My offline approach is so simple, it's almost criminal.. but i made $3000 last week.

Nice technique, definitely good for offline people.

Over where?

post up the letter

we need to start catering to German Comapnies!

Interesting.. got a question: Do you just randomly choose these 200 mom and pop shops from like the yellow pages (or similar) or did you focus on certain niches?

Great stuff Chris. I'd keep in touch with them via online/offline newsletter if I were you as they'll be warm clients and you can offer other promotion services to them to add to your bottom line for little cost.

Rich

$350 for writing a title, description, and keyword research?

Did you provide anything else?

Hi Chris,

I was actually recommending a very similar approach to this to a client who needed an extra bit of income to utilize their growing IM knowledge.

Back this service up with some upsells such as newsletter integration, more intense marketing, PPC analysis (make sure there campaigns are optimized for maximum conversions), even recommendations for some 3rd party services you can earn commissions on monthly for residual income and you are all set.

This is a very powerful business model that I used myself many years ago and will work just as well today.

Best of luck with your new venture!

Sean Donahoe
The Manic Marketer

It is amazing what can be earnt offline. A company my friend works for has just had a web company give them an "opinion" on their current website and what they need to get more customers via their website. This opinion was delivered in the format of 6 sheets of A4 paper, typed on one side of each, detailing what they would do i.e. keyword analysis, analyse traffic etc and for this might piece of work the company happily paid out just over £1,000.00 in real money ($1.350.00) for this report, all the "work" would cost extra.
I have the photocopy of the report as he knew I was interested in starting up in this line so it helps me with my pricing having this bit of info.
Also, for all the jargon and waffle in this report I would reckon that most warriors here could do a better job for a little less which would allow the company to think it had got a bargain. Both parties happy and nothing unethical done at all.

Congrats Chris,

An extra addon that you may want to consider would be providing videos and video submission to sites such as google video and youtube.

These companies absolutely love this and are willing to pay for that service plus the search engines eat the video up as well.

Just a thought.

John

Why dont you do a WSO on this? I would buy it. And I am sure others would too.

I love how you said "can" and put asterisks around it...

You know what that says to me?

It says that you know, pardon my french, that you are full of crap. You know that you charged then $350 bucks on something that wasn't worth anything close to that...

In a word, you know that you are one of the people that will make offline consulting turn into a fad that makes every "mom and pop" business lose money and never trust marketers again.

Congratulations, you are, as much as others will argue with me on this, a CON ARTIST.

And yes. It is scamming.

But rest assured, next month, less people will hire you, until you have no testimonials, and nobody is willing to work with you....

Sold your soul for three thousand? That's pretty cheap.

Moral: Respect others, and yourself.

Integrity. Try it out once in a while.

I'm not jaded... Everyone in the IM world "hypes"... This is way past hyping...

Does he sincerely believe that his time is worth $2100 per hour?

He charged them $350 under false pretenses (that changing the title and description of their sites will make them NOT be hurt by the global economic recession) and seems to be pretty excited...

Does he SINCERELY think that they will be seeing results because he changed their description and title? I highly doubt it... again, thats why he snidely put "can" in asterisks, wrote "potentially" in regards to visitors, etc.

Yeah, he says that they were really happy with results, etc. But remember, they are MOM AND POP businesses that are looking for a chance to get back in the game... businesses are closing left and right, and they are seeing hope...

Dont forget that most testimonials are given NOT when a person is successful, but right when he or she has finished reading the product, is excited and pumped, and thinks he or she will own the world.

Him saying that they are really happy is just as unethical as his letters to them. They wont be too happy when they realize they gave away $350 of their hard earned money for complete BS.

Like I said, I am a realist... but this is as close to disgusting as I have seen. If it was a REAL help to them, I would say hell charge them 10X as much... WIN-WIN.

This is a win-lose.

You are indeed great. Thanks.

$35 per minute! Now THAT'S moving!

$350 to a mom and pop? You'd better hope those results pan out. No good having a one-time client that will never refer you to friends. Mom and pops are feeling pretty desperate right about now. Those that survived the big box boom are now facing serious credit concerns, payrolling, and liquidity issues. Heck, do it for $50 and your phone will never stop ringing.

This is a good idea.. I'm gonna try this at my locality.
Another idea can be approaching local businesses and convincing them to design/redesign their websites, especially Real Estate agents.

This method of approach has been well promoted by several well known internet marketers and a very well known copywriter, it is also an approach VERY widely used by all sorts of genuine offline companies.

