Advice for New Offline Local Business Consultants or them thinking of starting......
Hi Warriors
So after being away from the forum for over 12 months I thought I would pop back and give some useful info back to the community. Where have I been you may ask?
Well back in July 2009 I incorporated my own company, as an internet marketing consultant to the offline world. Basically offering services to local businesses like web design, email marketing, social media, inbound marketing and much more.
So I want to give some tips and pointers to anybody that's either thinking about setting up offline services or maybe just started and need guidance. This advice comes from experience gained over that past 2 years and not just some rehashed junk I found elsewhere.
Getting Started
1. Focus - The most obvious I suppose but without it you are destined to fail. You must decide on your core business model and focus on that, don't get distracted. Nothing wrong with changing it as you progress just be sure to carry that focus through to your new plans.
2. Planning - Without plans for your business you will fail, plan everything, packages, marketing, fulfilment etc. At the start you may just want to jump straight in DON'T its costly. Even if you aren't 100% on how to do an area of your business build the plan using your current knowledge then you can always adjust these plans through time.
3. Time Management - This is crucial when offering your services, you need to know how long task are going to take and plan accordingly. Use software if it helps to either, track your time and see where you are wasting it or to project manage your outsource team to make the process efficient.
4. Your website - Doesn't have to be fancy to start with, but it's crucial that you practice what you preach and be able to show clients useful information. Use your website to create a brand for your company. Can be crucial to tip the scales in your favour when trying to turn a prospect into a client. Create useful info on your website focused around your core business message show your clients why they need your services.
Services Offered
1. What Services? - You need to decide what services you are going to offer to your clients. Create a number of packages and clearly outline them on your website and marketing material. You can either take your existing knowledge (e.g wordpress, social media, keyword analysis) or outsource the services leaving you the time to market and acquire clients.
2. What price point? - Get this wrong and you will either be working for nothing or struggle to get clients. It's a good idea to start of low and as your reputation builds leverage your past work to increase your prices.
3. Reselling services - Being able to offer services that may be out of your reach to start off with can be easily achieved using reseller program (e.g email marketing from Constant Contact). Most of these companies require very little commitment from you and will help you with their services. You can always develop your own service to replace this as your company grows.
Software Used
1. Wordpress, Wordpress and Wordpress - The only system I use for websites, with its powerful customisation and easy to use client interface this works brilliantly as a CMS. Whether you are offering a $99 blog, $599 CMS corporate website, $1599 Ecommerce site or a $2999 bespoke website Wordpress can handle it all. With 1000's of prebuilt templates easily customized to suite your clients, 100's of useful plug-ins that can be added to the sites and excellent community support from designers and developers you can easily setup website with minimal effort. Out of the box SEO advantages gives any site excellent rankings and Google just seems to love the system with sites getting listed within hours with minimal work.
2. Hosting account - If you are offering websites as one of your services (and you should be even if it's only a secondary blog for your client) then you need to secure yourself a reseller hosting account with a quality vendor. I personally use Heart Internet based in the UK this gives all my clients UK based websites for the audience they seek. Many hosting providers supply supplementary services that you can offer to your clients. E.g mailboxes, mobile sites etc. Charge you client separate hosting fees on a reoccurring basis monthly, 6 months etc. It won't take many clients before you are covering your monthly hosting costs.
3. Keyword Analysis - many of the services you can offer require Keyword analysis e.g SEO, Content Creation. I personally use Market Samurai and have done from the release of the software, I use the raw data it produces to build targeted keyword lists to then use in the services I offer.
Client Acquisition
1. Meetings + Proposals - Don't fall into the trap of creating bespoke proposals for every client. If you create your package at the start and do all the ground work with informative literature either printed or on your website then this will save you hours of meetings and time spent creating proposals. I made this mistake to start off with and it cost me hours of my time creating proposals for clients only to miss out on the project (usually because they had decided on the service provider already but wanted a comparison price).
