Where Most Offliners Are GOING WRONG! (Video)

Hey Dez,

Nice video, I had a couple of questions if you don't mind sharing...

1. How long have you been running your offline business for?

2. What are your offerings? I know you mentioned PPC and Video Marketing, what else?

3. What niches do you focus on?

4. When you say to 'focus on a niche', could you give strategies that you have used that have made your clients say 'wow, you DO focus on our niche, take my money!'

5. Care to share any financials at all? Costs per month, profit per month etc?

Hopefully it's a great refresher and also for those just getting started

Hey Payoman,

Ask them what the lifetime value of the average client is. There are several calculations but I like to work on 2 years. So, how much does that client spend per year?

For example: I have a cleaning company which offers window cleaning. On average we charge around £10 per house per month. If they only use my service for two years that's £240 income over two years. Now I know that figure, I can now calculate how much I can spend to acquire a new client.

Being really aggressive, I could spend £120 to acquire that new client, knowing full well that I break even at year 1 and then profit afterwards.

First we do a test with PPC by going after a selection of keywords we feel are relevant (but sending them to a landing page with a coupon offer). The coupon allows us to track the effectiveness of the campaign.

Let's say we spend on average £10 per day and receive 5 clicks with 1 conversion. That new client has only cost us £10, but the value over 2 years is £240.

Obviously, this is an over-simplified explanation and there a few more factors to add in here. But, this is the gist of how we persuade our clients to try ppc.

1. Find out life time value of their client
2. Arrange to do a test campaign and set an affordable budget
3. Get them to set up a separate landing page and coupon for tracking (or you can do this and charge).
4. Contact a PPC pro on elance and give them the specifics of the project (go for the highest rated contractors):

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Title: I need someone to set up a small ppc campaign for local company

This is a small project, but could lead to a lot of work. I need someone to set up and test a campaign for my local client.

The winning bidder will receive a selection of the keywords we'd like to target and I would like recommendations of more keywords they think maybe handy.

I need detailed weekly reports so that I can show the progress of the campaign.

Happy bidding!

Des
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I do things a little different to most people on here and I was quite aggressive with my marketing push when I set up. I didn't charge a fee for my services with my first few clients because I knew how important it was landing my first few clients. With these guys under my belt I started targeting similar businesses in different areas since I was now armed with real statistics. I also name dropped.

I don't advise you to go down the free route unless you can afford to. However, I'd worked out how much a potential client could bring in via ongoing fees etc. It's very good!

So, to answer your question, PPC is expensive if you don't know what you're doing and haven't worked out the LTV. If you have, you can easily work out a budget for each campaign.

I outsource everything to elance.

Tip: I also look at existing campaigns of prospective clients and type in general keywords to see what comes up (specifically looking at negative keywords where they're showing up for clicks that offer no real return).

For example, using my cleaning example earlier on. We offer carpet cleaning, but our ad was appearing when someone typed in "carpet cleaning hire" which on the face of it sounds good, but what this client really wants is to hire a machine to on a DIY basis. So, once you know this, you can add this to what we call a "negative keyword list" in adwords so it stops displaying for these words. That little trick has saved our company thousands by not displaying for the wrong keywords.

If you call this company or do a small video presentation telling them where they're going wrong with their campaign, you've got a good chance of getting their business.

I don't know what you mean by "yellow links"? The background colour is shaded yellow which has been toned down over the years so that it blends seamlessly with the organic results by Google. I remember the days when this background colour was a lot darker.

Hope that helps?

Hey, no problem. As I said in the video, try to pick a niche where money is already being spent in abundance. This gives you a receptive audience when trying to pitch your services.

Couldn't have said it better myself Red.

Thanks for the inspirational story.