What a lot of internet marketers seem to be saying is that offline business owners are simply cows to be milked till their udders fall off. This is a dangerous and stupid attitude to have.

While offline customers might not be au fait with all that goes on online, IT DOES NOT MAKE THEM STUPID!

I deal with offline customers who are happy enough to talk to me IF my letter is sufficiently IMMEDIATELY interesting enough for them to read it - but they certainly would not accept it if - I told 'em i would do some basic keyword research according to the niche they target, deliver the results in a word-document - because that's just hog-wash.

Look at it!

It is all IM phraseology! This means that the prospect wouldn't have a clue what he was talking about and certainly would not pay up.

OR

Am I to assume that the phraseology has been translated into IMese because all the thick internet marketers reading the post would not understand what he was talking about if he used the offline terminolgy that his customers did understand?

Talk about painting with a wiiiide brush!

Hi -chucke - just did a post - you might want to see
http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...usinesses.html
I have spoken to a few business owners who have paid from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for this type of service - none of whom thought the money was well spent - if it did result in extra enguiry it was minimal and untrackable - I'm begining to think on site seo is almost meaningless if not backed up by something else
Good luck - hope your efforts mean more clients for your clients
Cheers
Danny

I have been in outside sales for almost 30 years - and if you call a mid-range 6 figure income successful - then I do pretty well for myself. I ONLY sell intangibles (services) that have a recurring income stream - so that means my 'specialty' if you will - is what we call 'relationship selling'.

Right now, my husband and I both are hitting the pavement to launch our new mobile sms marketing service - and here's something that I can tell you - first hand - not theory - about what is going on this niche offline....

In doing our presentations, we have been asked how our service can be tied into their other marketing strategies - web, PPC, print, etc. and more than half of the clients (from single location small businesses to 100 location pizza franchises) have been 'victimized' by people that have sold them websites for $1000s, then by SEO/marketing experts that sold them PPC/SEO etc for $1000s - and they have also been sold the "get into your local Google results" plan as well. And the way the sales process goes for these various services is this: pitch with promises - money paid - 'work' done - no follow-up - no fine tuning - no results - p*ssed off client!

And I say victimized because we have yet to come across one client that has said "Wow! We really are thrilled with our website/SEO/PPC provider!" Instead, the common thread is that the site is 'out there', the listing is 'out there' - and it has never done a darned thing for the company.

And these people are NOT STUPID - they hire out these tasks for the same reason IMers do - it's called OUTSOURCING!! If they hire you to perform certain web marketing tasks - don't make the mistake of thinking they cannot find out the REAL cost of the service you are providing.

Can you imagine how angry the client was that had paid $1500 to get into Google maps - only to find out (which he discovered with a couple of clicks when he went to look at his new "premium" local listing???) that the service was free and he could have done it himself in 5 minutes? Yes, he demanded and received a refund and the 'service provider' will get no more business - and more importantly - no referrals........

Our approach? We let them use our mobile text service for 60 days, we train them, we work with them - and oh yeah, I am reviewing their websites & SEO for free, and discussing what THEY should/could be doing, rather than selling them on what I can do for them. And yes, several have come back and asked if I would CONSIDER handling it for them......yeah, I might ;-)

The point is this: in many areas - especially in major metro areas in the US - your local business owners have already been burned badly by your predecessor. Don't go out for the one shot kill. Don't make claims you can't honestly guarantee - do a good job, develop a relationship, and have as many services in your portfolio as possible to offer them.

Build yourself a nice 'family' of long term clients that are always happy to see you when you walk in the door, and happy to give you a few minutes to look at whatever it is you have for them today.

It works.

Melody

Build trust with them, and you will build a recurring income business model - rather than spending the next 30 years hitting the pavement looking for new clients every day.

An object or service is worth as much a those involved in the transaction agree it is worth.

Chris,

Did you have a website with samples of your seo work to show them, or did you set all of this up directly via phone & snail mail?

Hey Josef.

It is a free newsletter... How efficient would it be to have a newsletter that nobody could access?

There is going to be a youtube channel too... Or should I not ask them to subscribe?

Regardless. You are missing the point.

He twisted facts to get the sale. Changing a title tag and description tag for 350 dollars? I dont care how long it took, if it would make a big difference, I would tell him to charge 10x as much...

HERE are the facts though:

He told them that changing a title bar and description tag will improve their business by "XXX visitors." Yeah, I will be willing to bet you that if they didnt even have a good description, they had no SEO whatsoever. That means they were most likely NOWHERE near the top results for the serps...

