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.

I’m heading to bed, but I wanted to share something quickly.

I’ve had a membership site, the Online Marketing Toolbox, for several months now.  I promoted it through various advertising, and to my customers who bought websites from me, and though I had occasional signups, membership was very low.  With the economy in trouble, and revenue dropping, I made a commitment to make the Online Marketing Toolbox a site that every serious online marketer would want to be a member of!

One of the main changes I made was to the layout.  I had hastily designed a quick layout when I started the site, and though it looked pretty nice, it didn’t make customers say “Wow, I want to get more sites from this guy!”.  At least, I would imagine it didn’t.

Anyway, after discarding over a dozen potential designs, I finally came out with one I was exceedingly happy with.  Of all the website designs I’ve ever created, it’s by far my favorite.

What I found over the next month, is that potential customers like the new design too - enough to increase my conversion rate by over 400%!

It was hard for me to believe at first too.  Not only did my signups increase, but the biggest increase was from my website customers.  These customers saw my work firsthand, and yet only a handful were interested in joining before.  Now, five times as many were eager to signup.  It was truly amazing!

As a web designer, I’ve always felt like a good design can really change the perception of a potential customer, and now I have living proof!

Goodnight, and God Bless!

Robert

I’m sure I’m not the only small business owner who has been struggling a bit recently. Over the past few months, my online revenue has dropped significantly, especially from the source of income I was relying on the most.

Of course, this provides a good lesson that I’ve always known, but never got around to heeding fully - don’t put all your eggs in one basket!

Now, I pull in revenue from several different streams of online income, but since one of these streams was doing particularly well, I spent most of my time cultivating it. Now that the revenues from that stream have scaled back considerably, I’m left scrambling to bring up my income.

There is a silver lining though. I think in a year or two, I may look back to these few months as the catalyst for making my business grow to unprecedented levels. Without the revenue I was relying on, I’ve been forced to push the limits of what types of services I offer. I’ve had to leave my comfort zone, and I’m already seeing great results.

The first thing I did to try and earn more revenue was to promote my custom website design. I had built a website months ago called Porcupine Website Design, mostly to assuage friends and family who occasionally ran across people who needed a website and wanted to know where to send them. I was making enough money by pre-designing websites and selling them, that I didn’t have much time to do custom work.

Promoting that has opened me up to several new customers, generated tons of great website ideas in my head, and really expanded my view of what’s out there, and what people are looking to create.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had to take a hard look at my business model, and determine how I can not only make money online right now, and how I can build my profits to make sure my business is secure in the future.  I think I’m well on my way.

I have a special place in my heart for Yanik Silver.  I think his hype can be a bit over the top sometimes, and the price for most of his products is quite high, but if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be writing this blog.

Seven years ago, I bought a copy of his book ‘33 Days To Online Profits’, and that was the start of my internet marketing career.  The methods in the book didn’t apply very well to what I was trying to sell at the time, but I learned things about the world of internet marketing that I had no idea even existed.  That book opened the door for me, and eventually led to an escape from my “Day Job”.

I recently joined his Maverick Business Insider newsletter.  It sounded interesting, and Yanik always seems to be at the forefront of the latest marketing trends.  With the package came his short, but interesting book - “34 Rules For Maverick Entrepreneurs”.

Rule #3 intrigues me, but goes against the way I usually do business.  Rule #3 states that you should always charge a premium price for your product or service and then over-deliver.  Though I agree that going above and beyond your customer’s expectations is a great way to keep existing customers coming back again and again, I’ve always been of the mindset that you should charge a price that makes the customer think “How could I not take advantage of this awesome deal?”

Recently, a lot of my income has come from custom web design and coding.  I create website layouts and graphic design, do a bit of coding, install scripts, etc.  Since people can hire anyone in the world, this is understandably a competitive market.  I charge what I believe to be a fair price, but one that potential customers will see as a bargain.  And it’s worked.  I’ve gotten quite a few customers recently who were attracted to my low prices.  It’s hard for me to justify charging a lot more when it’s clear that my customers sought me out because they wanted a low price.

Of course, Yanik’s a millionaire many times over, and I’m not, so I think if anyone’s mistaken here, it’s probably me.  I’ve been studying Yanik’s methods, and I’m definitely going to make a few changes to the way I do business, now and in the future.

Back to the first product I ever bought - I followed up my purchase with a similar but more extensive product of his a few weeks later.  That product came with a special benefit.  Yanik would personally review your website once you finished it and give you pointers.  I never cashed that in.  Maybe I’ll send him here once it’s up and running a bit more and see what he thinks

I’m sure I’ll discuss more of his rules in future posts.  What do you think about Yanik Silver’s rules, his products, seminars or anything else he does?  I’m really interested to hear what you think.