Archive for October 2009

3 Free Ways To Get Offline Clients Today

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Get Offline Clients From HomeFor those of you wondering how you can start getting clients for your offline consulting business, its easier than you might think.

If you’re just getting started, it may be overwhelming to think of getting your first few clients. After all, you’ve been spending all your time learning about what to offer these offline businesses and how to get the work done or outsource the work.

But all that training will do you no good if you never get a customer that you can actually do the work for. Besides, you’ll go broke if all you’re doing is refining your skills and become the expert but no one ever knows about it.

The way I see it, there are three free and easy ways to get offline clients today! Here they are in no specific order:

1. Find out which local businesses are already advertising with Google’s Adwords. This is a complete no brainer. These offline businesses are already spending money promoting their products and services online using Google. Do you think they may be open to your services that will help them get the results they’re already looking for? Of course they are.

2. Start looking at the advertising and marketing that is all around you. I know this one seems silly but it really is a great way to get offline clients. Just the other day, I received a mailing from a local dentist office. Guess what wasn’t there; a website or a direct call to action. It just had a pretty picture, their address, and their hours of operation.

How many leads do you think this marketing piece is getting them. I would venture to say fewer than 5 for every thousands they send out. But you know what, this is the third time I get the same exact piece. What a great opportunity to walk in with one of their pieces and let them know the “5 Secrets To A Highly Converting Ad”.

If you think to yourself that you don’t have something like that, I just made it up. I used a little creativity to get in the door. That’s all you have to do just to get in front of them and show them the real value that you can provide.

3. Visit a few local Meetup groups or BNI (Business Network International) referral groups. The first few visits are absolutely free, but what you’re doing is surrounding yourself with potential clients and business referral sources all for free. Once you close your first few sales, become a paying member and your business will explode.

The way I see it, even if you charge a minimal amount just to get client from these sources, you’ll begin to build momentum to tackle those larger payout clients and get them regularly so you can be confident that having an offline consulting company is definitely a viable business.

Now, if you have some great ways to get offline business clients for free, feel free to share them here by commenting below!

Comments (1)
Categories : Client Getting

Don't Put Your Eggs In One BasketMany beginner offline marketers get stuck initially for a number of reasons. One of the most common reasons they get stuck is not knowing what to offer offline businesses.

Internet marketing consists of so many things and if you’ve been in internet marketing for some time, its seems like there are new money making concepts and products that come out weekly.

That’s why people get stuck when it comes to knowing what to offer; they have been presented so many options over time that they don’t know which of the thousands of strategies to offer to these offline businesses.

So, let’s dive into 3 quick and easy services that you can implement to get started.

These by no means are everything you can offer, however, they’re a great place to start in order to begin earning your first $500 checks over and over again.

Feel free to make your own “marketing value meals” mixing and matching these services in order to increase the value of each client.

1. Starting Their Social Media Campaign – Ok, you’re probably thinking, “I’m not sure how they can use social media to grow their offline businesses”.

In reality, every business should be using social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and even Plaxo to expand their reach. These are all sites that instantly give them access to people in their surrounding area and area of interest.

So, whether you’re a social media mogul or just getting started, you can always cater to them based on your knowledge of these sites and expand on your social media services as you learn more.

Let’s say that you use Twitter sporadically and haven’t been able to master it just yet. Let’s also say you just got started with Facebook and are starting to get your first few friends.

You can offer these offline businesses a service that will set up their profiles for them and link them easily with FriendFeed where they can manage all the sites from one place.

For this type of service, you aren’t doing anything else but creating their profiles and setting them up. Do you have to be an expert at getting friends or followers in order to simply set them up with profiles? Absolutely NOT!

Can you still charge $500 or more up front to set 3-4 of these profiles up for them? Absolutely!

Knowing this, you can even charge your first few clients a discounted price as you learn how to simplify the social media profile setup process. Eventually, you’ll learn how to spend less time on the work to get the same amount of money or more!

2. Integrate A Lead Capture System Into Their Existing Website – this one is perhaps the absolute easiest way to make a quick $500 whether you’re just starting with your offline marketing business or already performing other types of marketing services.

Many local businesses already have nice looking brochure style websites that are online, but aren’t getting any types of results. At the end of the day, there’s only two reasons for any business to have a website. The first is for a business branding strategy (which doesn’t make sense unless the business has a big budget) and the second is to generate actual results, namely new leads.

