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Mark Zoske has turned a passion for salt into a $3.5 million-a-year online business, largely by using search engine optimization.

His firm, SaltWorks, boosted sales by 230% over the past year, cut marketing costs by $10,000 per month and raised its rankings on major search engines by cleaning up its online marketing.

It all started back in 2001 when Zoske ran HO Sports, a company that sold skiing equipment. He decided it was time to make the break and see if he could earn money at what had hitherto been a hobby.

So he set up SaltWorks (www.seasalts.com). The Redmond, WA firm now pulls in roughly $300,000 per month. It has 15,000 active customers — from gourmet cooks and people looking to use salts for bathing and therapeutic applications, to small and large retailers. Half of them spend more than $100 at a time.

SaltWorks initially pursued search engine marketing using an outside firm for support, but soon found that strategy cost too much and didn't bring in enough business, Zoske said. Next, the firm tried to do its own search engine optimization.

Early last year, SaltWorks hired Portent Interactive, which helped cut pay-per-click advertising costs by 50% and improve its search engine rankings.

For example, SaltWorks jumped from unranked to No. 4 for the term “bath salts” and to the top three for “Dead Sea salt,” said Portent president Ian Lurie. For “gourmet salts,” SaltWorks went from No. 5 to No. 1 and for “wholesale bath salt” from unranked to No. 4.

Portent achieved this by finding words and phrases that potential customers most frequently use to search for gourmet sea salt and bath salts.

Contributing to this success is SaltWorks' e-mail newsletter. “Every time the newsletter goes out we have a spike in sales,” Zoske said. Sometimes that runs up to $10,000.

What's next?

For the moment, Zoske just wants to continue what he's doing, although he guesses the company could grow to five times its current size.

“People keep asking me, ‘When are you going to get into pepper and other spices?’” he quipped.