Most businesses have jumped on the train of internet marketing as they have discovered the value of cheap, targeted advertising compared to more traditional mediums. Not only that, but it offers many companies a much wider customer base than they could previously access.

Just think about it, as little as a decade ago if you wanted to sell something in another city or country you would have to open a point of sale locally, which was certainly not cheap. Most businesses couldn’t dream of expanding abroad due to costs, however the internet opened the doors to small businesses as well, allowing them to compete with the big fish.

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However, web wide advertising is not always suited to every type of business, especially some types of offline service providers. For example, a restaurant will never be able to service more than the local area and therefore it doesn’t make sense for its website to target the whole web. This is where local internet marketing comes in.

In this case, the SEO plan is designed to target only people interested in the local area. This can be done with the use of geographically targeted keywords, maps and many more.

The advantage of focusing on local internet marketing is that costs are usually much lower than if you were to target the general public. For example, “French restaurant Houston” will not cost as much per click as “French restaurant” and will only target people interested in a French restaurant which is in Houston. On the other hand, a search for “French restaurant” will bring up a very long list of French restaurants all over the world.

Local internet marketing is an excellent option for offline, small businesses that provide local services and their type of business does not allow them to expand globally. Plumbing, landscaping and even cleaning services are all such businesses. On the other hand, web development companies or ebook publishers do not have the same limitations and in their case they should focus on global internet marketing.

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One extremely useful way to take advantage of local internet marketing is with maps. The large search engines offer a map service where companies can register their offline address. This has multiple advantages but the main one is that it establishes credibility because people can see the physical location of your business. This also has a positive impact on the ranking of your website but, unfortunately, it is a technique that is often overlooked.

Local internet marketing is an excellent way to reach extremely targeted customers for a much lower cost than if you were to market to the entire world wide web. However, you need to do a little more investigation regarding which keywords your PPC campaign should target and maybe even get some professional internet marketing consulting to show you how you can design and track your campaigns.

The beauty of internet marketing is that you can see virtually in real time how effective your campaigns are and tweak them accordingly. However, you do need some professional advice until you learn the ropes and can handle it yourself.

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Some would tell you that selling your internet marketing services to local business owners is easy. The entire process, known within internet marketing circles as Offline Marketing is not always an easy method of making money online. I create offline directories so I’m always looking for people who need help or make comments about offline marketing. I ran across one such person in a forum the other day and this is what he had to say:

So first of all… I DID IT!
I opened up a company

The ‘working’ part of it is working
the making money part of it is not.

I need to find advertisers who want to promote on my site.
Today I messaged 30 local stores, none of them replied back.

Now I got phone calls + meeting them in person as my steps #2 and #3 since step #1 (email) didn’t work.

How effective is walking in there in person?
And do you think they’ll be down for a quick 10 minute meeting?

Its just … Ugh… I just want to make my first 5 stores, make some $$$ from there, and then I’ll know it’ll go a lot smoother

Well….I couldn’t help myself and was in a giving mood so I gave the guy some suggestions. It was late and I don’t know how coherent I was so you might have to read it a couple of times but my advice was sincere based on my experiences doing offline marketing….or working with local business people.

Here’s an easy way……. well one way to start getting customers…..this takes a little work, and you can do in conjunction with your existing marketing plan.

Focus on a city or town, pick out a specific market. Lets say Dentists.

Grab a domain for your city and specific market. Let’s say your in Madison and you’re gonna work with Dentists. Find a domain that would include MadisonDentists.com ……something like that.

Go to your Madison online yellow pages. Create a one page Madison Dentists Directory. Use your yellow page info to add 5, 10 or 20 dentists. Do some backlinking, bookmarking or whatever and get some traffic to your new site, try and get it on page 1 of google local.

Now there are several approaches you can take when calling or emailing Madison Dentists. (actually your approach can be anything as long as its unique) If you have your simple directory on page 1 of google I’m sure you can see how you might use this. You use it as an example of your expertise!

