It took me a couple of days to get acquainted with Aweber, the autoresponder. I thought I could set up the email series for new subscribers much faster, but Aweber is not as intuitive as I expected. Fortunately, John Thornhill’s tutorial and articles from Aweber itself helped me set up the first broadcast.
When I think that I had to put so much effort into learning to use the autoresponder it becomes clear to me that there are many small business owners who are not familiar with such tools. More likely there are many local entrepreneurs who do not take advantage of the opportunities offered by the Internet to promote their businesses. So I went further in my mind and asked if I could get any additional benefits from the knowledge of internet marketing.I went online and actually it turns out that anyone can generate additional revenue.
Offline marketing, in general, is providing services that you’re comfortable with to local area businesses who need those services and either don’t know how to do themselves, or they have better things to do with their time. Usually, both of those situations apply, and when they do you have an obvious and potentially popular and very profitable service on your hands.
So what I would do today is explain to local business owners the fact that I could help them get more of their current customers, who already know, like and trust them, to visit more often. Who wouldn’t be interested in that deal, right?
It would be current customers that I’d go after, not new ones, but current customers often bring in new ones through word of mouth.
Local business owners are good at what they do, whether that’s making pizzas, treating patients (doctors, dentists, chiropractors, etc.), landscaping services, auto servicing, plumbing, or whatever. They aren’t good at setting up computer systems to keep in touch with their customer base. Nor are they good at designing forms to capture those names at a point of purchase. Nor are they good at setting up autoresponder sequences that will offer the people on their list a discount if they visit within the next 7 days. These kinds of things are something you could do for them, couldn’t you?
You could also design a squeeze page for them and a very simple basic website for them, which would serve to capture names of potential new customers as well, while you’re at it. You could also write broadcast emails for the business whenever they have special events or special holiday discount periods, and broadcast the information to the entire list. So what you would be doing would sort of involve being their trusted service provider for email marketing, and perhaps so much more.
Keep in mind, businesses advertise to get more business. The point is, they’re accustomed to spending money with a goal to bring people into their establishment, and you’ll be helping them. Depending on the business, your service could and should be the most cost-effective for them, and give them the biggest return on investment of any of the other ways of advertisement.
So an initial setup fee (to cover the cost of designing the squeeze page, the flyer that’s kept by the register to explain the fact that the business has an email list and the benefits of joining, and the setting up of the initial autoresponder service) could earn you $500 or more. And after the initial setup, your ongoing service and assistance in regular broadcasts to that list, including setting up maybe 2 broadcasts a month informing the list of special sales and discount offers, could earn you an extra two to three hundred dollars a month.
You could also host their email list on your account… You could give them a 14 day or 30-day trial where you would help them set everything up, no charge until after the trial period, and show them at the end of the trial how many customers signed up. These customers would be visiting the business with their special coupons redeeming the offers and would prove the benefits of your service. If they decided not to become your client after the trial, you would delete the names on the list.
So if you’re hosting their email list, you would obviously charge for that based on the size of the list (much like Aweber and Getresponse have prices based on tiers of a number of subscribers). Doing that would lock them into a profitable monthly maintenance fee for you. Or if they wanted to take over the list on their own account, you would set them up with the email provider, using your affiliate link of course.
What business would want to stop your service once a bunch of customers signed up, right?
So there you go. Find one new customer for your service each week and the setup fee would net you typically $1,000, plus monthly maintenance fees of typically $250. Once you’ve been doing this for 6 months to a year, you’ll have a very nice recurring income, and if you have trouble doing all the servicing, you can outsource some of the tasks, or hire an employee or two as you grow and expand.
Once you’ve got a client, and once they’re happy with all the extra business that’s coming in their doors they will be, you now have clients that will look to you and trust you to recommend other services you offer…
Perhaps a redesign, or initial design, of their web site, or of their blog. Perhaps writing the regular blog posts for them, including getting them optimized for SEO purposes. After all, you know more about getting them to the top of the search engines than they do. Perhaps SEO services for their existing blog or web site, to help them reach more new customers. Perhaps social marketing where you set up or improve upon their Facebook fan page so they can keep in touch with those people more than just a couple times a month (you can post on their page for them regularly, for a fee of course). Perhaps a pay per click advertising campaign on Facebook or Google or Yahoo/Bing or elsewhere to get new leads. Perhaps designing a short report or even ghostwriting a book for professionals or service providers of some type, so they can publish under their name and gain greater respect and authority in your community. Perhaps sending out press releases to announce special events held by the business.
The possibilities are endless, and if you’re not comfortable doing all those various services, either you can decide not to offer them, or you can find someone to outsource to. You’ll become the centre of attention. Done right, the business owner will be happy to recommend you to his friends in the community as well, and the cycle begins again.
The whole point is, you have these skills, and they don’t. They have skills as doctors and accountants and restaurant chefs and hairdressers and plumbers and owners of bars and so much more. They’ll be happy to outsource to you and pay you well for what you can do for them, which is to bring more customers in the door.
Most businesses appreciate that a customer is a customer, not caring so much whether it’s a new one or an existing one. You’ll help them keep in touch and maximize the revenue from existing customers, and you’ll do that well.
What do you think about utilising your internet marketing skills with this method? Which local businesses do you see as your prospects?
And by the way, Do you use Aweber and do you like this software?
Let me know,
Aleksandra