The biggest challenge these local businesses have with getting new leads for their business is that they don’t have any effective way to capture leads besides a posted phone number and/or address, and many times, these are somewhere hidden in the bottom of the website.

So, as heroic as you are, you approach them asking them what kind of results they’re seeing from their website. Chances are they either don’t have a clue or start crying because they haven’t seen 1 single new lead from their website.

Then you present them with your “cutting edge” lead capture system that will get their website visitors to opt in and request more information. What’s this “cutting edge” lead capture system? The good old fashion autoresponder that everyone in internet marketing talk about, but offline businesses are completely unaware of.

So what are you really doing for $500. Adding your autoresponder code to their existing website or adding a nice looking, “relevant” pop up that offers them something special in exchange for entering their name and email address.

Again, most likely, they’ve never seen anything like this before and didn’t really know that they can set up a simple system that allows them to capture leads and contact their new leads in a sequence all automatically!

3. Set Up A Blog To Help Them Communicate With Their Target Market – most business websites, if they have one, are static websites that have the same content from the time they were originally created. As you know, these sites offered little to no open communication with their visitors.

But as the expert (experience is irrelevant for what you’ll be doing here), you show these offline businesses the value of having a blog and how big businesses have invested millions of dollars in their corporate blogs to have an open dialog with their consumers.

Then you tell them that you don’t charge anywhere near that. You don’t even charge $1,000. You tell them that since you support small to midsize businesses (and happen to have one as well), you have a small business discount of 50% to get them started with their own blog.

Once you get the check, you ask them for just a few things including their website hosting information and for the most part, installing a blog is just a few clicks away. You can even offer to host their blog for an additional monthly residual income while having the control of which hosting to use.

Why is this important? Because you would choose a hosting account that uses Cpanel to manage your hosted files. The great thing about cpanel is that installing a blog is literally a matter of clicking a few buttons and adding the new login details for the blog. It will literally take you 20 minutes to have their blog up and running.

So there you have it, three quick and easy marketing services that you can start with today to begin making $500 checks from local businesses. You don’t need to make it harder than it has to be. Start with these three services and you’ll be surprised how fast it takes you and how little time is required to start earning $3,000 to $5,000 a month all off of $500 services.

Again, you can mix and match them and create special packages to increase the value of your offering once they give you the first yes!

Comments (2)
Categories : Offline Services

What’s Up With Offline Consulting Success?

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

Offline Consulting Can Be Done From AnywhereIf you’ve been around the internet marketing scene lately, you’ve probably heard all the hype about offline consulting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that offline consulting is hype, what I’m saying is that there’s a lot of hype surrounding offline consulting.

This is especially true from marketers that haven’t made $1 from the actual consulting, only the selling of offline marketing material to online marketers and business opportunity seekers.

So what is offline consulting all about and why should you really consider it as a viable business that can earn you “real money” unlike all the hundreds of courses out there (believe me, I’ve purchased close to $25,000 worth of them!) that continue making empty promises.

The first thing that you should always consider before getting into any opportunity is believing that it is in fact a business, not just the latest quick money tactic.

If you realize that offline consulting is an actual business, then you’ll start off right because you’ll treat your clients with relationship in mind, not just money. This will help you build long term and lucrative relationships to those business owners that you help with their online strategies.

Secondly, you must believe that you are a marketer first and then a consultant.

Why is this important? Simple.  Because you are selling your marketing services to local businesses (at first) and if you don’t market your own offline consulting business successfully, how are you going to do it for anyone else.

Finally, considering the many possibilities of making real money as an offline consultant, remember this famous saying, “It takes money to make money”.

What I am referring to here is that you can ‘get started’ without much else than bravery and courage to talk to the first few businesses. However, if you intend on making thousands of dollars per client, you’ll need to invest in your own website, your own list managements system, and some tools along the way.

So there you have it. Its a quick and easy way to understand the opportunity that exists through being an offline marketing consultant. As you consider these things, make a firm decision to get started and do whatever it takes to get your first client, then your second, and so on.

You’ll finally get to the point that you can do this full time (not necessarily 40 hours a week, but as your sole source of income) from anywhere you want with just a computer and internet connection.

Be sure to leave your thoughts and let me know if offline consulting is right for you. I’d love to hear your experiences.