4 ms·

I used to do a lot of offline marketing of online products and made some good money. What I mean by this is selling sites/hosting/newsletter hosting to small, l

by mikeyur 17y ago

I used to do a lot of offline marketing of online products and made some good money. What I mean by this is selling sites/hosting/newsletter hosting to small, local businesses. I did this when I was tight on cash, since it can usually be done in a weekend: research a local group of businesses (ie. dentists or furniture stores) using Google Maps and grab all of their info. See which businesses don't have websites - and if they do check out how they look/work. For the companies that didn't, I'd write a simple sales letter offering a discounted website. Something like the client that originally bought the site ended up bailing near the end, but I got a deposit out of them so I'm selling this site for cost. Since the other customer already paid (say, $1000), and costs were $1500, I can give you the site for $500. That site is really just a cheap TemplateMonster design ($40-50) and once I get the payment I'll send over a word doc requesting all of the info they want for the pages and all the media they want uploaded. Probably a good 6-10 hours of work, for a decent profit (I typically charged them around $800 for the site). Once completed you sell them on hosting (grab a VPS for $30/mo. and charge them $50/mo. to host their site - I put ~10 clients on a VPS (comfortably) since the sites get very little traffic). You sell them on newsletter hosting, explain benefits of contacting customers directly about offers for almost $0 cost to them. Email is huge to local businesses, set them up with mail@theirdomain.com and many will worship you. So many people still use xyz123@isp.net for their BUSINESS email. For customers that already have sites, offer a redesign, better functionality (contact/quote request forms, email newsletter hosting, etc.). There's also lots of money in local business directories, if you know anything about SEO. Offer them targeted traffic/leads at $XX/mo. - even more if they want a banner on the site. So much cash offline, go and take it. It may be harder to do it based on the country, but I refuse to believe there isn't at least some need for it. If not - hit up craigslist in the US and start pimping your offerings ;)

dkokelley 17y ago
" I can give you the site for $500... (I typically charged them around $800 for the site)." How did this work? Was the final price after upselling on other services?
- mikeyur 17y ago
  What I meant was, I'd typically get $800 up front for just the site, not including any upsells. Basically I'd say the site was $2400, the company who was going to buy it paid 50% upfront. My costs for the site are.. $1900 (designers, devs, etc), so I'd just ask for the difference. The site would cost $700 upfront for them, which looks like an absolute steal to them. I would then explain the hosting and the email newsletter stuff, and typically upsell them on $100/mo. in services (that basically cost me nothing to run, other than maybe an hour of work per month). $100/mo. was kind of the minimum, my biggest contract was $600/month for sending out 2 mailings a week and updating the site periodically. Maybe 3-4 hours of work per month - most of it was just copying/pasting and pressing save.
jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
I posted an article from SAI the other day. Only 25% of local businesses are advertising online. Mostly because it's complicated and scary as shit to them. Of those 25%, 60-80% churn. That's because the companies doing this are so bloated that they only spend 50-60% on the actual ad buy and the rest on admin expenses. So yeah, the performance sucks. I also read 91% of local businesses are unhappy with their online marketing efforts (i NEED to find the link for this again). If 91% of a population is unhappy with something, you probably have an opportunity. Go fuck shit up. You can do it, and you'll make your money.
- acgourley 17y ago
  From time to time I see this as a real market need and wonder how to generalize and scale such a service oriented business. Seems like you could throw a lot of tech at it but still need a lot of feet on the ground at the end of the day.
  - nrao123 17y ago
    Yes, scaling local businesses are not easy. My research on this topic... http://www.nikhileshrao.com/post/9824/links-on-local-internet-local-advertising-market/ http://www.nikhileshrao.com/post/9824/links-on-local-interne...
  - aaronblohowiak 17y ago
    Yelp
  - jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
    the BIGGEST problem is scaling it (at any scale). All these companies have enormous sales forces running around. That does two things: a) causes less % of media buy to go to actual media b) causes the companies to have to raise tons of capital. If someone can figure out a unique way to scale sales without adding more human capital,they will do very well. On the flip side, most of these people don't want to "do it themselves". You can outsource most of the actual service work at a scaleable expense. I look at it this way, sure anyone can learn accounting, but you want an accountant to do your taxes. Same thing with local businesses and web advertising- yes they could learn it themselves, but they'd rather have a pro do it. They just want to run their business.
paulsingh 17y ago
+1 for "So much cash offline, go and take it. It may be harder to do it based on the country, but I refuse to believe there isn't at least some need for it. If not - hit up craigslist in the US and start pimping your offerings" I can't echo this enough -- small businesses have so much cash for offline stuff, it's not even funny. I'm learning that via my latest startup, MailFinch.

by mikeyur 17y ago

dkokelley 17y ago

" I can give you the site for $500... (I typically charged them around $800 for the site)." How did this work? Was the final price after upselling on other services?

mikeyur 17y ago
What I meant was, I'd typically get $800 up front for just the site, not including any upsells. Basically I'd say the site was $2400, the company who was going to buy it paid 50% upfront. My costs for the site are.. $1900 (designers, devs, etc), so I'd just ask for the difference. The site would cost $700 upfront for them, which looks like an absolute steal to them. I would then explain the hosting and the email newsletter stuff, and typically upsell them on $100/mo. in services (that basically cost me nothing to run, other than maybe an hour of work per month). $100/mo. was kind of the minimum, my biggest contract was $600/month for sending out 2 mailings a week and updating the site periodically. Maybe 3-4 hours of work per month - most of it was just copying/pasting and pressing save.

jasonlbaptiste 17y ago

I posted an article from SAI the other day. Only 25% of local businesses are advertising online. Mostly because it's complicated and scary as shit to them. Of those 25%, 60-80% churn. That's because the companies doing this are so bloated that they only spend 50-60% on the actual ad buy and the rest on admin expenses. So yeah, the performance sucks. I also read 91% of local businesses are unhappy with their online marketing efforts (i NEED to find the link for this again). If 91% of a population is unhappy with something, you probably have an opportunity. Go fuck shit up. You can do it, and you'll make your money.

acgourley 17y ago
From time to time I see this as a real market need and wonder how to generalize and scale such a service oriented business. Seems like you could throw a lot of tech at it but still need a lot of feet on the ground at the end of the day.
- nrao123 17y ago
  Yes, scaling local businesses are not easy. My research on this topic... http://www.nikhileshrao.com/post/9824/links-on-local-internet-local-advertising-market/ http://www.nikhileshrao.com/post/9824/links-on-local-interne...
- aaronblohowiak 17y ago
  Yelp
- jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
  the BIGGEST problem is scaling it (at any scale). All these companies have enormous sales forces running around. That does two things: a) causes less % of media buy to go to actual media b) causes the companies to have to raise tons of capital. If someone can figure out a unique way to scale sales without adding more human capital,they will do very well. On the flip side, most of these people don't want to "do it themselves". You can outsource most of the actual service work at a scaleable expense. I look at it this way, sure anyone can learn accounting, but you want an accountant to do your taxes. Same thing with local businesses and web advertising- yes they could learn it themselves, but they'd rather have a pro do it. They just want to run their business.

paulsingh 17y ago

+1 for "So much cash offline, go and take it. It may be harder to do it based on the country, but I refuse to believe there isn't at least some need for it. If not - hit up craigslist in the US and start pimping your offerings" I can't echo this enough -- small businesses have so much cash for offline stuff, it's not even funny. I'm learning that via my latest startup, MailFinch.