Solution ...
I spent a few hours educating him on some of the basics of conversion and business metrics. After he kept calling nearly everyday for a week or two I convinced him that if we could build a web site and optimize it for RPV (revenue per visitor) we could afford to buy all the traffic he could stand. And even afford to pay for the work it would take to get ranked highly in the organic search results.
He created a product in the $5/click real estate market. We dug into our own bank account buying $6,320 in ppc clicks before we ever made a profit. This was money our client didn't have, but he gladly upped our commission in return for our generosity in buying the intial traffic.
Ongoing
Optimization ...
By the end of March (about 7 weeks) he was earning more than $1,000/day buying traffic. We put a couple of our smartest people on the task of doing some seo around his highest converting ppc keywords and by May he broke six figures in a single month.
(just a side note, this is ALWAYS how seo should be done. the ppc comes first!)

Of course I don't know if we can do
this for you ... but I am more than happy to
consider letting my team rip your site
apart and put it back together.
Obviously at this point I get dozens of
requests every day. So I'm really only
looking for especially interesting projects.
If you have an interesting
product/service and you're willing to let us
run with it? Then we need to meet ...
Click here to get
to know us!