Internet Marketing Blog

Offline: Profits or Hype?

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!