So I guess that if someone managed to get to page 300 of the results, he or she MAY say "wow... that's a great description! I choose to click that!"

Please. Think critically guys.

Good post Chris, but for fairness sake you are not calcualting things the right way.

I see that you are calculating your work for the time that you did the research for the SEO stuff.

But, how many hours did it take to write the letter, print 200 copies out, fold them into tri-fold style, stuff the envelopes, stamp the stamps, and handwrite or type out each mailing address label?

I'd put that at 7 hours time which is not to say that you are not making out like a bandit...

Also when you subtract the cost of the mailings your profits were just cut into.

In Dan Kennedy style you might want to follow up and do 2 more mailings to the list to try to warm the list up even more and make more sales.

It is not a logical place to start.

Changing a meta description won't do crap, if the site isn't listing in the SERPs at all.

Now, I could be wrong here, but based on the info given so far, it doesn't sound like he asked them if their sites were showing up in the SERPs in the first place. So, essentially, he is charging for results that he will not deliver.

We can argue semantics and say that he is still doing work and should be paid for that, or that his clients need to work on their knowledge.

Whilst all this is true to an extent, I still feel, based on the information presented, he is essentially praying on ignorance.

I congratulate MouseandMice for having the balls to go against the grain in this thread.

Anyone who knows anything about SEO knows it takes a lot of effort to rank well. Most offline businesses don't know anything about SEO - they trust us to know that stuff and to provide a service THAT DELIVERS RESULTS.

You're not providing results. You're charging a crapload for something very simple and, quite simply, pointless.

The fact that a lot of people do it doesn't make it right.

-Dan

If you had gotten off the plane, paid the ridiculous amount for the water, and, after drinking it, found it hadn't quenched your thirst at all... would you still think it was worth it?

He's providing a service here, not a product. Services are valued on the RESULTS they DELIVER.

If you had paid for the water, and some guy went through the motions of handing you a bottle, but dropped it and left it on the ground, then said "well, I tried, can't give you a refund", you would not be happy.

I appreciate where you are coming from however it's really not quite the same, or as straight-forward.

-Dan

Cathy,

The problem I have with his approach is not any "profiteering" (perceived or otherwise).

It's that he is charging money for a service that, most likely, will produce ZERO results.

It's easy to bullshit, unfortunately, and some people are good at it. If they already had SEO done - and would appear in listings - they would have good titles and meta tags already.

He's charging a fair chunk of change, alluding to (if not promising) results that simply will not happen.

Whilst "technically" okay, I certain think it's unethical and immoral.

I have the feeling Chris has very little proven success with SEO to begin with... I'm not 100% about that though, but that's certainly the impression I get from his post.

-Dan

The customer may be satisifed under false pretenses, for now. What about in a year's time when they figure out that $350 did squat for their business - I doubt they will be happy then.

I get where you're coming from, and I sense that you and I look at things in much the same way, usually. However, my issue is not about price - it's about not delivering the results the client is expecting, which is, any at all.

If the site doesn't rank now, it won't rank because of a title change.

-Dan

The Op has laid out a good plan and congrats to him, but by simply having a keyword or phrase in the title tag or meta section shall not do much unless they start doing some proper off page seo optimization.

True google will rank you much better with the keyword/phrases in the title tag, but it still take a lot more work to get and keep the results.

thanks for this information chris. Too bad i dont yet know
how to seo good or i would try it.

MouseAndMice (Ali?):

Your success is admirable - but one thing a few decades in business has taught me - never burn your bridges. You can disagree with people but still be civilized about it. Being rude and calling names is never good - especially in a public forum - this is visible to the world and may come back to haunt you some day.

Your own site has some serious issues right now - like promising the tale of your success which has yet to be delivered (hint: write the freebie BEFORE you put up the optin form!). And yes, I filled out the form to send it my 3 friends - and no one has gotten the promised 'life story' yet.

But I am not going to accuse you of being a scam artist or a crook.

You brought up many valid points that I agree with - but the way you brought them up lacks professionalism.

We are all, at the end of the day, business people here. We can agree with each other, we can disagree with each other - but how we go about it can either build relationships or destroy reputations.

Again, I prefer to build relationships. You might want to try it too.

Melody

Personally, even if I don't agree with someone on one thing - I often learn something from them later - but only if we are still 'speaking' to each other.

A few points to share:

It's true that many SEO companies charge huge amounts for very little, but I still suggest you offer your customers more value. eg why not give them 30 links instead of only 6 so they at least have a chance of ranking well. It won't take much more effort on your part.

