Your offline clients will love this offer [Business-In-A-Box]

by ChrisByrns

Posted: 11 years ago 20 replies

OFFLINE MARKETING

Hi, Gang!

If i wasn't so lazy, this would actually have been a WSO.

So here's a quick watered-down version of my method. This is something you can offer potential offline clients and i'm telling you, they will love the idea.

The pitch:
"I'll make your company get noticed by hundreds (or even thousands) of people IN your area - EVERY DAY!"

Here's what you do:

Register a generic, localized domain. Let's say "NYworldnews24.com" if your client is in New York.
Register a related Twitter account. Let's say "@NYnewsupdate" or something like that.
Install Wordpress with a plain, simple theme.
Change the header of your new site into a nice big banner for your clients business.
Install an RSS aggregator plugin, such as "CyberSYN" for example.
Install some kind of WP to Twitter plugin, such as "SNAP" for example.
Go find some daily updated RSS news feeds, preferably related to the area (NY in this case).
Aggregate those feeds using the the WP plugin.
Make the WP to Twitter plugin automatically post to your Twitter Account. Configure it in a way that your Tweets automatically contain the clients area as a hashtag (#NY or #Newyork), the Post title and a link to your site.

What this does is:

The setup aggregates news or even local news and posts the headlines to your twitter-account with a link to your site. Because of the added hashtag, you can be sure that a lot of people seeing those tweets actually live in the same area where your clients business resides. They click through to the site in order to see the full news and theres a big prominent header, advertising the clients business.

PRO TIP: If you don't want to register a new domain/hosting for each new client, just setup a WP Multisite and create sites on subdomains for each new client (nyworldnews.yourmultisite.com, ontarionews.yourmultisite.com, etc). But IF you use the above-mentioned SNAP plugin.. you'd have to get the PRO-version for a multisite-setup. Well, i'm sure there are some other WP to Twitter plugins available, just sayin'.

Sell it for like $99 monthly or whatever and be a happy camper. With a bit of practice, you can setup a new client in like 20 mins or less and it's fully automated from there.

Cheers,
Chris.

#businessinabox #clients #love #offer #offline

payoman 11 years ago

Sounds fairly novel to me. Have you tested this and seen considerable traffic generated from it? If you have some examples of traffic numbers that would be interesting.
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PanteraIM 11 years ago

This is 'an interesting idea to say the least.

The only concerns I'd have is the amount of traffic and secondly how targeted the visitors will be, although I think this is more of a branding angle.

I like your idea of using RSS and syndication, cool stuff.
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Eddie Spangler 11 years ago

I dont understand how people are going to see these tweets if they are not already subscribe to your twitter feed in the first place.

If its all based on hashtag search, how many people are looking for city only based hashtags?
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- mak25 11 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Eddie Spangler
  
  If its all based on hashtag search, how many people are looking for city only based hashtags?
  
  probably not many or none.
  
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SashaLee 11 years ago

Hi there,

It's based on a spray and pray method, but might be worth testing.

All the best,

Sasha.
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- Aaron Doud 11 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by SashaLee
  
  Hi there,
  
  It's based on a spray and pray method, but might be worth testing.
  
  All the best,
  
  Sasha.
  
  Bingo and if it's cheap enough the business might just go for it. That $99 price point would make it appealing as most businesses would only need to get one customer every few months to get a positive ROI. And they spend a lot more on other media that doesn't have good tracking.
  
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ChrisByrns

11 years ago

The amount of traffic you get is obviously directly related to the size of the city/area you target.

I did this some time ago for a fairly big city in my country and got around 40-70 hits per day to my news-site (about 1600 uniques per month) - so i can assure you, you can get traffic based on hashtag searches. It also depends a lot on your posting-frequency and i used an awful lot of feeds.. posted like 200-300 updates a day, not only related to the city/area but always using the area-hashtag.

And yes, this is mainly for regional branding. Think of businesses that operate within a, say, 30 mile radius or something.

I just set up a small test project for US traffic (just two feeds) and will let you know the results in 48h.

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iAmNameLess

11 years ago

Originally Posted by ChrisByrns

I did this some time ago for a fairly big city in my country

Before or after duplicate content became an issue? Aggregation sites, autoblogs and websites that serve syndicated content alone have taken quite a hit.

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ChrisByrns

11 years ago

Originally Posted by iAmNameLess

Before or after duplicate content became an issue? Aggregation sites, autoblogs and websites that serve syndicated content alone have taken quite a hit.

I never really had a problem with dupe content. I build my sites with the principle in mind: "give the people what they want" - A really well made aggregation site can rank, even today. Just put some love in it

..But don't actually try ranking for "new york news".

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iAmNameLess

11 years ago

Originally Posted by ChrisByrns

If you don't want to rely on twitter, you could just -in a good old-fashioned way- build a local news-site using feeds, get it ranked in google and go for pure search engine traffic. Then rent out the header to small businesses. Or include a "powered by [company]" at the end of each post.

