10 valuable lessons for offline marketing consultants

Fellow Warriors, here are some very valuable lessons that I've learned after doing offline marketing for the past couple of years. Take these to heart.

1. Make sure that your client's website sells! Traffic to your client's website is useless unless you can convert them into customers. To that end, it's very important that you learn how to develop a very powerful marketing message for your clients.

2. Being a generalist is very tough. Sooner or later, after becoming an Internet marketing consultant, you may very well get prospects in dozens of different industries contacting you. This means that you may very well have to learn dozens of different industries.

In retrospect, I would have taken on lots of clients in several different industries (as opposed to clients from many different industries).

3. Use call tracking. It makes it that much easier to prove the value of your services to the client. Call tracking solutions like IfbyPhone and CallRail can help you to see where the calls are coming from (including what keyword, ad campaign, etc. led a client to call their business).

4. Pre-qualify first! There is nothing more frustrating than setting up a meeting with a prospect, only to find out that they cannot afford your services.

5. Obsess over revenue, not rankings. At the end of the day, what really matters is how much revenue you are bringing in your clients....not exactly where they are ranked in the search engines.

6. Make sure your content is top-notch. Be very careful about outsourcing the creation of your content overseas - you get what you pay for.

7. Use A/B testing frequently. You will never know which marketing / advertising approach works best until you test it with your target market.

8. It's all about the offer! Your client's website MUST have a very strong offer that actually converts visitors into customers; otherwise, their website may very well be a waste of money.

9. Write well-written title / description tags. This is extremely important to make sure that your website actually attracts search engine traffic.

10. Don't expect overnight success. It takes a lot of patience - and hard work - to build an Internet marketing business.