2. Networks - A very strong area for clients can be your local business networks and organisation. Many companies and owners belong various business clubs either informal or trade body. If you provide your services to one member and excel in your results it's very easy to then ask for referrals within that network.
3. Referral Scheme - Create your own referral scheme offering either monetary reward or free services to clients that pass on your details and a successful client acquisition prevails. It's becomes a lot easier to sell your products to a prospect that has been referred then to a fresh prospect that has never heard of your company.
4. Free Advice - Just like the online information system where free advice/ebooks are offered up front and then sales are made on the backend. This works very well if that information offered is valuable to the client and displays your core message and a need for your services. Ensure that this info is not a sales pitch and is actually useful info that the prospect will benefit from. This will also build you a contact list of potential clients.
Building Confidence and Reputation
1. Charities - A great way of starting your business is to offer a number of local charities/community organisations free or heavily discounted services. In exchange for advertising space on their websites and local coverage of these acts. For example I built a website for a local charity and they featured my company in their recent press editorial in the local newspaper. Local business people are often involved with the running of these groups so extra exposure is gained to potential clients.
2. Don't underestimate your knowledge - If you have been around internet marketing and the warrior forum for a number of months then you will for sure have gained a lot of knowledge about marketing online. You may question yourself and think that you don't have enough knowledge but remember that the average business owners know very little about the online world. E.g. if you ask a local business owner about inbound marketing, squeeze pages, social media they may have heard about some of them but won't know how to run a successful campaign.
3. Position Yourself - It is imperative that you position yourself as the local expert within your marketplace. Be the one that local firms approach for advice and guidance. 2011 brings me to that stage in my company where I am going to be offering local events for business owners to show them the tools and possibilities available in the online world. These events could either be a money machine in their own right or a lead funnel for your services.
I hope that you find some of this advice useful, and take on board some of the tips and implement them in your own business.
I have lots more to share with you but don't want to make this post to long that you switch off halfway through.
If you have any question you would like me to answer then please ask away, I will be happy to help.
Speak Soon
James
So after being away from the forum for over 12 months I thought I would pop back and give some useful info back to the community. Where have I been you may ask?
Well back in July 2009 I incorporated my own company, as an internet marketing consultant to the offline world. Basically offering services to local businesses like web design, email marketing, social media, inbound marketing and much more.
So I want to give some tips and pointers to anybody that's either thinking about setting up offline services or maybe just started and need guidance. This advice comes from experience gained over that past 2 years and not just some rehashed junk I found elsewhere.
Getting Started
1. Focus - The most obvious I suppose but without it you are destined to fail. You must decide on your core business model and focus on that, don't get distracted. Nothing wrong with changing it as you progress just be sure to carry that focus through to your new plans.
2. Planning - Without plans for your business you will fail, plan everything, packages, marketing, fulfilment etc. At the start you may just want to jump straight in DON'T its costly. Even if you aren't 100% on how to do an area of your business build the plan using your current knowledge then you can always adjust these plans through time.
3. Time Management - This is crucial when offering your services, you need to know how long task are going to take and plan accordingly. Use software if it helps to either, track your time and see where you are wasting it or to project manage your outsource team to make the process efficient.
4. Your website - Doesn't have to be fancy to start with, but it's crucial that you practice what you preach and be able to show clients useful information. Use your website to create a brand for your company. Can be crucial to tip the scales in your favour when trying to turn a prospect into a client. Create useful info on your website focused around your core business message show your clients why they need your services.
Services Offered
1. What Services? - You need to decide what services you are going to offer to your clients. Create a number of packages and clearly outline them on your website and marketing material. You can either take your existing knowledge (e.g wordpress, social media, keyword analysis) or outsource the services leaving you the time to market and acquire clients.
2. What price point? - Get this wrong and you will either be working for nothing or struggle to get clients. It's a good idea to start of low and as your reputation builds leverage your past work to increase your prices.
