Posts Tagged ‘internet marketing’

How ToMake A Living By Leasing Websites

Making a good living with internet marketing is nowhere near as easy as some people would have you believe.  To grow a sound and prosperous business requires a range of skills as well as knowledge and persistence.

Usually internet marketers are involved in selling e-books, videos, home study courses, reports, membership sites, CD’s & DVD’s.  It is not often that you hear about someone earning a living by leasing websites.

How can this be?

In the operational area of consulting to offline businesses, there is a huge opportunity to do just that.  It is now well established that this is a major growth industry.  At the present time, the large majority of small businesses either do not have a web site, or if they do, it is not bringing in new business.

Enter the offline consultant…

Becoming a consultant to offline businesses dictates that you need to provide them with an effective online presence that assists them to grow their business.  In order to do that you need to weigh the options available to you.

One opportunity would be to design an appropriate web site and sell it to the business owner.  In this scenario, this becomes a one-off transaction and he becomes the owner of the site.  The new owner also has the responsibility to maintain it on an ongoing basis.

A far better option is to prepare a web site for which you remain the owner.  Then lease the website to the business owner on a monthly basis.  You then retain control and can keep things to a proper standard…  More importantly, you then start receiving passive monthly income.  This is an important consideration, particularly when starting out in this area.

As your client portfolio grows, you will have a substantial monthly income.  Of course this income will be supplemented by other products and services that you may provide to your clients, but it will remain as the strong foundation of your business.

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Why Build A Local Business Directory

There are many compelling reasons to create a local business directory whether you are an Online-Offline Internet Marketing Consultant to your local community, an Internet Marketer looking to break out into untouched territory, or someone who recognizes the potential of servicing local businesses to expand their reach, exposure and brand outside of the traditional forms of advertising.

Building local business directories is quite simple if you follow the more generic utility sites that basically list links to businesses under specific categories much like an A-Z reference page.

Local business directories work in a similar fashion to local phone directories such as the Yellow Pages ™ so when an internet surfer enters a keyword for a product or service they are searching for such as Auto Mechanic Perth Subiaco, the likelihood of your listings for a local business on the first page of Google ™ for that specific keyword is rather high.

The surfer is then led to a page categorized by the nature of the business and once the links of choice are clicked by the searcher they are redirected to the local business via their website where the surfer can hopefully attain the relevant information they seek.

What the business does with the prospect once the visitor has landed on their website is not the responsibility of the local directory it has succeeded in performing its obligation.

This is a very basic and simple method to servicing your local business and community but still highly effective without the need for cold calling or hiring a sales force. An effective sales funnel, network system and multiple first page listings in the search engine for low hanging keywords will ensure local exposure that targets local shoppers.

It is these same local shoppers that local businesses will pay you a premium to have redirected to their online URL or to their offline brick and mortar address.

There are many advanced ideas to turn your local business directory in a full blown sales funnel that better services your local community and provides you with a regular monthly – yearly income while building a commodity that can be sold as an ongoing business for a handsome profit showing a very reasonable continuity income if so desired.

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Growing Your Offline Consulting Business By Expanding Your Sales Force

Many people in the internet marketing world are waking up to the significantly under-served opportunities available in the real world – selling online marketing services to offline brick and mortar businesses. Talk about turning bricks into gold! For those who have been engaged in this arena for some time however, many eventually find the growth of their offline consulting business limited by the constraints on their own personal time.

The obvious solution to this problem of course is to hire a salesperson. Unfortunately, while the solution may be obvious, the time spent, risks, and costs of actually hiring the right salesperson for your offline consulting business are not so obvious. Today we are going to take a look at three different options for expanding your sales force, what their advantages and disadvantages are, and which circumstances are best suited for each option.

The three options that we shall discuss for expanding your sales force are as follows:

1. Using commission only sales agents
2. Outsourcing your sales activity
3. Recruiting sales people

A commission only sales agent, or salesperson, is an independent contractor (not an employees) who usually represents or promotes more than one business/product. The big advantage to using a commission only sales agent is the low cost and low monetary risk, since you do not pay this salesperson any money at all until they actually close a sale for you. They only get paid when you make money, so there is no upfront cash outlay for your business. There is also no base salary or employment taxes to pay, nor benefits to provide, nor employment paperwork to file.

