This is something I have very little knowledge of... I have a (perhaps irrational and unjustified) generally low opinion of marketing people, and little contact with that world, but I thought that adwords/seo people were usually mediocre programmers.

> (P.S. If you're not going to make the company a million bucks next Monday, consider banging this out.)

so, how come you aren't a millionaire many times over? Clearly you are good at this sort of thing, you are a reasonable programmer, and on top of that, you are a good writer, and have a bit of fame. (I am convinced that being able to write well is one of those skills that, while nearly useless on it's own, dramatically multiplies the value of any other skills you obtain.)

I mean, I'm not saying you are wrong... just that it's more complicated than that. Marketing fluff, I mean, selling something for money that is pure marketing and nothing else is harder than it looks. And actually providing a service to a large number of users is also harder than it looks.

There is always that choice of "do I spend my time improving the product?" or "do I spend my time on marketing?" - the more time you spend on the latter, the harder the former becomes. The more time you spend on the former, the easier the latter becomes.

This is my current problem; I can't add users much faster than I am without degrading the service for existing customers. Marketing, right now, is mostly a 'for fun' thing.

You're mostly right. SWAG numbers: 50% of SEM/SEO professionals are FizzBuzz-level efficient in Excel, 10% of them know what a pivot table is, 5% of them know enough scripting to do their jobs. Against that expertise curve, the least accomplish programmer in e.g. an entire class of YC startups is a programming god among men. If you can ship products, you're so far ahead of the curve it isn't even funny.

so, how come you aren't a millionaire many times over?

The things I'm really good at tend to scale with the size of whatever line-of-business I'm allowed to work on. A 10% improvement in BCC's numbers is worth, ballpark, $5k a year or so. (Or it was before I doubled conversions recently -- guess it would be worth $10k a year now? Ask me in December for a better guess, summer throws things off.) A 10% improvement in $CONSULTING_CLIENT's $PRODUCT is worth, ballpark, a lot more. The large majority of that upside will accrue to whomever beneficially owns $CONSULTING_CLIENT.

marketing fluff

You don't need to have a product of your own to sell to monetize an engineering/marketing skillset if you (or someone in the audience) hypothetically has it. Many companies already have things to sell, and they will pay handsomely, in a variety of ways, for your expertise in making that happen.

This is my current problem:

I'd tell a client in your circumstance to focus on the hardware provisioning or CS bottleneck or whatever which is apparently making it infeasible to service VPS customers acquired at scale. In the meanwhile, continue experimenting with marketing channels. After solving the bottleneck, double down on whatever marketing channels seemed to work in microscale.

Um.

It might be worth holding off evaluation of how much something is worth until you know what you are talking about.

Also what is your advice about the landing pages?

My advice about the landing pages is in more depth on my blog in multiple places, but basically, "Build a CMS to spit arbitrarily high numbers of landing pages out of some data source which you have and some templates. Iterate on the templates in a data-driven fashion." It's essentially as technically complex as the Rails 15 minute build-a-blog demo. For more elaboration, see blog.

You could also consider using canonical tags for landing pages that are slight variations of each other [to prevent duplicate content penalties]. This one is really just a guess.

I've seen the programatically generated 'query-catcher' pages that the big boys use and have always dismissed them as effective (because they don't work on me). Am I completely missing the boat somewhere or is there some intersection I've yet to discover?

More broadly, "My behavior is not a good proxy for the behavior of all people everywhere." and "I may be smarter than substantially everyone in my industry but that is not the way I should bet." are two lessons to learn early and well.

Thanks for the head's up though. I'm still all for the careful crafting of landing pages, but at least I know I wouldn't be wasting my time to script out a bunch to at least put up until / unless they can be replaced or upgraded.