Billing a client for revenue strategies... How should I do it

[krooga]

Hello all,
I am coming to you today as I am in negociations with a potential client however I have no clue on how to go about charging him for this/those particular job(s)...

The potential client owes a few sites all totalling about 3 Million page views a month. The sites are mainly content based sites, and none are currently set up to generate any income. This potential client has only installed a few adsense banners to generate revenue but has not yet exploited any more in depth revenue generating strategies...

My job would be to set up strategies and ideas allowing for the sites to generate alot more revenue. If you were in this position how would you go about charging a client and most importantly how much... A percentage of the revenue, by the hour, a global fee for a defined time period ?

Your help would be greatly appreciated !

Krooga

[chihpih]

% of revenue would yield the most $$$ for you over a long period of time but i doubt he would go for it. try to charge a one time fee for a pretermined amount of hours that you will work.

[shadowbox]

Percentages of revenue is fine when you are able to track this revenue - of course, it's unlikely that your client is going to hand over all his accounts to you (at least, not the real ones). It also assumes that the work you carry out is the only thing that will affect income on the site, which is not true. For example, the guy may never update his content, and hence, visitors never come back - that's not your fault, so why should you suffer for it?

Take a big upfront fee and charge a monthly retainer to continue building the revenue capabilities of the site.