Option 1
You can sell them an inner page of your directory for a monthly fee or one time fee. Again, a foot in the door to sell a more complete website and services.

Option 2

If the dentist doesn’t have a website, sell him your full offline package.

Option 3

If he does have a website and its not on page one, tell him where he needs to be and offer your services.

Option 4

Lets say he’s on page one and has a hot looking site. From experience most sites are monuments to the doctors ego, they need to be reworked. Depending on your experience you could offer a consult…..leading into a monthly seo fee for you.

It almost never fails, none of these guys has an autoresponder and if they do, it isn’t on page one. Explain the benefits of an autoresponder….and sell sell sell!

I’ll give you one more use for the little directory you just built.

Sell it! Sell it to the top bidder!

If you were able to get your little directory on page 1, go down your lists of dentists, in this case, ask them if they would like to own the site. Give them the stats….ie, 500 visist a month etc. ……. I know one guy who does this and sells some of them for 1000’s and then charges the purchaser for any website changes or maintenance

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The key is to use the little one page directory as a foot in the door approach. More and more directories are coming online every day, the more unique you make yours the better for you. I’ve set up these directories with maybe 10 listings and then create maybe 2 inner pages for 2 dentists so I can use as an example. I’ll even add an autoresonder to the site and give something free if it applies to the particular market……that really helps to create interest.

For one town close to me I created a custom directory for the entire town. I grabbed about 10 local businesses and gave them a position on the first page and inner pages. Drove some traffic and these businesses were getting calls and leads….they loved it and made great references for me to work the rest of the town.

You really are limited to your imagination when working with local businesses.

Here’s the bottom line. You need to be confident in your ability to create an online presence for your offline customers the will result in them making money. Most of these folks are really hurting….on the verge of giving up and you just might have what they need to be successful.

There’s a saying that goes something like this: “Help enough other people get what they want and you”ll get everything your want and more!” I heard that from Zig Zigglar and if you truly make that your motto….sooner or latter things will start to go your way.

Don’t give up.

Remember we are in the toughest economy in our lifetime and probably our parents…..I’m 56.

Remember also, offline marketing is some sort of magic technique where people come running your way giving stacks of cash or as some say “offline gold”…..that’s pure crap, at least that’s been my experience.

My sons gets emails and phone calls almost on a daily basis with someone trying to show them how to do their website better, get them more business, rank for more terms…you name it.

That’s your competition.

The directory approach isn’t for everyone, however, you’ve already taken action. All this takes is 10 bucks and some hosting which you probably already have. Hope you give it a shot and let me know how it goes!

Hope I didn’t ramble too much….Good Luck

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Some guy was talking about seo, keywords and using a wordpress blog for setting up an offline marketing business by putting up websites for brick and mortar stores. He wanted to use static pages in a wordpress blog setup and thought that he wouldn’t need the part of a wordpress blog that does the dynamic posting….. I suggested if he was just setting up static sites, he might as well use Xsitepro because it would give him the most bang for the bust!  He must have been a newbie because he had some very basic questions. Nothing wrong with being a newbie, so I thought I’d post part of his question along with my comments below….maybe you might be able to glean something from it.

I really need to contact this fellow and show him my Xsitepro Offline Marketing Template. Using an Xsitepro Template for setting up brick and mortar businesses makes a lot of sense since these sites get indexed so quickly. In case you haven’t seen my directory yet, I’ve been experimenting with The Mchenry Business Directory …an online directory listing Mchenry businesses.

His Question

Basically, I’m going to try and create a stable offline business by providing a certain offline service, to customers which I plan to partially get through organic Google traffic. These customers would only be based locally. I have researched quite a few really nice local keywords, some with 4K+ monthly searches and I’m not really sure how to go about this.

