Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
No matter what business you’re building or what job you’re working at; you could probably do with more income. And…
If you’re reading this, the chances are you know a thing or two about online marketing. As I was saying, everyone could do with some extra income. Even if you’re doing well with your current business venture, wouldn’t it be cool to start a new income stream?
If you’re like most humans; your answer is yes. Now if you know anything about Internet Marketing, you should know that you can make a killing by offering services to offline businesses. It’s a fact that over 95% of offline businesses don’t know anything about online marketing. Many of them don’t even have their own websites.
In today’s world, your business absolutely needs an online presence. You need a website, a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, group, a mobile website, Search Engine Optimization, social media management, PPC and more! The vast majority of offline businesses truly believe they need an online presence and with a little persuasion you can force them into believing it.
Now how can you benefit from the array of offline businesses that want an online presence? Simple; sell them your services. Offering online marketing services is by far the easiest way for Internet Marketers to make a full-time living. It’s real simple, setup a company, choose your services, find providers, promote, accept clients and make money.
Above all, I think providing SEO services like link building is most profitable. You can hire people to do SEO pretty cheaply and you can charge anywhere between $100-$10,000/month for it. Let’s say after reading this you decide to offer an SEO service at just $500/month per client. You only need to convince 6 offline businesses that they need better search engine rankings to pull in $3000/month in revenue. Not bad at all.
Can’t provide any services?
No problem, that’s the beauty of this business model. You can just outsource the services to legit companies who actually provide them. Or hire people who know what they’re doing and pay them a small percentage of the profits. Honestly, this isn’t difficult, so let’s begin.
1. Setting Up Your Company
This step isn’t mandatory, but it’s a good thing to do if you’re not dead broke. Having your own company and company phone number will make your services seem a lot more professional. The first step is to think of a company name. It doesn’t need to be clever; your initials will do followed by something like marketing. Something like “DW Marketing”. Or you can use a suggestive word like “Rapid Results Online Marketing”.
Whatever you want to do – just choose the name. Then you need to choose your business type which is a pretty straightforward process. You have DBA’s, Solo Proprietor, and LLC’s. You could start a corporation, but I think it’s a bit much for this kind of business. Most marketers and online marketing companies go with LLC’s. They are easy as well as cheap to set up and just get the job done.
Having your own LLC just makes your business look more professional. Next, you should get a business phone number. I really feel that getting a phone number is vital when dealing with clients. If you give your mobile number and a potential client calls you when your kids are running around the house – let’s just say you’ll lose sales.
You can get a simple 1-800 number or local number pretty cheaply these days. Again, getting a company setup isn’t mandatory right away. It just makes you look more professional. Next, you need to choose your business model and the services you’re going to offer.
2. Choosing The Services
Once you’ve set up your company if you choose to go that route, you need to choose your business model and the services you’re going to offer. You really can make a living selling any online marketing service. Here’s a short list of the most popular ones:
- SEO
- Site Design
- Graphic Design
- Social Media Management
- Facebook Fan Page Creation
To begin with, you should focus on 1 service. I personally think SEO or website design are the easiest services to begin with. If you offer website design, you can target offline businesses that don’t have websites. Or businesses whose websites just need a slight face-lift. The former works better. If you offer SEO services, it’s an ongoing thing.
Meaning unlike website design or most of the others; the clients pay every month for your services. In the beginning, you can even outsource the SEO altogether. Let’s say you find 10 businesses who want higher search engine rankings. If they all paid you $500/month and you outsourced the services for $300/month; you’d be pocketing a cool $2000/month for doing nothing.
Offline businesses are happy to pay for any kind of online exposure. As long as you find a solid provider to outsource your services to or hire your own VAs and train them – you can charge hefty sums for your online marketing services.
>>> Read Part Two Here <<<
Comments
Mark Johnson
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
This is exactly what I was looking for! I’ve been trying to figure out how to set up an online marketing business, and this post is a great starting point. Thanks, David!
Sara Lee
I find it hard to believe that offering SEO services can be that easy. Do you have any proof or examples of success stories?
Kevin
What would you recommend for someone who’s just starting out with no prior experience? Should I focus on SEO or website design first?
Andrea Peters
I appreciate the breakdown, but I think you oversimplified the process a little bit. Setting up a company and finding clients is not that straightforward. You might want to go more in-depth on that.
Michael Rodriguez
Hey David, great post! It’s been a while, how have you been? We should catch up sometime soon. Let me know when you’re available!
Ashley Thompson
I was dealing with a similar issue you mentioned in your post. I started offering online marketing services to a few local businesses, and it’s been a rewarding experience so far!
Jason Murphy
If you’re looking for some good tools for SEO, you might want to check out SEMrush or Ahrefs. They have been really helpful for me in managing SEO campaigns.
Rachel Green
This post really opened my eyes to new business opportunities. I’ve always wanted to start an online business but didn’t know where to begin. Now I have a clear direction, thanks to this post!
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
Get paid 100%, on-chain, the second the sale clears
Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
This is very interesting to me, but I notice the whole business model assumes offline businesses that do not yet have a website, which describes very few businesses now in my market, even small ones, even here in Izmir. What I would want to know is whether “most businesses don’t understand online marketing” was ever true outside of wherever this post was written, or whether it was already an American assumption dressed up as a global one. The LLC and phone number advice, that part I think does translate, appearances matter everywhere.
The strongest defence of the claim that most offline businesses don’t understand online marketing, whatever its accuracy, is that it doesn’t actually need to be true for the business model to work, it only needs to be true often enough that a handful of convinced clients cover your time. Elif’s right that the number is probably dated or regional, but the model survives a much lower hit rate than the post implies, because the cost of finding out a given business is a poor fit is just one conversation, not a large commitment either way.
Walt’s framing is fair on the logic, but I keep coming back to what kind of business this makes you into rather than whether the odds work. The post is explicit that you can “force” a business owner into believing they need something, using their own uncertainty about technology against them, and then outsource the actual service to someone cheaper while keeping the difference. None of that is illegal, and Walt’s right that it can still work even at a low conversion rate. I just think there’s a difference between solving a real problem for a business and manufacturing the belief that the problem exists, and this post is fairly openly recommending the second one.
In plain English, Elif: find businesses that don’t know what a website is, then convince them they’ll suffer without one, then sell them one. That’s the whole model under the acronyms. Works fine as a business as long as you’re honest with yourself that “persuasion” in this post is doing a lot of the lifting that “need” should be doing.
The post says you can “force them into believing it.” Not a phrase I’d want printed on my own business card.
Selling services to businesses that don’t understand what they’re buying, that’s not a new model, that’s the Yellow Pages ad salesman from forty years ago with a website instead of a page number. Same pitch — you need to be seen, let me handle it, you won’t understand the details anyway. Worked then too, for a while, until enough of them learned what they were paying for.
Setting up a company, choosing a niche, cold-calling businesses on top of a job I already work nights for. The post calls this the easiest way. Compared to what?
The entire second half assumes a phone number, cold outreach and in-person persuasion of business owners who don’t yet believe they need you. That is a specific temperament, and the post writes as though it’s the only route into this kind of service business. I have built client relationships entirely through writing, proposals, and referrals, without ever making a cold call, and it works, just on a slower timeline than this post is willing to admit exists.