I have my own in-house staff that does everything from content creation, graphics, custom web design, etc. that I need for my own sites. We are US based and all my staff lives in my area so we can meet face-to-face as needed but work from their own homes allowing me to keep overhead down. I provide them all the tools they need to get the job done as wellas train them on how I want things done. We also do work for a selelct group of clients; some on monthly retainers and others as needed.
One of things I have thought about doing is offering our services to others in the IM community on a small monthly retainer basis, something like $50/month. Those who would benefit from this arrangement could be people with their own portfolio of sites needing SEO work, or it could be from those who are selling SEO services to others and just need a reliable "back office". Also, those who retained us would be freed from having to worry about maintaining dedicated servers, VPS, proxies, monthly fees for other tools, staff turnover and training, etc. As you know that can get quite expensive very quickly to maintain just the basic tools if you do not have enougn income coming in to justify and cover the ongoing expenses of a few hundred dollars. Not to mention the learning curve, updates, and the time you have to actually spend using the tools.
The monthly retainer is just to make sure that we keep enough capacity for your projects and also be available to consult with you on special situations as needed. Each project we would do for those who kept us on retainer would be available at a highly reduced rate over what you would normally expect to pay for the level of service we would provide. The biggest single expense for any project is creating quality, original content (not scraped and spun articles) for the tier 1 links.
I am curious to see what kind of interest some may have for this kind of arrangement.