I’ve decided to use WordPress for the website because of the ease of use and because it’s SEO friendly. The website contains a welcome home page as well as faq, contact, terms of service, privacy policy and services page which describes the services that are being offered. The reason for not knowing how to go about this is because the whole website is static nothing really changes on it since it’s meant to be a business website. The local keywords I have researched seem to have a fairly low competition although some seem hard to dominate.

My Answer and Comments

You’ve got a lot going on and some big questions. I’ll give you my 2 cents for one small part of it. You’re talking about using a wordpress blog for a buisness blog which will be composed mostly of static pages.

First based on my experience, if you’re planning on creating a static site I would use Xsitepro. I use Dreamweaver or just plain ole notepad for developing sites and Xsitepro produces results that often times out do Wordpress. So, if you’re serious about setting up multiple offline sites, composed of 3 or 4 pages….get a copy of Xsitepro and use it… Your pages will be indexed in some cases overnight and usually stay there with little to no updating. That’s my personal experience. Just make sure you use the rss function and create a xml page, ping it and submit it to the directories

However!

Wordpress offers so much and to limit yourself to a couple of pages per site is a big mistake. Many big corporations switch to a wordpress blog…using it as a CMS. There is tremendous potential in using wordpress for your offline sites that you’re really missing.

If you want to create a static front page that’s fine. But don’t dismiss using the blog as part of your site and its entire promotion.

I find a blog is the perfect offline business platform for developing websites and I incorporate both static and regular posts.

You mentioned you have a couple of keywords…I image it wouldn’t be too difficult to come up with 50 or more keywords for your niche….especially if it’s localized.

This is how a the blog portion of the site would work.

Use the blog to create or build a story about the business. You can expound on any aspect of the business, create a category and post weekly or daily blog posts using your keywords. Your story could virtually be a diary of daily business happenings. People love to read about the more personal side of a business. You could profile the employees….you could follow one employee through the entire week.

I can’t think of any business that you couldn’t develop some sort of story around. Heck, you could even have a cagegory that focuses on the office life of the business….isn’t there a hit TV show called “The Office”!

I like to chronicle various projects, jobs, cases or patients within a business or service.

Let’s say your site is for a local chiropractor. You can set up the front end of the site to make it look professional….but don’t dismiss developing the blog because this is where you can effectively use your keywords or keyword phrases and start getting organic traffic.

Keeping with the chiropractor example. Find a patient to blog on. Let’s say he has arm pain from a ruptured disc. Have the Chiropractor or you blog weekly on the patients treatment and progress. You’ll be able to use keywords for the treatment…such as “decompression therapy in Mchenry” or “muscle stimulation therapy in Mchenry Chiropractor“…..you’ll have enough material for a full year. Use your imagination.

Consider a hardwood flooring company.

Do the same thing, set up your static front page as an introduction to the company…make sure you have an optin form. Then you could set up some blog categories such as “materials” where you would talk about the various hardwoods, finishes etc. Or how about a “projects” category. Pick a couple of good projects to blog about in a diary form. Once again, when you’re talking about oak flooring, you would use the keyword “oak flooring in Mchenry” or “hardwood floor sanding in Mchenry“…..man, you have more material for an offline blog than any blog on internet marketing or some adsense blog.

You can literally blog about any aspect of any business, talking about information that those familiar with the business would probably think is uninteresting. As the website developer you’re presented with an opportunity to use this information to stick important keywords or keyword phrases.

Although you mainly blogging to get your site indexed for certain keywords, by no means, dismiss the fact that people really enjoy knowing the inner workings of a company. People are nosey…they want to know the gossip and whether people are happy with a business……you can provide that information by blogging.

I’ve purchased and read many offline marketing guru’s and nobody talks about what I just did….use this information to beat any and all competitors!

Concerning backlinks.

This forum is full of ideas and methods to get backlinks….some as white as the driven snow and others dark like midnight on a new moon look around and do some searching there are plenty of experts here on keywords.

