Cool Offline Twist - New Revenue Stream or Added Value for Your Clients

Hey fellow Offliners,

I wanted to share something with you that I think you can use in your own consulting businesses.

It always amazes me how opportunity can arise from situations like this and I wonder if
anyone else is doing something similar to this with their offline clients.

I had a restaurant client who wanted to show the different daily specials they featured
throughout the day on the home page of their site.

This way... in the morning, website visitors could see their morning special and in the
afternoon it would change to their lunch special. Same goes for dinner.

Since I was using Wordpress to run the site, I figured it would be pretty easy to find a
plugin that would allow me to display content based on time inputs.

Unfortunately, I was wrong.

Not one to let a client down, I actually had a plugin created that would do the trick.

Since he wanted to change the special 3 times per day, I needed the plugin to be simple
enough that he could just log in, change the content of the post where he listed the special,
save the changes, and the plugin would do the rest.

All I had to do was add the code for the plugin to the spot on the home page where he
wanted the daily specials to be featured and the restaurant owner handles everything else.

Everyday he goes into the site to make the changes to the daily specials and even
through it's only been a few months since he started, he's gotten a lot of great feedback.

Thanks to some of the other work I did for them, he said there's even been a few times
where people have told him they found the site through a search and decided to eat there
because of the daily special on the home page.

Since there's a mobile version of the site, one person said he was only a few blocks away
when the hamburger special saved him from another Big Mac Attack.

Which is funny because the restaurant owner wasn't too sure about a mobile site in the
first place.

Now I'm trying to conceive him to start using SMS text messaging or create an application
so people can receive the daily special updates from the site on their smartphones.

I introduced the idea to a couple of other clients who've all been very responsive to the
idea as well.

I've had personal trainers use it to setup daily motivational messages, florists use it to
manage the promotions they run during Valentine's Day and other holidays... I've even had
a nightclub promoter use it to showcase the different theme nights they run.

Although he hasn't been able to track the financial impact of the changes he's made, he's
had a few people visit the club from out of town who said they picked it because they saw
it was ladies night or some other theme night.

Even though I didn't charge him to add the plugin to his site (I owed him a favor), he
ended up sending me a cheque for $500 to say thanks... so I guess he's doing alright with it.

Thanks to him, I now have an easier time showing value when talking to my existing clients
about adding it to their sites.

I don't charge much for the one-time setup fee and since they can manage everything for
themselves, they don't have to pay me every month for it.

As you can imagine, most of them want me to handle everything for them.

Since most of my new clients are setup to use the plugin on their sites, I now have
enough people asking me to manage the updates for them that I'm probably going to have
to hire someone to post the updates for my clients.

It's amazing how one little request can turn into something so much more in such a short
period of time; from a simple request by one of my clients to a new revenue stream for my business.

Has anyone else tried something like this with their offline clients or am I onto something
unique here?