Today is the Day! After a year of lurking and inaction, I'm going to truely begin my offline career.
I graduated college in the summer of 2010, with limited work experience, I had a tough time finding a job. I had some savings and opted to instead create a travel website. I knew nothing about the internet at the time or even the travel industry. I created the website mainly to have fun and see where it takes me. As I looked into getting more traffic to the my site through Google, I found a few websites that taught the basics of SEO. From there I did my research and learning and decided that this could be something that I do.
I started the rent a site model in April of 2011. I purchased a few sites and had them ranked by July of 2011. At this point, I needed to find clients to lease these sites too. I brainstormed a few options, all of which did not involve cold calling. After a month with absolutely no results, I determined that cold calling was my only option. I made about 4 calls and quit. I told myself "I don't know what I'm and I'm not going to be able to sell these sites." I began to look for a salesman and justified it by asking myself how I would sell anything with absolutely zero experience. I chose to hire a salesmen with 15+ years of experience.
Of course, as you can imagine, results were minimal. I was almost paying 100% of the firsts month rental income to the salesman. Again, I justified this in order to avoid calling on my own. This continued for the next few months, averaging about 1.5 sales a month and only a few hundred dollars of income. I switched salesman a few times, and at my best I was making about $4000/month. I had two rental clients and a lead gen ( pay per call) client paying $1000+.
This lasted for about a month and a half until panda hit in the middle of February. I lost two of the sites and was left with one high paying client and a few others paying $200-$300.
I hired a few more salesman in February, and from that time until now, I did not pick up a single client more. Here I am today, generating about $1500 a month and at the point where I can't keep continuing this if I don't start making money. I am feeling pressure from my girlfriend and family to either get a 9-5 job or start making money. They don't know my secret of never making a cold call. I am ashamed of it myself and too ashamed to tell them that I've been outsourcing the calling.
The thing is, I dont even know why I'm so scared of picking up the phone. I know they aren't going to hurt me and that a "no" isn't the end of the world. I've never been yelled at or chewed out over the phone (during my handful of calls). I also know its rare to be chewed it, if it even ever happens. I am not an extrovert, but that isn't an excuse for me not call these local businesses.
Today is the day that I take action, I am doing a modified form of video marketing and I have a decent sized lists of businesses to call. I've seen a lot of successful warriors post on this forum, and I want to be the next one that does. I know I have a great products and if I sit down and make these calls, I'm going to get some sales and money coming in.
I'm using this post to be held accountable and will be posting my results daily. I will begin my calling at 10:30am PST. I will be calling east coast businesses hoping to catch them after their lunch break. I've done enough reading about cold calling and I'm going to put it in practice today, doing modifications if necessary.
No more excuses, my offline business starts today.
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