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Copyright © 2009 Willie Crawford
Lately, I hear from a LOT of struggling internet marketers. Many of them are worried about paying next month's rent, or having their electricity turned off. In other words, I hear from a lot of internet marketers "with their backs against the wall."
The sad part is that if they've studied internet marketing for a year or so, this is completely unnecessary. They already possess the knowledge to generate as much as $10,000 (or more) in a single weekend. They just haven't learned to properly value and market their know-how.
How does a struggling internet marketer go from zero to $10,000 in a single weekend? You CHANGE who you are marketing to.
Instead of trying to convince other internet marketers that they need some $20 ebook, you market to people with money already budgeted for expertise similar to yours.
The customers that I propose you market your internet expertise to are local offline businesses. Many of the local businesses in your area are struggling, and need your expertise, and are willing to pay for it.
What am I proposing?
I'm suggesting that you put on a 1-day workshop where you TEACH local businesses to use the internet to drive more paying customers through their doors.
You charge a token fee of $100 - $200 (or more) to these local businesses, so that they value what you are teaching, but that's not where you cash in.
In your 1-day workshop, you teach these local businesses about things such as search engine optimization, long-tail keywords, and capturing the email addresses of their customers (and website visitors) so that they have an easy way to follow-up with them.
You teach the local beauty parlor that, if they noticed Thursdays are always slow, an easy way to fix that problem is to send out an email on Wednesday to all of their customers, telling them that if they come in on Thursday, they get a 10% discount. Then you teach them how to capture their customers' contact data so that they can easily contact ALL of their customers for free.
You explain the power of email to them as compared to say newspaper or radio advertising where there is considerably more preparation and lead time required. You teach them that email is practically instant AND free.
You spend the day teaching these local businesses how to really harness the power of the internet. You don't need to hold anything back - you can teach them everything that you know.
At the end of the 1-day seminar (you can make it 2 days if you prefer), you offer to do the things for them that you just taught them how to do. You'll be pleasantly surprised when 90% of them want you to do it for them (even though you just taught them how to do it).
These local business people are too busy running the day to day operations of their businesses to learn a whole new set of skill, so they will pay YOU handsomely to do it for them.
Here's the secret, you "outsource" that work. You charge the local businesses enough where you can pay someone else to do the work and still end up with thousands of dollars from the weekend.
You funnel the work to talented people that you've met online or find through sites such as Elance.com
It really is that simple and easy.
But what if you don't feel up to putting together a presentation? You can get a complete seminar in a box, with slides, script, handouts, everything you need, from several places online.
In fact, I didn't write the presentation that I use when I put on local workshops. I got the entire presentation at: http://TeachingEcommerceToLocalBusinesses.com
That "seminar in a box" package is so complete that it even has the ads you use to let local businesses know about the seminar. It is so complete that you "could" just hand the slides and script to an assistant and they could run the seminar for you.
I was so impresses with the completeness of that package, and how easy it was to just take it and host a seminar for local businesses, that I interviewed the two marketers who created that package on my radio show. You are welcome to grab the transcript of that show free. I entitled it "How to Make A Fortune Offering Freelance Consulting To Local Offline Businesses" and you can download it here: http://WillieCrawford.com/FreeTranscripts/
When hosting local seminars, you want to keep your costs low, so you want to use a meeting room in a local hotel, high school, or you can rent a meeting room very inexpensively from the local Knights of Columbus or Shriners. Lots of local civic and fraternal organizations have their own meeting place, and happily rent them out. You can even get some of these organizations to publicize your seminar for you :-)
Everything that you need to know about organizing a seminar for local offline businesses is included in the package mentioned above, and the free transcript shares a lot of great information too.
With just a little preparation, and the decision to share your expertise with the "right market" - business people who have already set aside funds for growing their businesses, you literally can earn $10,000 (or more) in a single weekend.
If you get into action now, you could literally do this next weekend, although I'd allow a little more lead time.
This IS something that you can do!
Take a look at the resources mentioned above, flow out the event, and then do it! You'll find yourself looking not only at your city, but at other nearby cities. It's that lucrative, and that much fun. You'll become a local celebrity, and a hero to local businesses too.
About the Author:
Willie Crawford has been teaching internet marketing and ecommerce since 1996. As founder of The Internet Marketing Inner Circle he now teaches his tactics in the membership site at http://TheInternetMarketingInnerCircle.com You are invited to join this community of serious marketers today!
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I will seek to answer those questions here, as well as to provide a Day Planner to enable the new online entrepreneur to navigate the maze of building a successful online business. When I find great advice by other writers, I will include that information as well. --- Clinton Douglas IV, Founder of Vasrue.com |