

Ask HN: What is your customer acquisition cost? - rokhayakebe

Ask HN: What is your customer acquisition cost?
======
patio11
It depends.

I get the majority of my customers through organic SEO. The marginal cost of a
customer from organic SEO is zero. The amortized cost is almost impossible to
calculate -- I SEO well because I spent years learning the technical/marketing
aspects and, e.g., blogging (which has a side effect of getting me domain
trust), writing useful resources for my niche, coming up with a content
creation strategy, etc. (The great thing about content creation is that if
you're making evergreen content you pay for it once and then it keeps getting
you customers/links/etc for forever.)

AdWords, on the other hand, is pretty easy to calculate marginal CPAs for. My
previous experience with Google leads me to believe they understate my
conversions with them, but just reading the number off the AdWords report, I
spend about $12.25 per customer. Since I make about $29 from each customer
after all costs but advertising, I'm quite willing to do this all day long.

For those of you who are more interested in cost per signup rather than cost
per paying customer: 22~24 cents.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Any good books/seminars/videos/blogs that you would recommend for getting a
handle on organic SEO and evergreen content?

~~~
patio11
SEO is a deep, deep field though, so this question is close to "Do you know
any resources about programming?"

I spend a lot of time talking about my particular take on it on my blog,
although I don't have a good entry point for you there... Hmm, I guess this
post from 2007 is the first big one about it.

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2007/10/21/developing-linkbait-
for-...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2007/10/21/developing-linkbait-for-a-non-
technical-audience/)

Things have changed since then -- the content site that I developed for that
project was merged into my main site, its gotten a lot bigger, the ROI is no
longer prospective, and the overwhelming majority of the manual labor is
automated or outsourced.

The best two free SEO resources I know of are SEOmoz.org and seobook.com. They
probably taught me most of what I know on the subject. (Both also have paid
portions. I pay for SEOMoz, which is mostly tools. I used to pay for SEOBook,
which is mostly for forum access to people who know what they're doing. I no
longer pay for that because they made me a mod, greatly bringing down the
average quality of the moderating staff.)

~~~
oneplusone
Thank you for the links. Watched two Whiteboard Friday videos on SEOmox.org
and they where amazingly informative.

