Work with smaller towns and places with a lower population?

I live in a small market too and so I deal with this all the time. But you don't have to just work in the small markets you know. ;-)

Many small market niches just don't get the number of searches required to charge a high enough monthly fee for straight consulting services. There are still very good niches (just look at your yellow pages to find out which niches have all the big ads) that pay well.

So I take a bit different strategy. I sell them lead generating web sites (plus more later). These sites are properly optimized WP sites that rank first page. This gives the customer a more tangible purchase with less sales resistance. It also builds in continuity as your ongoing maintenance fee includes their web hosting. They want to keep the web site, traffic, and the rankings... so they keep paying.

But you can still leverage this into good revenue. If you build one small market niche site, plan on going after ALL the similar sized markets with the same services for that niche. I send direct mail to three other businesses in the same niche in a different small market with the offer that I will work with only one of them (I tell them who else I've sent to). I give them real numbers from the site I already built and link them to it. One of the three ALWAYS buys. And they don't care that the site is usually based on the same theme... they are in a completely different market. This makes site setup very quick.

Lots of small market sites still makes a really good income stream.

/Clark