I can tell you that a handfull of decent backlinks for most keyword phrases for offline marketing will almost always get you on page one and at the top. That being said, why don’t you set up a network of blogs for your own links. Set up some blogger and wordpress.com blogs. Then there is always the old fashion method of asking for a link to your site.

You can find a some guys here offing backlink packages…..so getting backlinks should be the least of your problems….just make sure you build it into your pricing structure.

Oh well….I wasn’t going to say anything about linking or backlinks…wanted to leave that to someone else.

Hope you get the idea about how you can use a wordpress blog more effectively for your offline sites!

Scott

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Marketing online can get you business from all over the world. But many business owners aren’t aware of one of the most recent internet advertising trends which involves using the web to target local markets as well as national and international markets. And many new marketers are wary of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising in local markets because they haven’t been taught how to do it correctly. Pay per click doesn’t have to be expensive or only for the big players. Anyone can get started with a small budget and gradually work their way up as they learn more and bring in more customers and profits.

Pay per click revolves around keywords. So, the most important factor in your PPC advertising campaign is your keywords. But the keywords themselves aren’t important. It is what they represent that you need to focus on. For the purposes of PPC, keywords are the terms that consumers type into a search engine (like Google, Yahoo, MSN or any of the others out there) when they are looking for information.

These words represent what the person is seeking out, what they need or solutions to their problems. Finding out what people are typing in is easy and free. One of the free keyword research tools is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You just type in a term that is relevant to your business and Google will show you the exact related terms that people are typing in and how often they are searching for it. If you are doing a national or global PPC campaign you can stop at these keywords. If you are doing a local campaign, you want to add in geo-targeted words.

Another way to take advantage of the local internet advertising trends is to establish a presence in the social networks and/or forums that are related to your industry. Set up your free accounts at places like Facebook and Twitter and include the website that you want to promote in your profile. Then you can start searching for other network users who are in your area and communicating with them.

This is a great way to network online without having to actually go to a networking type of meeting. But this is also a great way to make that first connection which can then lead to an offline type of get-together. Although you can set up a Facebook page which actually promotes your business, you will not be doing any kind of hypey advertising on your Facebook profile. However, you can also do PPC advertisement in Facebook and these can be more promotional.

Remember as you are going about in your wider-scope advertising campaigns, that one of the biggest internet advertising trends right now is the shift back to the local offline marketing. This type of marketing builds your brand, allows you reach more customers and to get a jump on your competitors who haven’t yet joined the trend.

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I ran across a post regarding offline marketing the original poster offered a great business model for doing offline marketing and obviously he had some experience in it. He wasn’t proposing that this was the ultimate “offline gold”, simply one type of method to use in offline marketing.

Many of the readers weren’t really getting it. Their lack of understanding might indicate their inexperience since they wanted to know the OP’s sites, how much he was making, how come his sites weren’t listed….in other words they didn’t believe this was a viable business model.

Read his orginal quote below and then my response below it. Offline marketing works…you just need to do it!

I’ve been combining my offline and online marketing skills for quite sometime now. Im going to show you a method that can make a you limitless money if you rinse and repeat it.

It involves local search. The best way of describing this method is by showing you a real life example. This example uses local dentists but you can do it for literally any type of business. The reason I used dentists is because here in London they make an absolute fortune which means they have the funds available to invest in advertising their services.

What I did was buy up a load of domains. I bought about 50 of them but im just going to show you 2

http://dentistinleyton.com

http://dentistinleytonstone.com

So what I did for the first one was chucked up a wordpress blog on the domain, upload a nice theme and write a quick 200 word article with the domain keyword which is “Dentist in Leyton” In leyton there are about 20 dentists but ill go more into that in a minute. I then stick a few “Advertise Here Banners” in the right side of the margin.

What I then did was buy one of these 200 blog comment packages and get the provider to get me 200 links to my TLD with the anchor “Dentist in Leyton”

Now the thing you need to remeber is you Obviously want to go for a term that you will rank for and appear on the first page immediately so dont go for anything crazy like “Dentist London” go for something with a bit less competition, like I’ve done above.

