Another Offline Story

[TorontoCarol]

I'm one of those people that hesitates to approach successful offline businesses, thinking that they know a lot more about business than I do. But I know that once I start talking about marketing on the Internet, my enthusiasm takes over and I forget about my nervousness.

Here's what I did:
I approached the head of programming for our local community centres and made an appointment to talk to her about the things I'm doing online. I ended up talking for almost two hours, she went from site to site as I mentioned things, as well as madly writing down resources I mentioned.

The result: she said I've opened up a whole new world to her and their clients need to hear about the possiblities available online. So she has set up 6 full day seminars for the fall so I can present on things like affiliate marketing, using autoresponders, creating digital products, using social media, and blogging.

She can't pay me more than about $100 a session, but I can promote myself and my business as much as I like. Plus, she'll take care of all of the advertising and registration for this.

And like many other warriors have said, the positive feedback when you start telling people about what they can do online is great for the self-esteem.

[Vince Courtney]

Congrats Carol

You will likely be surprised at how much total spinoff business comes your way out of this. Nice Move :-)

Vince

[amotivatedmom]

Carol what a great idea. It is true that we often think offline business owners know everything about business since we see they have visable business model running however alot of them are so engrossed in daily business activities they really are ignorant of online marketing systems.

I know you will come away with many new clients!
Brittain

[TorontoCarol]

Thanks to all for your supportive comments. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens as a result, not just for business owners but also for retired people who still have a lot of expertise to share with the world.

[sylviad]

Your story is very familiar to me, Carol.

When I launched my own little local travel guide, one of the biggest challenges was getting people to advertise. This wasn't something I'd done before. In fact, it made me a tad nervous.

To my surprise, once I started talking to prospects about my project and how targeted the advertising would be, they were all ears.

What I find extremely helpful, though, is to put together a small presentation you can reuse with each prospect. I used a 3-ring binder with different sample pages and what ad spaces and sizes were available. This gave them a visible representation of what they'd get.

Being so organized helped me to feel more comfortable approaching people. In the end, I made a few good acquaintances who were always fun to visit when my next issue came out.

I discovered that as long as you are talking about THEIR businesses instead of your own, they will be extremely interested. In my case, I explain how their ads would do so well for them because of the magazine's target audience - plus the fact it was local and to them, it was important to support local endeavours along with their peer merchants.

Today, laptops are the ideal presentation media because you can take people right into a site and show them how you can help them to boost their exposure and drive traffic to their offline store.

Congrats on such a successful first shot. The rest will come even easier.

Sylvia

[amotivatedmom]

Sylvia that is a good tip to use the 3 ring binder. I am just starting out and I haven't gone out to my first client however I am getting everything in order. I just laminated all my presentation pages, putting them in a binder is a better idea than a folder.