3. Reselling services - Being able to offer services that may be out of your reach to start off with can be easily achieved using reseller program (e.g email marketing from Constant Contact). Most of these companies require very little commitment from you and will help you with their services. You can always develop your own service to replace this as your company grows.
Software Used
1. Wordpress, Wordpress and Wordpress - The only system I use for websites, with its powerful customisation and easy to use client interface this works brilliantly as a CMS. Whether you are offering a $99 blog, $599 CMS corporate website, $1599 Ecommerce site or a $2999 bespoke website Wordpress can handle it all. With 1000's of prebuilt templates easily customized to suite your clients, 100's of useful plug-ins that can be added to the sites and excellent community support from designers and developers you can easily setup website with minimal effort. Out of the box SEO advantages gives any site excellent rankings and Google just seems to love the system with sites getting listed within hours with minimal work.
2. Hosting account - If you are offering websites as one of your services (and you should be even if it's only a secondary blog for your client) then you need to secure yourself a reseller hosting account with a quality vendor. I personally use Heart Internet based in the UK this gives all my clients UK based websites for the audience they seek. Many hosting providers supply supplementary services that you can offer to your clients. E.g mailboxes, mobile sites etc. Charge you client separate hosting fees on a reoccurring basis monthly, 6 months etc. It won't take many clients before you are covering your monthly hosting costs.
3. Keyword Analysis - many of the services you can offer require Keyword analysis e.g SEO, Content Creation. I personally use Market Samurai and have done from the release of the software, I use the raw data it produces to build targeted keyword lists to then use in the services I offer.
Client Acquisition
1. Meetings + Proposals - Don't fall into the trap of creating bespoke proposals for every client. If you create your package at the start and do all the ground work with informative literature either printed or on your website then this will save you hours of meetings and time spent creating proposals. I made this mistake to start off with and it cost me hours of my time creating proposals for clients only to miss out on the project (usually because they had decided on the service provider already but wanted a comparison price).
2. Networks - A very strong area for clients can be your local business networks and organisation. Many companies and owners belong various business clubs either informal or trade body. If you provide your services to one member and excel in your results it's very easy to then ask for referrals within that network.
3. Referral Scheme - Create your own referral scheme offering either monetary reward or free services to clients that pass on your details and a successful client acquisition prevails. It's becomes a lot easier to sell your products to a prospect that has been referred then to a fresh prospect that has never heard of your company.
4. Free Advice - Just like the online information system where free advice/ebooks are offered up front and then sales are made on the backend. This works very well if that information offered is valuable to the client and displays your core message and a need for your services. Ensure that this info is not a sales pitch and is actually useful info that the prospect will benefit from. This will also build you a contact list of potential clients.
Building Confidence and Reputation
1. Charities - A great way of starting your business is to offer a number of local charities/community organisations free or heavily discounted services. In exchange for advertising space on their websites and local coverage of these acts. For example I built a website for a local charity and they featured my company in their recent press editorial in the local newspaper. Local business people are often involved with the running of these groups so extra exposure is gained to potential clients.
2. Don't underestimate your knowledge - If you have been around internet marketing and the warrior forum for a number of months then you will for sure have gained a lot of knowledge about marketing online. You may question yourself and think that you don't have enough knowledge but remember that the average business owners know very little about the online world. E.g. if you ask a local business owner about inbound marketing, squeeze pages, social media they may have heard about some of them but won't know how to run a successful campaign.
3. Position Yourself - It is imperative that you position yourself as the local expert within your marketplace. Be the one that local firms approach for advice and guidance. 2011 brings me to that stage in my company where I am going to be offering local events for business owners to show them the tools and possibilities available in the online world. These events could either be a money machine in their own right or a lead funnel for your services.
I hope that you find some of this advice useful, and take on board some of the tips and implement them in your own business.
I have lots more to share with you but don't want to make this post to long that you switch off halfway through.
If you have any question you would like me to answer then please ask away, I will be happy to help.
Speak Soon
James
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