Need help pricing my services for a friend

grega711

grega711

New member
Apr 21, 2011
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Thailand
www.internetincomejackpot.com
Note: I'm not advertising my services and this is not a plug. I know I have to go to the marketplace to do that, but I'm not looking to do any more of this kind of work for anybody but myself. I only want to get the pricing right for some work I'm already doing for a close friend. OK, here's the post

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Last year, I built a Wordpress site (http://neuropathypaindoctors.com) for a close friend. This is a guy who's helped me out a lot of times over the years.

And I'm now managing his local Adwords campaign. Also did a few other things for him.

I charged $1000 to write and build the site and am now charging a flat 15%/month for setting up and managing his Adwords account. He's spending low 4 figures on Adwords.

Also migrated him from Ipage to Dreamhost for $200. Also Photoshop/retouched his header picture and one other to change ("take out") the face of one of the doctors. It was a rush job and I charged $100 for that -- both pix.

And now I'm putting together a 10 piece email blast for him and looking for suggestions on how to price it. I'll be writing the emails and sending them to prospective patients who have been to his site and signed up for his newsletters.

We're hoping the emails will improve results.

He's not happy because although the site gets around 30-50 visitors/day with a 2% bounce rate, he says he's only getting 1-2 appointments/month from it. He also says a newspaper ad is getting him new patients for a cost/new patient in the low 3 figures.

I'm puzzled because the site gets a lot of comments and email contacts and opt-ins. Maybe 7-10/week. And this is from Adwords advertising only in a very small circle around his office. Like maybe 45 minutres drive time. And over 100 people have signed up for his list in about 3 months, since I added the squeeze pages.

Here are my questions:

1. What would have been fair pricing to write and build his site?

2. What would have been fair pricing to migrate his site? It was turnkey, including plugins.

3. What would have been a fair price for retouching and replacing two pictures on his site?

4. What should I charge to write and send 10 emails for him? (I added a couple of lightbox squeeze pagees into his site and had him set up an Aweber account, so we have an email list now.)

I'd also appreciate any comments or suggestions.

Thanks --
 


Dude, seriously... it's a brick and mortar business. He doesn't make money off an email list, he makes it off people making appointments. Why the fuck are you asking people for an email opt-in before making an appointment?

Put the places phone number on the landing page, put an address there, and tell the fuckers to call, or request a call.

For example:

Do you suffer from:
Numb Toes? Numb Feet? CALL 1-314-739-2900 AND BOOK AN APPOINTMENT NOW

Also, fix his fucking Yelp reviews Neuropathy Pain Doctors - Bridgeton - Bridgeton, MO it's the first result on Google neuropathy Bridgeton, Missouri - Google Search
 
And, whatever you're charging the guy, it's too much, because you shouldn't have your head so far up your ass, that you didn't take the time to work out what the guys goals are.
 
Goals? Yelp? Thanks, Insomniac

Hey Insomniac --

Thanks for the quick reply and heads up about Yelp.

Wow! We hadn't seen that. We'll get it fixed as soon as we can, if we can. The injections don't usually cause reactions. And my friend usually replies quickly to any complaints or problems. Thanks again for that.

And for goals -- I didn't mention them in my post, but the goal is to get new patients to sign up for initial appointments. People with Neuropathy get bounced from Dr. to Dr. because it's hard to diagnose and they don't have good treatments. They finally decide there's nothing to do and give up.

But my friend's treatment works -- at least it works pretty well. Those testimonials on his Home page are real. So that's the goal of the site: Convincing people who have given up that there IS a treatment that works, and then getting them to call for an appointment.

Email marketing is part of that, like any other business. Even if somebody isn't ready to buy the first time they see your offer, you stay in touch and keep chipping away at them.

But maybe we should be more aggressive and put the phone number on the landing page, like you suggested. We'll talk about it.

Thanks again for your comments --

(And can I pull my head out of my ass now?) :bootyshake:

Greg
 
Whether or not the guys treatment is awesome or not doesn't matter. The kinds of leads you're dealing with here are going to be pretty huge insurance bills. The hardest part is getting them to start the first treatment. I'm willing to bet, that at least 80% of the people the doc gets into his door for an initial consultation, go through with the treatment. Therefore, you need to do whatever it takes to get them through those doors. Your goal here should be to get the people on the phone, have them either talk to the doc, or booking an initial appointment. The ROI on patients justifies the cost of any phone time.
 
You're spot on, Insomniac. Absolutely right. Once they start treatments, Medicare pays for everything. So the key is getting them in the door and to start treatment.

I'll mention your comment about phoning them to the Doc, too.

Thanks again --
 
1. What would have been fair pricing to write and build his site?
Click to expand...
Whatever you feel is worth it. For example, if you feel you deserve $100/hour developing the site, and you believe it will take about 10 hours, charge $1,000. In business, I don't give friends or family a lower price than anyone else. Personally, I believe friends and family are the worst clients to have - they know where you live and will always pester you.

2. What would have been fair pricing to migrate his site? It was turnkey, including plugins. + 3. What would have been a fair price for retouching and replacing two pictures on his site?
Click to expand...
Since migrating a WP site, even with plugins, takes ~10 minutes, charge accordingly. $30 is more than fair, but if you can get him to pay $200 go for it. Business is business. Personally, I'd offer this for free one time if they paid me $1000 to develop the site. Same with pic retouching. In most cases it takes a few minutes if you know what you're doing.

