facts though.

I probably shouldn't take offense from this, but just FYI - this was completely 100% SEOmoz-internal generated. The primary driver, though, was Matt Inman, who recently left the company. It was his idea to charge for the use of tools, and mine to add content. We did hire Andy Beal as a consultant in 2006, but his recommendations were much more towards the client-facing side of the business, as that's where his experience lay.

BTW - Randall - Whiteboard Friday going up in a few minutes, so you tell me if the shirt works for you