Originally Posted by ChrisByrns

..But don't actually try ranking for "new york news".

I'm not dogging your system or anything, but the whole eggs in one basket deal is an issue if you're relying purely on search traffic. This already killed many online businesses when panda was released. Maybe you never had a problem, but businesses were destroyed, and I agree, aggregation websites can rank but it isn't for a beginner whatsoever. Duplicate content is usually a bigger issue when it concerns higher traffic.

I believe pretty much anyone can have a dup content website and still pull in traffic but not enough. Giving people what they want, is already provided by the sources you're pulling data from. I've seen this attempted quite often but never have seen it work out well.

An exception would be if you were curating.. I think nowadays that would probably be the most effective, what do you think?

Props to you if it has actually worked for you! Why did you stop though?

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ChrisByrns

11 years ago

Originally Posted by iAmNameLess

(...)
An exception would be if you were curating.. I think nowadays that would probably be the most effective, what do you think?

Props to you if it has actually worked for you! Why did you stop though?

Content curation is definitely an effective strategy. Regarding why did i stop: Well, i used this strategy for online marketing and monetization was kind of a pain in the rear. Then, recently i got this idea of renting out header grafics to offline businesses for local branding purposes and i'm all in again.

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patadeperro

11 years ago

Originally Posted by ChrisByrns

I dont want to be a hater ot nagger, but why were you having such a problem monetazing the sites? why you did not put some adsense? you coauld have been able to scalate from there? I think there is too little traffic for a local business.

Content curation would have the problem that the automation would be avoided, then it may be better to curate more timeless content

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ChrisByrns

11 years ago

Originally Posted by patadeperro

(...) I think there is too little traffic for a local business. (...)

Imho, if you manage to get around 1000 local people to view an ad for an emergency plumbing service in their area each month, it should be worth at least *something* to that particular plumber for the branding value alone. But I could be wrong.

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iAmNameLess

11 years ago

Originally Posted by ChrisByrns

Imho, if you manage to get around 1000 local people to view an ad for an emergency plumbing service in their area each month, it should be worth at least *something*

Worth about 50 cents on facebook, but obviously worth more when you have decent ads with bigger space.

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warrenonline 11 years ago

It's an interesting idea, but won't it hit some problems relating to automation? I don't know much about Twitter automation, but Twitter, according to their FAQ, won't show Tweets that come from automated/third-party applications in the Search feature (look at the bullet points here: http://support.twitter.com/articles/42646# for things that will prevent you from showing up in Search). So you can use automation to Tweet to followers, but it won't necessarily show up in the Twitter Search stream. This idea requires Search, so if automated Tweets won't show up in Search, that's a bit of a problem. (But is that FAQ perhaps outdated? I see quite a lot of what appears to be automated stuff in Twitter Search.)

Also, Twitter Search only shows what it considers 'top' content in Search. At the top of the Search feature, there's a "Top/All" switch. If automated Tweets did get through into Search, they might just be hidden and unseen in the 'All' category, which no one will click; people will just read the top links which Twitter's algorithm selects; I can't see many people clicking 'All' to see all Tweets on a particular hashtag.

I don't know too much about Twitter automation. Maybe someone else can chime in, but it looks like automated Tweets won't show up in Search.
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- ChrisByrns 11 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by waterprism
  
  ... but Twitter, according to their FAQ, won't show Tweets that come from automated/third-party applications in the Search feature ...
  
  Well, there is a way around this issue. I get *all* my automated tweets included in the search - even with brand new twitter accounts. I'm kind of ambivalent whether to spill the beans on this 'trick' on a public forum but let me just tell you, it can be done. Just take your time and analyze some tweets for the next 24h and there's a good chance you'll get the idea how it's done.
  
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ChrisByrns 11 years ago

If you don't want to rely on twitter, you could just -in a good old-fashioned way- build a local news-site using feeds, get it ranked in google and go for pure search engine traffic. Then rent out the header to small businesses. Or include a "powered by [company]" at the end of each post.
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IMAnthony 11 years ago

Yes it sound pretty good. But I would like to know as many here if this gives results or you have earned some money from doing this.
Twitter traffic is not very reliable for offline as I have seen, but who knows this would work.

-Anthony
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ChrisByrns 11 years ago

Just to give you a small update.. The site i set up yesterday with two feeds (80 tweets over the day) brought 27 unique visitors via hashtag-search for a fairly big US city. I'm confident that, by adding some more feeds and upping the posting frequency, a total of about 1500 monthly uniques can be reached.

Those visitors, going to a page with a big, nicely designed fly-in hover ad for the clients company are definitely worth a monthly fee. Note, the $99 monthly i stated above was just a random number i pulled out of the hat.
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warrenonline 11 years ago

Thanks for the update, Chris. Good stuff. Are these tweets getting into 'top' search or 'all' search?
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Your offline clients will love this offer [Business-In-A-Box]

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