Great way for anyone (new and old) to make money.....in theory.

Hey guys, I just had an idea pop into my head and I just wanted to post it here and see what you guys think. Hopefully someone can use it to start generating some cash for themselves.

Before I get into it let me just say that i have not used this method myself..I have no idea if it would work well. It just popped into my head and in theory it sounds like it would work very well and even be scalable into a full time business.

This method requires the following skills:

Blogging
Niche Research
SEO (on-site and off-site)
Networking
The ability to sell in person to business owners
geo-targeted traffic generation


Alright so lets get into it shall we?

Part One: The Research

This is arguably the most important step to making this work. During this step you need to utilize whatever research tools you are comfortable with and find the following things.

- A niche that you are comfortable blogging about
- 10 low competition keywords related to that niche (keywords should have over 200 searches per month each)
- 5 higher competition keywords related to that niche (keywords should have at least 1000 searches per month each)
- 1 decent competition generalized keyword related to the niche (by generalized I mean make sure that it is not specific to any one thing in the niche. It must be able to span over the entire niche) Try to find one with at least 500 searches per month. Keyword must be available as a domain name.
- As much info about that niche as you can possibly find
- Make a list of businesses in your area that operate in that niche (businesses should be small and locally owned with an interest in bringing more customers/clients/sales)

After you decide on a niche and find everything that was listed above you need to spend some time researching the niche itself. Learn everything you can about it so that you can easily talk about it to others and be educated on the subject.

Part Two: The work

Once you have a working knowledge of the niche it is time to buy your domain name. Use the generalized keyword you found earlier as your domain name and purchase it. Set up a wp blog on your domain and pick a theme that fits your niche (if its a professional niche, be professional...etc..)

The main part of this method is to start blogging. Make a post or two EVERYDAY and keep at it until you attract a nice amount of daily traffic.

Some traffic methods to consider for this include (but are not limited to):

Article Marketing
Video Marketing (if applicable)
Content Syndication
Press Releases
RSS feed submission
Offline website promotion at events related to your niche
and so on...

Make sure you use a keyword in your posts and articles/videos to get ranked for that keyword in the SERPS. However, I urge you to focus on the posts..not the keywords.

Once you have a good amount of traffic coming in its time to make some calls.

Part Three: The Sale

The concept here is basically to sell advertising space on your high traffic blog. go back to the list of businesses that your made in part one.

Although I personally believe cold calling isn't very useful I have chosen it for this method because i also think that if approached correctly it can convert very well.

Call these businesses and ask to speak to the owner. Once you are on the phone with the owner the conversation should go something like this:

You: Hello (owner), I am a marketing consultant in (your area). I was recently looking through the businesses in this area and yours stood out to me because it is in a niche that I am heavily involved with.

You: I would like to come in and take a look at your marketing plan for free and give you some suggestions if they are needed. I have (however many years) experience in the marketing field and I am sure that your business would only benefit from this. Plus it is free so there is nothing to lose.

At this point the owner will most likely say yes to a meeting because most small business owners do not have a background in marketing and do not have a marketing department so most business owners will be more than happy to have a free consultation on their marketing plan (if they even have one)

Once you get the meeting it is your job to prepare a good sales presentation on why they should buy advertisement on your site. In this presentation you should include:

# of visitors per month
estimated ctr's for their ad (research)
the number one reason they should do it

One thing i've learned about business owners is that they don't care much for the fancy marketing talk about seo and ppc or any of that. They care about hearing about results. So it is usually a good idea to hit them with the results first to grab their interest.

When you go to the meeting you simply review their marketing plan and make suggestions (make them good suggestions so that you can prove that you know what your talking about) After you make some suggestions you can get them to give you their email so that you can enter it into your autoresponder later (you do have an autoresponder right???) and then you talk to them about advertising on your site.

Chances are (in theory) they will be so impressed by what you have shown them that it will be the easiest sale you'll ever have to do.

Once they are eating out of your hands you can offer them exclusive advertising (you only run THEIR ads and their ads alone) or just regular advertising (both ad options have a monthly charge and a one time set up fee). Make sure to point out that all though exclusive ads will cost them more..it ensures that they will have an advantage over their competition.

If they buy, awesome. If not...move on to the next one and keep trying. Someone is bound to see what it can do for them.

Part Four: The Scale

After you get a sale you can use that money to hire someone to write the blog content for you. Make sure this person is able to write good original content with the keywords that you provide them. ALWAYS review the content they send you and run it through copyscape before paying them.

Note: I am not sure if this is a better idea, but I would be more comfortable finding someone that isn't a paid article writer. The reason for this is because I have never used a paid article writer so I am not sure what their quality is like.

Keep running the site yourself until you find someone to outsource to. If your clients didnt buy the exclusive option then keep looking for ppl in that niche (remove the exclusive option as an option). (I would probably stop at 5 or so and set up a rotating ads display. This way your page doesn't get cluttered with ugly ads everywhere)

Once you outsource you will be cutting your work down to:

Keyword research
Content review
Finding clients (if non exclusive)

This should give you enough time to start another blog in a different niche and repeat the process.


That's it...in theory I think it sounds like a good idea. I don't know if this is something that someone else has already said..it just popped into my head and I figured I might as well post it and hopefully it can help someone out.


What do you guys think?
Would love to have a discussion on the idea...


Thanks for reading
Gregg

PS: The dialogue in part 3 needs work. I just threw that together very quickly.