Offline Marketing… An Interesting Way Of Making Money

I talk to quite a lot of people I’ve ‘met’ online daily… nearly every single thing I’ve learned about making money online and online business for that matter has been through someone else, as I started off a complete newbie – yes, some of it I found out by myself, but a lot of it I didn’t – a few months ago I didn’t even know what GoDaddy or Hostgator was and people had to explain it to me. I have learned a lot from people online in my daily chats and I hope those I speak with can say the same 

Today I met a new guy in person who also is a bit of an online entrepreneur… I spoke to him a bit and he filled me in on how he was making money by combining offline activities with online business – I didn’t listen much in the beginning, as to me working offline sounds a bit too much like your regular day job, but as he filled me in I got more and more interested. My buddy that I spoke with was pulling in around $1000 a week – that’s a small sum for some of you, but for the rest of us… well, that’s more than I make and I certainly wouldn’t mind increasing what I was – the best thing about this is that he spent maybe one hour startup and then fifteen minutes a day after that. By combining online business with offline marketing, he was making a killing, and I’m going to try this out – you can too if you find it interesting 

This is by no means rocket science, but listen anyways  . In the modern world, most large companies have their own website…� there are however quite a few smaller companies, aiming solely at the local market that don’t. These businesses also tend not to really know much about dealing online – all they rely on is word of mouth, advertising through posters/newspapers and getting customers from people that live nearby. This is where you come in. Essentially, here’s how it goes:

1) Set up a website of your own offering web design and logo design. Make sure the domain clearly states what you do (xyzdesign.com) If you can’t design or code, get someone else to do it for you – make sure it looks spectacular, and maybe throw in a bit of CSS/Ajax to awe visitors. Concentrate on the functionality of the website – you don’t have to do rubbish like SEO on it.

2) Get a killer logo done for your website – make sure it relates to design and is memorable. An example of one can be seen below – that’s the logo of the guys that did my header.

3) Once you get the logo done, have flyers made – if you can’t design, again… get someone else to do it. All in all, it should cost you less than $100 USD for the website, around $20 USD for the logo design and maybe $50 USD for a flyer to be created. Say $20 USD in misc fees for a domain and hosting, and you’re looking at around $200 startup.

4) Print those flyers. I took a look at a local printing store and then go at around $0.1 per printout, meaning 100 flyers for $10. Make around 500 of those – $250.00 startup.

5) Open up your local Yellow Pages (or whatever is similar) for business. There should be thousands, if not more companies listed – take a look at them. The ones that have websites will have them prominently displayed; you can safely assume all those without websites listed don’t have them. When you have a list of say 500 companies without websites, you’ll need to write up a small text – this can be done in Microsoft Word.

On this text (you can use a basic outline, and then edit it slightly every time to suit each company) you will need to explain the benefits of having a website, point out competitor websites and list a few facts (stating the $x billion amount of online business that is conducted every year is a good example of one of those). Print these out and attach them to your flyers.

Also mention your pricing… around $500.00 USD per website should be fine.

6) Mail copies of your flyers + email text to each organization. Say you get just a 1% conversion rate – that’s five websites done, and $2500.00 earned. My friend didn’t know how to design or code for nuts (like me  ) so outsourced the work – he started off paying $100/website and eventually worked his way down to $50/website (including the company logo).

Not bad at all, eh? It’s a pretty interesting idea, and it’s definitely working as he’s a live example; anyone know any decent designers or coders? 

7) Extra – he isn’t doing this, but you could, if you decide to make a go of this; obviously companies without a website won’t have hosting. What you can do is get your own high powered dedicated server and offer hosting at $20/month… something that will net you some nice residual income.

I’m thinking of doing this, but rather that contact 500+ companies maybe just take out an ad in the newspaper… it would be slightly more expensive perhaps, but would hit up a larger range of people, quite a few of which may just even want personal websites. What about you?

Membership website

Gaah, my lack of technical prowess is hitting me again – I’ve compiled most of the stuff for the membership website, including five custom written reports that I’ll be giving out with resale rights to everyone that signs up, but I’m having problems with the membership script – it’s giving me errors again and again. If anyone’s good at installing scripts (databases and cron jobs) let me know – I’ll give you free lifetime access if you help me out 

Skype/Google talk

I’m thinking of getting either or, mainly so that I’ll be able to communicate with all the people that are too lazy to type… need to buy a microphone though. I’m thinking of offering limited live support via the two programs for my new membership website (whenever I manage to get it up) as that’s something I haven’t really seen out there. Granted, I’m not subscribed to dozens of membership sites but it is an interesting prospect.

That’s all for today. Hope you found the post about marketing offline somewhat useful