Offline SEO Opportunity - Seeking Advice

Here are some winning offline marketing tips to make sure you're on the right track and that you see profit from your efforts:

• Plan your offline marketing strategy first. Sit down and take time to investigate your options and write an appropriate plan to market your business in the offline world.
• Compare offline strategies to their online marketing counterparts. Define which ones will work best for you or if you should use both Internet and offline marketing in certain cases.
• Read and study as much information as you can about successful offline marketing for the online business.
• Attend business conferences and learn as much as you can about how other companies are marketing. This is also a great networking opportunity and a chance to hand out your business cards, etc.
• Always be on the lookout for an opportunity to market your business. Carry business cards and fliers with you wherever you go and don't be afraid to strike up a conversation with someone about your company or visit the places your potential customers would be.
• Balance your efforts and budget between online and offline marketing strategies for the most benefits overall in your business. Compare the results you are seeing from the different types of marketing so you can see what works best.

Thanks for the tips PettyL111. Do you have any feedback regarding my questions in the OP though?

I'm not looking to bring in offline clients, I'm busy enough as it is, so maybe you misunderstood me. This is a one time opportunity and I'm seeking advice how to best approach the "interview" (along with the other questions I asked).

Thank you,
Karen

Hi Karen,

If you have no portfolio then I would strongly advise you to make sure you have someone professional take a look at the proposal you've put together. Also put together a contract outlining your payment terms, and everything you are doing for them for the fee you're charging them.

Whatever you do, go in there confident in your knowledge and abilities and believe in yourself. If you can exude that kind of quiet confidence and professional demeanor, you have a better chance of landing the project.

By the way, your payment terms are fine.

I wish you every success and good fortune!

Karen,

Show them your successful WSO on RSS marketing as part of your presentation. It impressed me!

Steve

A couple of seo tips:

If your on a tight budget and dont feel you can compete with the more competetive keywords and brands (depending on what the company trades in)
Go for the generic terms in your meta tags.
Consider hyphenating subdomain urls as this makes it easier for the search engine to read them. keep it highly relevant so you can get indexed for lots of long chain highly relevant key words.

If you want more from me, feel free to PM me and the very best of luck in your interview

This is just my thought, but if you're in to it, why not. How about make a deal of "pay per performance" or "pay per result"?

You can attend the interview and explain about them the whole point of SEO, I'm in a condition where most companies don't even realize the potential of internet promotion, so it's kinda hard to ask them an up front payment even though I have some successful stories of my past works.

Give the future clients blueprint of SEO works, the time line, the reports they'd get and the expected end result.

Karen's question has got me interested in seeing what others are using for a "proposal" to a prospective client, like a page or two listing the work that will be done and the pricing, whether itemized or just a total at the end. Can anyone share a document like that they have used successfully?
Thanks!
John

Hi Karen,

I hope you a big success for the offline work, I'll be watching your updates in this thread.
Btw, I just subscribed to your RSS free guide, can't wait for the tips, thanks.

Thanks I just followed you back, looking forward for the great RSS tips.

Btw, you have a very cute baby, congratulations, my wife is also expecting a baby, about 3 months pregnancy now, please wish us luck.

Hi Karen,

I've been doing this type of consulting for about 5 years and here's my main comment:

Your first meeting shouldn't be about what you can do - it should be about what they want and expect.

The first meeting is almost always to uncover what role their website (and the marketing of it) will play in their business and for you to get an idea of what is and isn't appropriate for them.

Going in talking about what you can do for them is premature if you haven't sat down and spoken about their business goals.

Not all SEM techniques apply to all businesses, and some businesses may not care how you do it, where others have a marketing department that will want to 'vet' everything before it 'goes public'.

No knowing what their situation and expectations are means you can't give an appropriate proposal.

Once you know what their budget is and what their expectations are - you can put together a proposal that suits - or turn down the business if it's not something you're comfortable delivering.

I never do any web page/site creation. I will advise them of what they need to consider and changes they could make and then leave it to them, so if they wanted a webmaster - I wouldn't want the work. I know it can be outsourced, but I don't want to spend my time outsourcing things I don't want to do when I can just do work I enjoy.

Many people think understanding seo is all that's required to run a business, but approaching businesses as a professional sem consultant is different to knowing how to blast links out for clickbank products and you need to behave like a professional. In my experience almost ANY consulting work starts with an initial meeting so that you can outline what's needed and THEN create a suitable proposal to meet that need. You can always have various 'levels' or things which can be done to a lesser extent should the budget not meet your biggest proposal level.

My experience is that I can charge up to 500 pounds a day for my time for this type of work, so most of the price quoted will be for my time plus expenses for paid directory submissions and press releases etc. as required.

If the client can't afford that then I have several 'compromises' which can be tweeked to bring the price down and reduce the scope of the work. Then it's up to them to pick a level they're comfortable with.

More often than not they've just paid a company thousands of pounds to get their website created so a few grand for me to get their sem plan together and implemented is not a large amount.

Just do things in the way that makes sense and don't go in there all guns blazing and dizzy them with SEO facts or you might just confuse them.

Andy

Interesting thread. I just met with someone last night but he was giving me the "what can I do myself vs pay you to do".. tough spot, I understand that they want to save money but it's cheaper to pay me to do it and get it done then try to "coach" them I think and I think the mayday calls will drive crazy...