You will spend more than 10 minutes per client. This estimate of 10 minutes is completely unrealistic in my experience. Make it at least a few hours assuming all goes smoothly. There's phone calls, emails, billing and all this takes time.

But the basic point of this post is true - you can make good money by offering simple services that we take for granted.

12 months ago I charged a local business $500 for writing and distributing one article to a number of directories. This simple activity took the site from 1 visitor per day to 30 highly targeted visitors per day and the traffic still comes in one year later. It's made the business thousands of dollars so they got excellent value and I made good money for a short work day (actually it was over 2 days because I had to wait for the article to be approved by the client).



Andrew

I'm not questioning your ethics, but I might question the value you're currently providing. You certainly don't want the customer to question the value you've provided because if they do they won't come back. It's easy for you to over-deliver here so I think you should.

Andrew

Chris, I'm looking forward to you putting up your sales letter that you used to contact the businesses. I like the idea and have already been thinking about some things to do in my local area to make some money offline. Before I read your post I was not thinking about how I could do this, now I am so thank you.

That said, I think it is time for you to ignore MouseandMice.

Melody summed it up best and his attitude has left a bad taste in my mouth from the start. If he had any problems with your post he could have expressed them in a more professional manner than he has.

Instead he has behaved in a manner that I, and I'm certain many others, find childish. The old saying "You'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar" comes to mind.

I've not seen anything from him in this post that goes toward helping anyone, the only information he has posted is to point out how great he is, or to degrade you. Ignore the insults for the childish rants they are and move on.

There are people in this thread that are wanting to learn from you what you did here. Instead we're having to watch and him argue back and forth.

Please get focused again and back on topic so you can teach those of us who recognize that you have something of value to offer.

I don't think the way Ali has handled this has been especially good, but then again, the OP was being just as childish as he was.

I agree that this has become a bit of a mud-slinging match, and that's unfortunate. However, Ali certainly has proven that he has balls, ethics, and the skills to back it up. He's probably more successful than most of us (possibly all of us, if you think back to when YOU were eighteen) and whilst his attitude can come across as a little arrogant, I don't think he really means it that way.

For me, at least, diplomacy is gradually coming with years and experience. I'm only a few years older than Ali but when I was 18 I definitely made a lot more enemies than I do now.

However, he's making a good point, and one that was backed up by several respected posters (Andrew Cavanagh for one, and if ANYONE has the right to talk about stuff, it's him).

Charging $350 for a service that will not produce results, and pretending it will, is not cool. If he really was "great at SEO" he would know very well how useless this strategy is - inbound links are probably far more important. I'm no SEO guru, but I've ranked for some minor keywords, ones with a few million competition, so I know a little bit.

His way of looking at things - that SEO companies are charging $800 so he's better - is either wrong or flawed. Ripping people off is still ripping people off, even if it's not as bad. The other alternative is that the SEO companies, for their "basic analysis" go really in depth, find out the "buiying" keywords, look at ALL on-page factors AND off-page factors.

I don't know. I'm not an SEO company. But most companies have to provide value to stay in business.

Come on guys. If it was YOUR business, would you feel happy flushing $350 down the toilet for no results?

Let's be sensible here, and look at things objectively. Making money is fantastic, but not at the cost of your soul, or your morals.

-Dan

Chris,

I apologize for missing your earlier post where you outlined everything.

The strategy you have outlined certainly sounds like it may actually produce results.

I guess the language barrier got in our way a little, but there are lots of people who would happily take money for no results.

I retract my earlier statements... and again, I apologize.

-Dan

I can tell you this from first hand experience:

Simple onpage SEO can have a HUGE effect on a local site when your targeting local search phrases.. I've gotten sites from not being anywhere in the serps at all for the targeted local phrase(s), to darn near the top of page 1 - with only onpage seo.

And regarding pricing: would a $350 investment be worth it if it returned 1k a month in additional profits? how about 10k? Or only $50 a month? $350 is cheap.

MouseandMice:

I absolutely agree with you.

For those who think this is perfectly legit, imagine if your mom and dad bought into this guy's scheme - would you still be egging him on to do a WSO?

Are you making any residual income with your business? Its seems like you are making out pretty good. Good Job

is it possible

10 minutes for 6 socail sites + keyword research + website edit?

OK, here's the deal guys. As some of you know, I handle the internet marketing for a car dealership. The dealership's website did not show up for any relevant search terms at all for our metro area. It's located in a small suburb outside the city, and most people had no idea there was even a dealership out there.