Once the site is ranking. I then went to yell.com and made a list of all the dentists in leyton and rang them one by one. I told them I had a site that was ont he first page of google for the keyword “Dentist in Leyton” and was currently getting around 10-15 visitors a day. We’re talking ultra targetted traffic.

Now 10-15 vistors a day could quite easily be an extra $1000 a day of income for a dentist depending on the work that needs to be done to the persons teeth. So I explain this to the dentist and they like the idea and ask me how much. I tell them it will cost $400 a month but potentially that could bring them in about 20K worth of business in that time. They love the idea and sign up. I get my partner to set up an invoice and get them on a monthly billing plan. I then put their contact details on my site and move onto the next dentist.

When I have 3 dentists signed up I close off the signups to that particular site and move onto another location. I don’t want to sarurate the site with too many ads because otherwise the dentists start complaining that they are not recieving enough calls so the optimum number i have found to work is about 3 dentists max per location, which is about $1200 per site per month! This whole process takes about a week to set up and doesnt reall require you to be that persuasive. Once the dentists see the potential in what you are providing they are eager to get signed up. Once I saw the protential for this I then set up another 20 sites in another niche.

As you can see with about 10 sites you should be able to turn this into a $10k a month business and the money is RECURRING every month. All you need to do is make sure the sites are ranking for the keyword every month and bringing in enough traffic to warrant the dentist to stay hooked. What you might also want to do is get people to mention your site when they speak to the dentist to show the dentist you are actually bringing them in decent leads.

Anyway just giving you guys an insight into the power of local search and how you can make money from it.

The OP talks about using one aspect of internet marketing to market to one aspect of the offline or brick and mortar world. In my eys, an excellent post with great ideas. A business model anyone could follow and a niche most anyone could target. Yet I see questions on the reality of the idea….does it work…will it work for me….my dentist’s are poor….my dentist’s have too much money….my dentists won’t talk to me, my dentists won’t pay that much…..and on and on.

Offline marketing works only if you make an effort to apply it. If dentists don’t work for you, try chiropractors or…..just keep trying till something clicks. I said it works but it isn’t necessarily easy. If you’re looking to have your paypal account magically filled over night…..it ain’t gonna happen

The biggest joke was the so called “mentor” who said it the idea stunk….yep, and Al Gore invented the internet!

Here’s what you have to remember. Chances are, if you’re here, you know buckets more than any brick and mortar store, service or professional about marketing online. These guys are clueless…period! You have one of the most sought after assests in the whole world…that is, KNOWLEDGE!!!

For one minute forget about your pockets and concentrate on the pockets of your customer or client. If you approach this market from the genuine standpoint of providing value, help and profit for your customers…..you’ll win. You see, this philosophy is counter intuitive to most. In fact, most people on this forum are interested in one thing….that is, making money for themselves.

Get this concept right and the mechinics of developing websites, directories or whatever for offline clients will work. You provide the best solution for their business to start making money or start making more money. Its all in the mindset and people can sense that….even through email or just phone calls.

There are so many different angles you can approach the offline world with that it really is mind bending. The OP’s concept will work if you only try it. I’ll give you a simpler model to follow.

Pick a business in your town….could almost be any business, and find their webpage. Lets look at resturants. So we go to Google, and search for “resturants in XXXXXX” go through the first 10 results. How do their websites look? Could you improve them? What could you do to help them make more money?

Here’s where you’ll look like a star. How many of the resturant websites have an autoresponder form on the first page…at the top, or above the fold? Find the one’s that don’t. Now make contact with the owner and ask what their slowest day is…they say Tuesday. Ask them if they’d like to make it one of their busiest. Ask them, “What if you had a way to contact all your best customers and tell them you had a special gift for them on Tuesday….a free meal…2 for 1, free sandwhich….you get the idea. Explain further ways could build a list of customers from their website and how they could market to that list to make more money.

