I think that you could charge people who want to link to your site.

I agree with all that you have said.

The variation that you have is tbat you are going after quality followers/likers.

That works.  Also, having a high count might attract a few extra people but probably not quality people..

But paying to have a bunch of drunks following you isn't directly going to be beneficial unless your mission is to give  away cheap wine.

Its not how many people are following you, its who is following you.

I always like to use the comparison... which is more important "100 drunks or one Pope?"

The real value of a follower occurs when they are paying attention to you and when they take an action based upon one of your tweets.

I don't think that the 100 followers for $5 people are going to be of any value.

.... but some people like to brag about numbers - even if they are meaningless.

I think that this client just doesn't understand how twitter works.  I'd email an article to him if you can find something appropriate.

I agree with Stephen.  Tons of lyrics websites out there.

If you want to get your site more visible write a couple to a few hundred words about each song and post it on the pages above or beside the lyrics.  Then you will have something unique.

Try that on a couple dozen pages to see what happens.  Give it a few months.

When I have new content I can't wait to get it indexed.  So even if I am not promoting it yet on the homepage I will put up links to it on relevant pages just to get spiders into it.

Five articles is no worry.

A couple years ago I had about a hundred pages that described closely related substances.  Their title tags consisted of the name of the substance and a few other words.  I launched those pages and saw where they ranked and decided to change the words in hopes of better rankings.  It worked good but not great as I was hoping.  So I changed them again, and then again... BAM... my rankings droped big time.  Like from bottom of first page to third page.  They stayed there for a few months then moved up.  Now almost all of those pages rank near the top of the first page.

Based upon this I think that Google is tolerant of a little bit of experimentation.  But when you really go at it you might get demoted for a while.  Now I don't monkey with title tags.  I research first and then launch.

If I was going to hire an SEO I would have them explain in detail where my links would be coming from.  If I was going to hire an SEM I would ask them to explain in detail Google's quality score.  Answers to those questions would end lots of interviews quickly.

Now, getting to your question.  There are lots of people out there who are very very smart and know SEO and SEM inside and out.  There are plenty of people who could do either job better than most of the competitors out there.  If the scope of work needed on both the SEO and SEM side is limited I would try to get both of these jobs done by same provider - if I could find one who could impress me with both of the above questions.

However, if you have a big SEM campaign spending a lot of money you want to hire a person who really knows his stuff and who will watch over your wallet carefully. It is easy to blow an awful lot of money on SEM.  The same can be said for SEO.  Easy to blow a lot of money on someone who is unable to deliver.

A risk that you have with the above is that Mr SEM or Mr SEO could outsource your work or delegate it to someone of lower abilities.

That's my two cents.

...... Aaron, you seem to be a smart and ambitious person.  You are here at the right place asking good questions.  The more you learn the better position you will be in to hire and monitor the people who provide these services.... but maybe you would consider learning and doing one or both of these jobs yourself if you can get company support for training sessions, a daily hour ongoing for continued education and the rest of your time to keep these jobs in house instead of worrying about who is doing them and how?

Find out how much traffic you would be walking away from if you block them from the index.   My category pages bring in huge traffic - more than most websites receive.  I sure would not block them.  Also those pages attract a lot of links, likes, etc.  If I block them from the SERPs those benefits would be gone.

My advice is to understand the website better..  Then make a decision based upon data.