Also: if this is going to be making him money you need to get him far far away from Dreamhost. Get off shared hosting alltogether and get him on a VPS (such as zensix).

Also, definitely consider what Insomniac said about focusing on getting calls. If your goal is getting appointments, you shouldn't be making the person waste time opting in to an email list. Get them to call, then get their email later so they never forget about you.
 
For whatever its worth...if you are not already doing it...throw a phone number in your adwords copy...might reduce clicks and save some cashola.

Take that save money and investigate some free traffic sources...organic and places. No idea what the search volume is, but it might be worth checking out.
 
Thanks Matt and Blue --

Didn't think of the phone number in the Adwords ad, Blue. Guess I thought Google wouldn't allow it. But if they will, great idea. I'll try it. Thanks.

And I'm interested in your comment on Dreamhost, Matt. He was on Ipage before, and I did a reverse IP search and there were about 125 sites on his server. Did the same search on Dreamhost and there were about 20 sites on his server. And his load times are a lot faster. But you seem to be negative about Dreamhost and sharing altogether. Can you give me a little more detail on that? I'm not arguing. I'm trying to learn. But the shared hosting on Dreamhost is cheap and seems to be fast. We can go to a virtual dedicated server or even full dedicated server there just by a couple of clicks on our control panel, so I'm interested in more information and why maybe we should do that.

And as for the pricing, I'm kind of in a catch 22. I'm slow on a lot of things. Like migrating that WP site took me around 5 hours. I used BackupBuddy which is supposed to be pushbutton, but I ended up having to edit a bunch of paths in files, set up a new database and repopulate it from a backup I had made, and then reinstall (actually relicense) a bunch of plugins. It was a bitch. Maybe somebody with more experience could have done it faster, but I couldn't.

So here's my Catch 22. If I don't do it, I can't learn and get fast. And if I charge full price while I'm learning, then I'm screwing my customers. I've kind of concluded that I'm going to have to screw myself a bit on price while I'm learning, but I'd appreciate you comments on that, too.

BTW, Insomniac, I wrote to my friend about Yelp and he's seeing what he can do about it. Thanks again for that.

And thanks for all the good ideas. I can see I have a lot to learn. And Wickedfire seems like a great place to start learning it.

Cheers --
 
Dreamhost won't help on migrations, Joe. They have a long Wiki about how to do it, and the rest of their support is good, and their loading times have been good, but they won't help with importing Wordpress sites. Maybe I should have gone to HostGator?
 
grega711 said:
Dreamhost won't help on migrations, Joe. They have a long Wiki about how to do it, and the rest of their support is good, and their loading times have been good, but they won't help with importing Wordpress sites. Maybe I should have gone to HostGator?
Click to expand...

Not affiliated, but I've got a few shared accounts with Zensix (owned by a member of this forum), they move everything for free, and their pricing and support destroy hostgator/dreamhost. I've never had a support ticket that took longer than 10 minutes to get a reply to.
 
Zensix and ads and other suggestions..

Wow, cheesewhiz, never heard of zensix. What do they charge for shared accounts? Maybe I went to the wrong place with Dreamhost. What kind of reputation do they (Dreamhost) have? I'm going to take a close look at zensix. Tnx.

And Insomniac -- I'm putting up an ad on Adsense exactly as you suggested. I'll post the results here in a week or so. Tnx again for the suggestion.

Since it's a local advertising account, BlueSteele, SEO and stuff like that doesn't do much for us. I think our SEO is OK, but most of our clicks and patients need to come from 20 miles around the office. So we're stuck with advertising that lets us do that.

Thanks again for the help and suggestions --
 
You should also split test those Google ads. I would use different phone numbers for each ad - that way you can track how many calls you receive per ad. There are many cheap paid services to do this, but Google Voice works - and it's free.

Always test. Never stop.
 
That's great, Nebraska. Google Voice. Or Skype, right? No, Skype costs.

I'll try it and let you know. My friend hasn't said anything about calls, and I let him know to watch for calls. Told him about the ad. Of course he was traveling with his new girlfriend, so maybe he wasn't watching calls too closely.

The ad has the lowest click-through-rate (CTR) or all my Adwords ads, but that's to be expected because it's trying for calls, not clicks, right?

If I do the test, I'll post the results here. Tnx again. Cheers --
 
Interesting thread.

Just a thought, but why not geo target pr1 & pr2 sites that offer ad space & massive impressions, and create some kick ass banners "with the phone number/address on the banners?" -add the visual element to the above efforts. Maybe throw in a hot nurse with a foot fetish...just kiddinbg

"Are You Suffering from Blah! Blah! Blah! FREE Consultations! Call or Stop by....drive them to the phone, main site...or the physical address.

Unfortunately, I suck at Photoshop, so don't mind me. This was something I intend to do in the future for my own biz later on.
 
Are a lot of sites offering geo targeting for ads now?

Hey Art --

Thanks for the idea. While I'm still a Noob, I'll take advantage of my status to ask a few dumb questions --

1. What's the best way to target PR1 and PR2 sites? What kind of Google search would I do? Or is there software I need?

2. How can I limit my advertising on those sites to within 20 miles of my client's office? Even if the sites are within 20 miles of my client's office, and have the high PR rating, not many sites offer geo targeting for banner ads, do they?

3. If a lot of sites are offering it now, I wasn't aware of it. Please let me know.

Tnx --
 
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