If they aren’t interested….just walk away. You might want to tell them you are going to their competitor next

Next you need to figure out what you want to charge for simply putting up an autoresponder form. Maybe $100 or how about $400 one time charge….sign them up for an Aweber account with your affiliate link…..or put them on your own account. Up to you how you want to configure your business model.

I guarantee you get more business from them regarding their website because you are now the local internet marketing expert. Of course, you could set this up any way you want and live on the east coast and market to businesses on the West coast.

I could go on with this but let me tell you about another offline project that works.

Set up a Local Business Directory. Do some SEO and get your site on page 1 for “YourCity Businesses”

You can put up free listings of local businesses. Send an email and tell them of the business when you get their listing on page 1….tell them its free, tell them it will stay there for 10, 50 or 100 bucks a month. Whether you charge for the listing or give it to them free, offer a complete web package…with autoresponder.

I can tell you from first hand experience that the “Mentor” doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground and I certainly hope he didn’t charge you for his advice because this works. Wordpress brings excellent results, and Xsitepro sites are just as good if not better when developing directories….but you really need to know how to use Xsitepro and all it features.

The bottom line is, any method or platform you use when contacting an offline customer can be used to build and expance your business model. Whether you start pounding on doors selling autoresponders or start by developing some sort of local directory…use them as a funnel to bring your prospect and customer into more development, adding monthly or yearly charges. Provide outstanding value and you will have customers and friends for life!!

Hope this helps

Scott

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Have you been trying to break into the online world of business and need internet advertising help? You’re not alone. Although many small businesses realize the importance of the internet, they often do not take advantage of what Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines have to offer. And many people don’t even know what Google Maps is all about – but this is essential if you own a brick and mortar business. Similar services exist in Bing and Yahoo too.

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These are just some of the many internet advertising places. There are many other venues that you can use to promote your business, products and services:

1. Article Directories and Content Sites. Registering with Ezine Articles (and the hundreds of other article directories), Hub Pages and Squidoo is completely free. Your goal with these sites is to create informative articles about your products/services and publish them here. Doing this will earn you credibility, expert status and possibly higher ranking in the search engines once you start bringing in traffic to your site.

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Article Marketing
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2. Search Engine Pay Per Click Platforms: All of the major search engines and many other search engines offer the possibility for you to advertise on their sites and some of the most sophisticated internet advertising help. It works like this. . .you place an ad based on some keywords that are relevant to your business, products or services. All of the search engines give you free tools that you can use to find the keywords that you want to target. You will bid on each keyword that you advertise and the search engines will also help you to identify what your bid should be. Once you have placed your ad, whenever anyone types in the keyword that you targeted into that search engine, your ad will come up. Where it appears depends on how high you placed your bid and how relevant your ad is to the keywords that you specified.

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Pay Per Click Basics
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3. Ezine Advertising. Advertising in online magazines, called ezines, is another very effective way to get started with internet advertising. As with all of your advertising efforts, this requires some research on your part. Your goal is to find an ezine which fits your target market and advertising budget. Don’t discount ezines with small subscriber count. They may allow you to advertise for very little and often have very responsive lists.

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Directory of Ezines !!!!
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4. Banner advertising. Placing banner advertisement on high traffic sites within your industry is also an effective way to bring in traffic to your own site. If you “google” banner advertising you will find a ton on sites offering some type of banner advertising. Advertising with banners was very popular 10 years ago and has slipped away in popularity, however, we are beginning to see a resurgence of older internet advertising methods.

5. Online Classified Ads. Many online classified sites allow you to place free advertisements within restrictions. Upgrading to become a paid member usually allows you to place more sophisticated ads more frequently than if you are a paid member.

Each of these methods offers internet advertising help in the form of written instructions, tutorials and support communities within their sites.

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