I need your advice on contacting offline businesses

Mike, right now you have a potential benefit, but that's all you have.

How much traffic is the site actually getting? Just having the ranking means nothing if you aren't getting the clicks.

The next step is to prove that the traffic you do get converts to actual business for companies in this niche. And, since you want to charge them $200/month, you have to be prepared to demonstrate that they'll get some positive multiple of that back. Otherwise, you're dead in the water.

In your place, I'd approach businesses in your chosen niche with an opportunity to participate in a market study to see what the returns actually are. Offer to place their information and coupons for free in return for information you need to set your baseline.

You want to establish:

# of coupons downloaded/printed
# of coupons redeemed
Avg transaction value on coupons redeemed
Avg profit per transaction

You can offer to aggregate the information and share the combined info with each partner.

If the returns make sense, you can go back to them and ask if they want to go live with the project. If yes, you're set. If not, you have actual data to present to the next candidates on your list.

I think John hit the nail on the head here.

You are going to need some sort of social proof to really sell this well, I wouldn't say it would be impossible to get paying clients now though.

I would REALLY stress the whole "people performing a search on google" vs "local newspapers".

Scenario 1: Person reads through a newspaper and sees an ad. Maybe they are interested, but will they remember the ad later when they actually need the service?

Scenario 2: Person sits down at the computer and types into google "mytown hair salon" because they need to find a hair salon RIGHT NOW.

Which scenario would you rather be working with?

This allows you to sell the value of what you have. You could also mention that if they don't take this opportunity from you, you can believe one of their competitors will.

I've never tried this method, but I am certainly curious how well it converts.

Matt

Hey Mikey,

Another thing that you might find useful is to take a look at how many businesses are doing Paid Advertising (PPC) for those keywords, since you have organic rankings for them already (which are known to have a 75% higher CTR) then you have a nice hook to offer those businesses vs pay-per-click!

Cheers =)