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There's been threads on launching a SEO business. Try the search.

Do some kind market research in your area, and among the customers you think you'd be targeting. However, I find it very likely that most of them have heard of SEO, salesmen are constantly calling them, and there's dozens of competitors in whatever area you reside. Maybe the clients have stumbled upon a good SEO company, but especially smaller businesses are likely to be conned by the snakeoil salesmen in this business.

This is what you're up against. You'd need to succeed in marketing and finding clients. You need to prove them that your stuff works in a business that's hard to understand, and where some of the prospective clients are "desensitized" by lies and half-truths.

You'd probably need to bill more than $8k / mo to hit that kind of salary. Maybe way more depending on taxes, additional costs of employer, outsourced work and stuff like that. It's very much within reach if you know and can market your stuff, but usually it takes years to get your name out and get to that level. Good contact network helps.

Hey

A resource that really helped me learn to properly do SEO is Wealthy Affiliate - Online Business Starts Here

They go over everything from start to finish.

If you plan to own a business online and are looking for a fulltime income, SEO will be crucial in your efforts to do so and yes it will be worth it in the long run.

But this is only a suggestion.

Hope this helps out!

-Josh

Thanks for the detailed replies this was good info.

One thing that concerns me about SEO is the cheap remote overseas competition.
It does seem like oldschool inhouse network IT has the job security by virtue of physical presence/jack of all trades.

I'll probably try to learn SEO to help launch my own ventures but I wonder if I would save in the long run over just hiring a good Indian gang to rock it.

SEO and Traditional IT are never been compared between them. There are not such type of competition and huge number of websites having same keywords are never been found before.
Now websites are completely depend upon SEO for their search engine rank and traffic.
Simply we can say that "SEO is the necessity of Traditional IT"

deepu,

You state "SEO is the necessity of Traditional IT".
Do you mean that eventually all IT professionals will need to learn SEO?
I know some programmers and high level (Cisco/wan) engineers that know little to nothing SEO.
But it does seem to be going this way.

Jack of all trades...

If you're simply looking for money, and your making 80k a year now, I would give it a miss personally, all the time you take learning your new trade will end up being unpaid for.

SEO has absolutely nothing to do with Networking.

SEO businesses require a good amount of salesmanship, and to be actually good at your job, you need a good amount of experience with SEO, preferably with a portfolio. It takes years to become a great salesperson and years to learn SEO. Less than 10% of people are effective salespeople, and some people never seem to get SEO. Chances are you can not do this at a pace that will get you your 80k a year for at least a few years.

However it is possible of course to make millions doing this, if your a super smart multitalented guy with a bunch of money behind you and able to find and hire lots of good staff.

A better reason to start a SEO business would simply be because you want to be your own boss. If you invest a decade or so and a bunch of cash, it is very possible to get rich from it.

Well, Mindcoin let me give you a piece of advice directly from the SEO point of view. Google has cut down most of the part i.e what SEO do which includes directory submissions, posting article over article directories, purposefully Guest posting is banned, blog commenting for gaining backlinks.... etc. What now left with SEO guys is link building using the natural way... I'll give you three points i.e.

1. Concentrate over forums to get backlinks ( i.e not by dropping links everywhere but by getting backlinks by signature ).

2. Concentrate to surge traffic from social media ( the best way to do is make a subdomain over your site like abc.aa/blog and keep sharing you content over there, now what you need to do next is share your blog over the social media and try to surge traffic ! )

3. Concentrate on yahoo answers and Q/A site ( they are also helpful in providing you bulk of traffic, i didn't say over here that it's going to give you result in a day but you need to keep working on and it will give you the traffic eventually)

Remember these 3 points and there is just no need to look out for any seo individual !

It won’t take very long, you can do your research and learn quality SEO within 1-2 months. After getting the necessary information you can become a freelancer and that can bring a lot of money; you will also have the benefits of working for yourself.