Posted by peter on May 28, 2009 | No Comments
There has been a surge in interest over the last few months about taking internet marketing offline, or more specifically, consulting small offline businesses on how to make their presence increase online. Some people are claiming to make huge amounts of money from this, others are struggling to understand how it all works.
Now, I’ve never tried consulting to offline businesses, but this is just my opinion on the matter.
First off, you need to have confidence and you need to be able to sell. You need to have the confidence to contact businesses, even to the point of cold calling, and expect a high level of rejection. Even if you get an interested lead, you need to be able to go and meet them and sell them your services.
Then it comes down to money. A lot of people don’t have much confidence when it comes to valuing their services (and unfortunately, there are others that are all too keen to take money off other people). This makes it difficult to know how much to ask for, and sometimes, even more difficult to actually ask for the money to be paid.
When it does come down to valuing your services, one method to use is to establish what you want your annual income to be and work backwards to find your hourly rate. Be reasonable with this rate and consider what other businesses are charging. You will probably find a rate between $25 and $75 and hour to be suitable - assuming that you are a very good marketer.
One approach that works well, but comes down to trust, is to approach the business and offer to work on a performance basis. In this case, offer to get them a certain amount of traffic or raise their search engine rankings or get them a certain number of email leads. Once you have achieved this target, then you can ask the business to pay up. This makes it easier to ask for the money because you have done everything you agreed to do.
While everyone is raving about this ‘offline riches’, you have to remember that it is still very hard work. You will be competing against a large number of local web development businesses, and chances are, they’ve already tried to target the local businesses.
Personally, I would not look at offline marketing to increase my income, it’s too much like work!
Posted by peter on June 6, 2008 | No Comments
A while back I spoke about whether internet marketing will see a growth over the coming months. According to Google Trends, so far the answer is no.
But, what about in niche markets? With the slow down in the US economy, petrol (gas) prices hitting an all time high, it opens the road for the savvy internet marketer with the time and resources to start making some products that really solve the need of not just the internet marketing arena, but possibly 80% of the population of the US.
Off the top of my head I came up with the following…
- How to save money at the gas pump
Kinda obvious I know, but with gas prices making some American’s think twice about a car journey, everything possible should be done to reduce the costs. Create an ebook on how they can reduce these costs with simple, practical advice.
- Alternative fuel consumption
Most people don’t know that car engines built in the last 10 years are built to be ‘dual fuel’. This means that they can take other types of fuel besides gas, like bio-fuel for example. Creating a product that shows people how to convert their vehicle to run alternative types of fuel will be a hot topic!
- Grow your own food
With stockists reporting record growth in seed sales, it’s obvious that the average American consumer is looking at ways to cut the grocery shopping bill to pay for the gas. To most people, growing your own food is as foreign as the Rupee, so a how 2 guide on growing your own vegetables is a guaranteed best seller
- Make Your Own Soap & Detergent
More sort of a home crafts type product, this could follow on from grow your own vegetables because it helps to cut down on costs. Often, natural cleaners can be as effective as their chemical counter part. Lemon juice is great for removing grease, vingar is good for removing limescale and so on.
- Coupon sites
A site that can give people coupons to print out and use at their local grocery store will grow in popularity. Entire coupon hunting sites could spring up
- Ebay Guides
As people tighten their purse strings, many are going to be yearning for the latest gadgets still. Ebay is a fantastic place to get the latest gadgets and gizmos at knock down prices
- Cash in the Attic / Basement
Again, as people tighten purse strings and look to find more money, an obvious reaction is to start sorting through all the old ‘junk’ one has acquired over the last few decades. All over America there is going to be big sort outs. Remember, one persons junk is another persons gold.
That’s just a few that I could think of, but I’m sure there are hundreds of niches that you can start profiting from, even as America tightens it’s purse strings.
Posted by peter on June 2, 2008 | No Comments
I wanted to revisit a post I made earlier about creating some sort of group or network which allows people (specifically IM’ers) to get in touch and do a collaborative project.
Having given it some more thought and chatted about it with some online and offline colleagues it’s clear that some people are excited by the thought and others are a lot more cautious. The downside is obviously that someone may not pull their weight, or some might do more than others, in which case how do you decide how to split the profits?
I thought I should elaborate a bit more on how I saw the whole concept working.
First off, I see this as a social network / freelancer type project. Everyone who signs up would have their skills for other people to see. For example, my skills are:
- Writing
- SEO
- Access to quality programmers on demand
Now, either someone could approach me, or I could approach someone and say, hey, are you interested in my project? Would projects be listed like on scriptlance? I don’t know. Maybe you could have some sort of status which says “available for projects” or “not available for projects”.
You could network with people who have similar skills or areas of interest as yourself to create the foundation for a product. For example two guys that were in to SEO could record an interview together and work together on an SEO home study guide (which I don’t think has ever been done, btw).
There are then loads of collaborative web tools, like gantt charts, brainstorming tools, task lists, to do lists, milestones, whiteboards etc. that people can use to do the project.
The idea of doing a collaborative project instead of outsourcing all the bits you don’t like doing or can’t do (like graphics for example) is that it could help keep you motivated and focused. I imagine an awful lot of people could make tens of thousands of dollars (like me for example) if only they would focus and concentrate on doing just one small part of the project.
Anyway, more musings from someone with more time than money on his hands 