The downside though is that you can only influence these sales people, but you cannot control what they do. If they decide to focus their efforts on other products or businesses and make your services less of a priority, then there isn’t much you can do about it, so you may not want to rely solely on this kind of an arrangement for your sales force, but use it in connjuction with either or both of the other options below. Additionally, using a commission only sales agent most often works better for selling products rather than services, so you may need to spend some extra time training this kind of salesperson and familiarizing them with your offline consulting services.

Our second option of outsourcing your sales activity can really be done in one of two ways. You can choose to either outsource only certain functions (like cold-calling, telephone follow up, or managing a direct mailing campaign), or outsource the entire sales process. These may be good options for you if you need something done quickly, and the partial outsourcing option in particular may be ideal for complementing the efforts of your sales force.
However, with partial outsourcing, you still don’t have the whole job covered, so you may still need to hire a salesperson.

If you choose to outsource every part of the sales process, it will free up quite a bit of your management time. However, it is extremely difficult to do this on a commission-only basis (especially if you have a very long sales cycle). You will most likely need to agree to a shared-risk payment structure that includes both a day rate plus a commission payment.  This means you have to pay for their work even if they never close a single sale!
Another significant disadvantage to outsourcing your entire sales process is that you lose the opportunity to build relationships with your customers, making this a poor long-term choice.

For maximum control of the sales process, the best option is undoubtedly to recruit your own sales people (i.e. hire your own employees). In this situation, you get to dictate where your sales people focus their efforts, and even how they should do their job.
The big problem with this of course is the risk, time and effort required, and the relatively high cost.

In this case, you do need to offer some base salary, pay employment taxes, consider providing employee benefits, and file all of the necessary employment paperwork – and all of this only after going through the whole recruiting process! And even then, you may find that you’ve hired someone who simply cannot deliver the increased sales to pay for their employment.

Most certainly there is no sure-fire solution to finding exactly the right salesperson for your offline consulting business. But if you’re currently a maxed-out, stressed-out, one-man sales force, then you should not let the potential pitfalls of hiring a salesperson stop you from doing just that. Simply think things through beforehand and make sure you’re choosing the right option for your particular situation. Keep realistic expectations of what can be accomplished when, and remember, if it does not work out, you can always make a change.

How To Add A New Dimension To Your Internet Marketing

Internet marketing is both a fascinating and frustrating activity in which to be involved.  The fascination arises because of the different skills that one has to acquire in order to be on top of the game as well as the challenges presented by the rapidly changing scenarios on the internet.  The frustration arises because of fierce competition and the constant battle to get growing streams of traffic to your website(s).

Therefore it is important to be on the lookout for new opportunities where you can beat the competition by being ahead of them.  The purpose of my article today is to alert you to a new field of opportunity where, if you take advantage of it, you will find a source of untapped riches that will swell the coffers of your bank account.  I am talking about being a consultant to offline businesses.

Do you realize that in the USA over 50% of small businesses do not have an online presence?  It is also reasonable to assume that the situation is very similar in other major countries.  The percentages may vary, but the real point to understand here is that there is a huge market waiting to be shown how to improve their businesses.

In addition to the above scenario you also need to realize that where small businesses do have a web presence, it is often ineffectual.  In other words, it is not bringing about increased business.

When you put those two scenarios together then you have a great opportunity to take your internet marketing to a new dimension.  You can become a consultant to offline businesses and to those businesses that have a website that doesn’t help generate new customers.

Consider for a moment this new dimension and what the needs of your prospective clients might be.

• They will need a website that is search engine optimized so as to bring in the maximum search traffic

• They will need a website that captures the email addresses of visitors so that there can be follow-up campaigns to convert those visitors to customers

• They will need an auto-responder that will send out the follow-up messages

• They will need a marketing plan for their business

• They will need advice about other tools and resources that may assist in the growth of their business.

For example, using videos on squeeze pages and sales pages.

Can you see the opportunities provided by this new dimension?

The opportunity is undoubtedly there and you need to get yourself organized and begin taking advantage of it.  It has been calculated that the scenarios I have outlined represent a multi-billion dollar industry.  It is therefore crucial to get organized and get in early and procure your share of this growth industry – online consulting to offline businesses.