For months, I’ve been planning how best to tackle the local market, and I’ve finally made some good progress with recruiting local clients. I’ve realized for years that local markets are virtually untapped, and not nearly as competitive as the online world. The biggest hurdle for me is that I’m the world’s worst salesman.

For me, working online means communicating by email, receiving payments online, and never having to sit in traffic.  It also means little or no rejection.  I do all my marketing online for a low cost, and customers come to me from all over the world.  The local market involves actually meeting face to face with potential clients, talking on the phone, and sitting in traffic occasionally.  It also involves a much higher chance of rejection.

It’s working pretty well so far though.  I’m already pulling in several hundred dollars a month from local businesses, and since I bill monthly, every new client I recruit adds to that total.  I have some marketing ideas that I’ll put into place next week, and I hope to triple my client base in the next several weeks.  With some luck, I’ll have a large enough client base by next Spring that I can hold off on recruiting new clients, and simply maintain my business in a few hours a day while I travel around Europe again with my family.  Now that would be great! 

I’ve read a lot on the Warrior Forum and other places about local marketing, but I haven’t come across any good information about exactly what I’m doing.  I’m sort of winging it so far, but through trial and error, I’m learning a lot, and I’m growing the local part of my business.

I have a lot of other projects going on right now as well.  I’ll post more about them soon.

–Robert

p.s. – For a preview, check this out – Free PLR Articles – It’s a concept I’ve been testing with pretty good success so far.

Over the years, I’ve created lots and lots of websites.  Some, I haven’t touched in years, and some, I update nearly every day.

One site I created mostly for myself is ComicStripArchive.com

I am a huge fan of comic strips.  I’m not a super-hero kind of person, so I’m not really into comic books, but I love the daily strips – even the soap opera strips, which can often be hilarious without even trying!  Most comic strips have archives online, but most only link to the past month of strips, even if the archive goes back several years.

I created  a simple PHP script which links to the archives for each comic strip, making it easy to find years worth of strips.  Mostly, I did this so I could access old strips easily, but I figured I wasn’t the only one who liked old comic strips, so maybe other people would enjoy it.

Did they ever!

Within a few months, I was getting tens of thousands of visitors a month, and now I get over 5,000 unique visitors a day on a slow day!  The site usually gets over 25,000 visitors a month directly from highly-targeted Google searches.  It’s a marketer’s dream!

The problem is monetizing that traffic.  With that kind of targeted traffic, one would think some decent income would be easy, but I’ve really struggled to make any sort of worthwhile income from the site.  I added a blog, to ensure fresh content, added Project Wonderful ads, and recently added Amazon boxes that have books related to whatever comic strip page the visitor is viewing.  Still, almost no revenue.

I have some ideas to attract even more traffic that I’ll probably implement in the next few weeks.  Still, if 5,000 visitors a day isn’t making much, 10,000 visitors a day won’t make much more unless I’m able to step up the monetization.

I’ve thought about trying to build a list, but I’m unsure of exactly what type of content I would offer, and what type of incentive people would have to join the list.  This will probably be my first step.  Even with a list, though, comic strip readers aren’t the most rabid buyers around.

This would make a good case study, especially if I’m able to increase my profits in a big way.  I’ll be discussing this site more over the coming months, I’m sure.  Be sure to check back.  If you have any profitable ideas, I would love to hear them!

Robert