$30,000 USD. One web marketing report. 45 hours on retainer. And one extremely popular blog post. Rand Fishkin, AKA "randfish" and CEO and founder of SEOmoz, is one smart blogger. Just two days ago Fishkin laid it all out on the table for his readers with a blog post titled "How to Price an SEO Campaign." What Internet marketer, webmaster, business person or entrepreneur period could resist?

True to form, Fishkin didn't just blog a cute little ditty about ROI evaluation or ensuring your markup is X% over cost. That's boring. That's old school. That ain't link bait. Instead, Mr. Fishkin (yes, I'm calling him "Mr." from now on) just wrote the plain truth about how he approaches pricing and the inevitable politics that come with it when you are a well known commodity both inside and outside competitor circles.

I found it incredibly refreshing to see an Internet business man be frank both about his pricing policies (or lack thereof) and his actual prices . Why all the secrecy anyway? People do in fact search on terms that include the word "rates," yet how many rates pages simply say "please contact us for a custom quote" with nary a price tag in site?

People really do like talking about money, even if it's not cool to admit it. And they want to know not only how much things cost but how much they "should" cost, especially in the eyes of a respected industry player like Mr. Fishkin. The beauty of the Internet is that you can talk money and not get all squeamish about it. No one has to see you staring at the floor when you quote someone a rate you never dreamed possible for yourself. (The day I posted my rates on my site was the day I started getting a lot more inquiries from qualified prospects.)

Mr. Fishkin garnered 33 blog comments in two days from that one post. How many backlinks will this earn SEOmoz? I'm willing to bet that randf...I mean Mr. Fishkin's candor is going to earn additional incoming links for months if not years to come.

ROI indeed.