It is important to be properly prepared before you go about establishing contact with offline business owners. This includes having a domain name, a website that displays the services you are offering, a set of business cards and printed material that outlines the services and benefits. They are the basics, but they are essential.
Keep in mind that small business owners are busy people. They are not necessarily going to want to spend a whole lot of time analyzing different service plans and considering what is best for them. Also, you may not be the first person who has approached them about having a website. In fact, they may have a website, a very bad one, for which they paid a lot of money. Therefore they may be reluctant to respond positively to your approach.
Therefore you need to practice your approach beforehand. This will vary depending on your existing presentation skills. It is crucial to come across as a confident, experienced professional in your field. Write down the key points you wish to make together with any supporting evidence. Rehearse it a few times until you feel relaxed and confident.
If you already have some experience as an online marketer then boost yourself with the thought that it is probably easier to market to offline businesses than online businesses, who are much more aware of just how many resources and alternatives are available online.
There will be times when you meet up with someone who is not at all responsive, in which case you should thank them politely for their time and move on.
Bear in mind that there a whole host of offline businesses who need your services and if you do all the preliminary promotional work you are not going to have any difficulty in recruiting a large number of customers.
The statistics are overwhelmingly in your favor. Approximately 50% of small businesses do not have an online presence. This has two important consequences for you as you prepare to launch your business of marketing to offline businesses.
Firstly, you are going to have very little competition. That’s a far cry from traditional internet marketing where, in some areas, competition is intense.
Secondly, you are presenting yourself to people who probably have a very limited knowledge of the services and benefits you will be offering.
Therefore your confidence should not be an issue. Do your preparation and you will be successful in turning those initial contacts into paying customers.
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A useful starting point in finding offline business customers is the Yellow Pages. A little research will help you identify those who do not have a web presence. Running the company name through the search engines will soon tell you whether or not they are online. This speedy technique will soon give you a sizeable list of potential clients.
A second technique is the concept of a “finder’s fee”, where you pay a fee to people who refer you to a business who decides to use your services. Put some time into this one as it becomes like an offline affiliate program.
You will need to decide on an appropriate fee, which can be a flat fee or a percentage of the value of the package purchased by the customer.
You can easily set this up on your own website, using a simple online affiliate script. It will be important to operate it in much the same way as if you had affiliates promoting for you online. This means you need to supply them with resources, but instead of using banners and graphics, you would supply, flyers, brochures and business cards that could be handed around and distributed by various means.
Experience has shown that once you offer people this kind of opportunity to make money by promoting your services, you will get a surprisingly good result.
You can even start with your friends and family and again you will be surprised and impressed by the number of leads they will generate for you.
A third resource you can use is to place an advertisement in your local community newspaper. This works very well. All you need to do is put your URL in the advertisement or perhaps your phone number so that interested business owners can speak to you directly.
Your fourth helpful tool is to consider purchasing a toll-free phone number from online services. This will create a very professional appearance and offers the advantage of shielding your home number and allowing you to set up messages for times that you are unavailable.
The fifth weapon in your business building arsenal is to contact the local Chamber of Commerce and register your business with them. This gives you additional exposure and enhances your image as a trusted provider.
Why not learn how to build a customer base of offline clients and build your own profitable business? Find out more… Turing Bricks Into Gold
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Setting up shop to become a provider of services to offline businesses involves firstly identifying the types of services that you will offer to your clients.
For example you might offer all or some of the following services:
- Search engine optimization
- Auto-responder & email services
Whatever you decide to offer, you need to put together a professional website that outlines all the services on offer. Be assured – once offline businesses begin to hear about you and your services, they’ll look you up on the internet so you need to present as a professional, well organized business.
Because so many offline businesses do not have a web presence, it is highly likely that website design services will be something they request. Therefore it makes sense to create a sample portfolio that showcases designs you have provided for previous clients. The provision of a website will probably become the “bread and butter” of your business. Every offline business that wants to go online is going to need a website that incorporates their company information; logo, mission statement and is fully optimized for the search engines.
Similarly, if you intend providing an online marketing campaign, then you will need clear outlines of what is included together with any case studies that illustrate what you can do.
Starting out always presents some difficulties but you should not be deterred by these challenges. If you apply a little creativity you can offer your initial clients a special deal in exchange for a testimonial and this helps build your portfolio. These initial deals also help you to develop and refine your skills in presenting yourself to prospective clients.
In setting up shop, you should focus on the provision of the website design and basic content. Many of these offline business owners will have a limited understanding of all the other add-ons you could offer them by way of marketing their business effectively. Terms such as “search engine optimization” or “back links” will be like a foreign language, in many cases. Be patient and as they grow to know you and trust you, then you can begin to offer them sophisticated marketing plans for their business.
Therefore keep it simple in the beginning and work on building up a positive working relationship.
The pricing of your services is an important consideration in the beginning. Web packages can range in price from $800 to $8000, depending on what is included. You will therefore need to think about where you fit in that range as well as analyzing customer requirements.
Another key factor that affects pricing is whether or not you are doing the web design work yourself. Don’t despair if you feel you don’t have the necessary skills in this area. Outsourcing is a very viable alternative. You then simply have to factor in a price that still gives you a reasonable profit.
The best thing about outsourcing via the internet is that not only can you get quality work done for an attractive price, but your client doesn’t even have to be aware of it. As far as the client is concerned he/she is dealing with you and you are providing what is required.
One final hint about setting up shop – offer your customers a discount via a coupon system on your web site. This helps with breaking into this field and establishing a solid client base. Make no mistake this field of consulting to offline businesses and helping them to go online is a rewarding path to take. You can get started today – just grab a copy of Turning Bricks Into Gold
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There is not the slightest doubt that people who are trying to build an online business usually have to struggle against an ever-expanding number of competitors.
When you stop to think about it, this is hardly surprising. As you get immersed in areas such as search engine optimization, web development and design, online advertising, video marketing, product creation, you soon discover that the hordes of other people doing the same thing and many of them are quite prepared to undercut your prices and push you out of the market.
Therefore the issue becomes – how can one build a business where there is virtually an unlimited supply of customers and in which there is limited competition?
The answer lies in marketing to offline businesses.
World-wide there is an astonishing number of offline businesses who either don’t have an online presence, or if they do, it is ineffectual. This means that there is an equally astonishing opportunity to build your brand and become a recognized authority with the services that you offer.
It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about web design, SEO or traffic generation, you can build a business with limited competition and minimal effort.
This incredible area of opportunity is sometimes referred to as “offline gold” and with very good reason. The challenge is to determine the needs of each customer and then offer services tailored to those needs. You then introduce them to a whole new world where they can harness the power of the internet to help them grow their own businesses. And guess whose business grows at the same time? You guessed right – yours! Offline gold is a very appropriate name
Let’s imagine for a moment a small business owner in your local community who has no web presence. You come along and show him how you can help him grow his business through an effective online presence. This owner is spending over $3,000 per year in advertising in the Yellow Pages and is not getting any new customers as a result. You find out as much as you can about his business and then you set him up with a web site, auto-responder, email, articles and videos and you get his business ranked on the first page of Google. You do this for less than he is spending on his advertising. Do you think he would be interested?
And remember – you can do this with virtually no competition because the field is wide open. All you have to do is start looking around your local community.
Marketing to offline businesses is definitely the way of the future and the way to have the perfect online business.
Do you want to have the perfect online business? Surely, you can’t say “no” to that question! That’s why you should pick up your free report Getting The Word Out
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The right mindset involves listening to the customer and identifying the needs of their business. Only then is it possible to deliver the most appropriate services and resources.
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