I agree with David that if you want want to have serious discussions in regards to working together it’s best to take them private and it seems like you’re reaching that point in the conversation. However if you do end up working together I’d appreciate if you could come back and share your experience. I think it would be helpful to a lot of people.

I do hope everything works out well.

857 uniques in a day is about 25k a month, but the number will be inflated by a certain percentage from robots, spiders, and vistors that use proxy servers, like all AOL visitors. But let’s say you are currently getting 25k a month. About how many credit hours are purchased each month, by how many students?

I’m trying to get a sense of what your organization is doing currently and that will help me to get an idea of what the potential is for inprovement. Also, would increased donations also be a consideration, or just credit hours?

What percentage of the gross are you offering as a starting point, and just when would that become effective? Would there be any way for me to verify the financials? How long would the agreement last initially?

Depending on what has been done to the site so far, I would estimate that the qualified traffic could be increased 2-4 time what it currently is. However, if the site is not converting with the traffic is has, then it may be that having the site highly optimized would reduce the traffic numbers, but result in increase conversions.

I’m interested to keep the discussion going.

The conversions is a harder metric since it depends greatly on the site design, copywriting, and the nature of the offer, such as price. Conversions are generally NOT the responsibilty of the SEO, but they should be a concern.

We are currently working with one partner and we have a 50-50 split of income, but in this case we are providing some webmaster services as well as the marketing.

For the second partner, we are also taking a 50% cut, but it is only for the amount that is over what the site had been generating. We are getting 50% of any increased revenue. It’s not much to start with, but as long as we can work with the partner for a long period we expect to do well enough.

That is also a possibility but it puts far more risk on the original owner. SEO is a hard thing to quantify. Depending on the market you are in, you could do everything right and still not break the top 100 much less top 10 on search engines. This is why a good SE optimizer will be able to point you to the correct keywords that should bring in quality traffic.

Of course in the end, it all comes down to the product you are selling. If you have what everyone wants, no SEO is required. If nobody wants it no amount of SEO will get you traffic.

ENOCIS expects no one to work for free and we believe a reasonable return on their investment is fair. We are prepared to protect that right by reasonable percentages and participatory agreements.