Simple onpage SEO got us to the top 3 results on the first page for all of our chosen keywords, and increased our sales by about 20 vehicles a month.

The dealer could have paid me over 100k for just that, and it still would have paid for itself in a rather short period of time.

So yes, simple onpage seo can have a dramatic effect on local sites targeting localized search phrases.

Here's another example from the same business:

1) Just last month I identified a new KW phrase related to 'used cars' for us to target, as we were not in the first 10 pages of results for any used car related searches (that's when i gave up looking). I simply added the phrase to the end of our title and description, and a week later we were on the first page.

2) I also added some deep pages in the site targeting our competitors names - not much luck with google yet, but we actually outrank one of these dealers for their own business name on yahoo!

So some of you can scream 'scam' all you want - the truth is, basic onpage seo CAN have a huge impact on local search phrases, and a huge impact on that business. In the case of the car dealer, it was worth over a $million over the past few years.

I've read the "bashing" of the original poster of this and chuckled at times, cried for him at others. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, so I'll chime in with my thoughts.

I run an Offline business in addition to my Online business. I have been a residential builder for many years, building very large, eh expensive, and nicely outfitted homes. (This explains why I'm focused on Online business now) During these past few years, I charged what many would deem exorbitant prices for the trim work and detail work that I did in these homes. Did I rip off my homeowners? Am I a scam artist?

Absolutely not. I charged what the market would bear. If I charged less, I didn't do them any favors and I definitely didn't do myself any favors. I only minimized the perceived value of my work. Charging less than the standard for the market may seem like a smart business decision to the uninitiated. Believe me, it's not smart business. It only reduces your worth to the buyer. In fact, some people will not do business with you because you are less expensive. So you lose on two fronts. Competitive is good. CHEAP is bad.

We recently quoted a trim job at what should be a reasonable price (It was a $14,000 trim job by "old" standards, but we gave him a price of $12,000). The next closest quote was about $10,000 and if given the opportunity, we would probably do it for that just to have something to do rather than sitting at home. However, the homeowner received a quote for $5,500 and decided to go with that quote. Are we willing to work for 4 weeks to make $5,500 - split two ways to make just under $2,800. Not really, we can possibly pick up two or three smaller jobs, complete them and make more during that 4 weeks. Let the low bid have the job.

This guy is working and we are not. But, what he has done is lower the perceived value for everyone in the area. This homeowner will tell everyone how inexpensive his trim job costs and recommend this guy everywhere. That is until he figures out what he'll get for that $5,500. But, as my friend from Australia says, "In the absence of other factors, price is all the consumer has to make a decision on." If this guy does a great job, he's cut the price for everyone that comes in contact with this customer. If he does a terrible job, we'll never get a chance to come in and correct it because the customer's pride prevents him from admitting that he made a mistake. Finally, can he really deliver a quality product to the consumer by undercutting so much? I say not - I know what was involved in the job.

But, this customer was only willing to pay the lower amount. Did we scam the customer with our quote? No. If he had decided to go with us, did we scam him then? No. We would have delivered a quality product at an agreed upon price. That's called a free market economy.

I'm sure someone it thinking "Yeah, but the trim work is a quantifiable product whereas web site SEO is not." to which I respond "YEAH, RIGHT!!!!". Don't believe for a moment that the customer can quantify the value of your product - be it physical (trim work, stone work, auto repair, etc.) or virtual (SEO, traffic, or other web site functions). The customer is ignorant of the value. If the realized the value, they would not be hiring us to do it, they would be doing it themselves and either saving the money or making the money like we do. The customer is busy doing what they know how to do - running their business. That applies where it's doing nails, cutting hair, serving meals, or selling groceries. The bottom line is that the customer can't take time away from their business that makes them money in order to do something that costs them money (because they're not doing what makes them money).

Plus, just having a web site is really costing them money - unless they are doing things to monetize that web site. For the value of a non ranking web site, they might as well abandon their online presence and save that money for moving their business equipment when and if it closes. The reality is that a web site should do things to enhance the business rather than cost the business. What is the lifetime value of a sigle client? If that web site is optimized to bring in one, two, five, or ten more clients a month, then the web SEO expert has proven his worth. Of course, keeping the client or getting them to return is then up to the busienss owner.

Sorry to ran to long, but I'm "in the zone" today as I'm doing some marketing and writing myself.

JDD

Your strategy is good but did you provide value for money?