Earn Money Online Blog

Make Money Offline with your Online Knowledge

It’s really easy to get wrapped up in making money online, to do freelancing with contacts across the world. You have your earn money blog, you get focused on your referral commissions, your advertising revenue and you forget that there are businesses in the local area that could use some of your hard won internet marketing skills to get better visibility.

With the kinds of things that you have to learn to succeed with a product (or advertising supported site) online you can develop quite a valuable skill set.

For instance, one of the skills I’ve developed is a knack for ranking for search terms that I choose to. Sometimes it takes longer to get there than others (depending on the competition), but I have a roadmap for how to get there. Most local business owners wouldn’t know the first place to start.

How valuable would it be to ANY business to dominate the search results for something that is relevant to their niche? It could be priceless. Realize how much businesses pay to be in the yellow pages (hundreds or thousands EACH MONTH.) Well, the yellow pages are dying in their traditional form and the internet is replacing them. Search engines.

How valuable do you think it would be to be the first result for “dog groomer in yourtown” ? For that matter, what if they don’t yet have a website? You’ve probably developed enough skills at this point to be able to design (if only based on an existing template) a simple presence for local businesses and give them some good SEO.

One of my recent projects has been along these lines. I’ve been working on a couple of self storage or mini storage websites. So, we’ve worked from a wordpress template and modified things to suit. We’ve given pages on storage unit sizes, optimized the page for the self storage and mini storage terms that seem to make sense and have worked on building inbound links for this company that provides self storage in Greenville, SC. The last I saw (today) they were #3 for one important search (self storage in Greenville) and 11 for another (the previous link text). Hopefully climbing in both cases. Thus far we have just started with “offsite” optimization and things are looking promising. (Much better rankings than before.) There’s still a lot of work to do there though. Whether that converts to more storage rentals is still an outstanding question it may be a matter of more keyword research.

But, keyword research is yet another of those things that you should know how to do if you’re going to be successful online.

One of the nice things about expanding your offline leads is that it can get you out away from the computer from time to time. How you approach this is entirely up to you, but it can be fairly easy to develop a lead list just by traveling down a given street. (Or thumbing through the yellow pages.) You will likely want to discard national or regional chains, they usually have their own centralized corporate web site (although it can’t hurt to investigate.)

After you’ve got your list, go through and see which ones have websites and which ones don’t. Then try to get a feel for whether or not the websites come up for generic searches for that service or product in your area. (Search as though you don’t know their name, but your in a potential customers shoes…) Something like music lessons in Asheville if the business teaches private music lessons. Of course, if a business doesn’t come up in the first result searching for their name you may have some work to do there as well.

A final thought would be this. Don’t be afraid to charge a decent sum for these kinds of services. After all, if you are able to give them a good stream of revenue from leads from the web. This will be valuable to them. Don’t sell it as something without value! Another good point to add in closing, is that if you don’t already have one, get a reseller account for web space. You may well pick up some hosting clients which could make for a steady stream of ongoing revenue long after the web optimization and design phase is done.

Popularity: 13% [?]