I have been using this method for several months and there’s no reason why you can’t start using this right now to start generating some serious income. This method can work well even if you just want to use emails instead of cold calling or personally visiting prospects. However, I have found that this works best when a phone call is accompanied by a real letter followed by a personal visit to close the deal.
The Method:
The method involves offering local businesses a service to rank websites on the first page of Google.
I can already hear you screaming “Are you kidding me? This is one of the oldest offline methods”
The method might be old, but I’ll be showing you how to identify prospects which satisfy the following criteria:
1. Will be eager to use this service
2. Will have websites that are extremely easy to rank
Combine these two and you have a gold mine waiting to be exploited.
What you’ll need to implement this method:
1. A tool to check competition (free and paid tools available)
2. Ability to build links (DIY, use tools like scrapebox, gsa, amr, etc. or use someone’s service from fiverr or this forum)
3. Ability and motivation to go out and talk to people.
Once you have all the above-mentioned tools, you are ready to get cracking..
Step 1 – Select a category
Select any category of business which has a local market and could do with more online traffic. The best businesses are usually small service businesses which don’t have adequate resources to effectively market their services. Some types of businesses which I have had success with include doctors (drill down to specific categories like dentists, pediatricians, etc.), lawyers (choose specific categories like dui lawyers, criminal lawyers, divorce lawyers, etc.), accountants, fitness trainers, tutors, cleaning services, house maintenance services, etc.
The list of businesses that you can market this service to is huge and a quick look at the categories in yellow pages (or any other directory) will confirm that.
Step 2 – Check Online Traffic for Selected Category
Once you have selected a category, head over to Google Adwords Keyword tool and check the traffic that the term “[category] in [city name]” gets. For example, if you are targeting dentists in city1, check the traffic that “dentists in city1” gets.
If the term gets over 200 searches per month, it is worth pursuing. This number might seem low but bear in mind that, for an offline business, even a single new client could be worth several hundred dollars. A single client could potentially recoup the investment that they would have to make in your service.
Step 3 – Check Competition
Use a tool like Market Samurai (paid) or SEOQuake browser plugin (free) to evaluate the top 10 sites that appear in Google for the search term you have selected (“[category] in [city name]”). If the top 10 results contain 2 or more sites with a page rank of 0, this market is ripe for the taking.
Step 4 – Identify Prospects
This is the most important step in the whole process which will help you identify prospects which satisfy the criteria mentioned above.
Make a list of all the websites which appear on pages 2 – 5 of Google for your chosen search term. Additionally, if there are ads appearing for your search term, include those websites in your list as well. This should get you a list of 30-60 websites.
Now go through this list and only keep websites which match all of the following criteria:
1. Has a minimum domain age of 4 years.
2. Has “[city name]” and “[category]” mentioned at least once somewhere on the home page.
3. Does not belong to a business that present in multiple cities.
The websites that remain in your list after applying this filter have the following characteristics:
1. Being aged domains (some of them might even have a good page rank), they are much easier to rank with minimal off page SEO (mostly link building). In most cases, these websites can rank on the first page with a single scrapebox blast, a single link wheel/link pyramid or a handful of press releases. (Even after Panda/Penguin/Dolphin/Zebra/etc.)
2. The age of these domains shows that these businesses are real having been around for some time.
3. Most importantly, because these websites are ranked in the first few pages, they most likely receive some organic traffic from Google. This means that their owners understand the value that you could offer by ranking their website on the first page of Google. This makes your job of convincing the website owners much easier.
Using this list of websites, create a numbered list of the names of the firms which are owners of these websites. This list will come in handy in the next step.
Step 5 – Contact the Website Owners and Make Your Offer
Before you contact website owners to make your offer, you need to know some of the most common excuses they will give you initially. Here’s a list of these ‘excuses’ along with an explanation of how you can counter those:
I already have a person in charge of my website
This is by far the most common line you’ll hear. The best way to counter this excuse is to point out that the existing person/company in charge of their website is doing nothing to rank it higher. Not only will this get your prospect’s attention, it’ll also open the door for you to start hosting the website and make a nice recurring income.
There don’t seem to be any tangible benefits/It is too expensive
Even though most of these website owners understand the value of online traffic, some will play dumb to take up a good bargaining position. The best way to counter this argument is to ask the prospect what a single client to him/her is worth.
Then go on to illustrate how just a couple of clients obtained from increased online traffic can help recover the investment in your service. When you position your offering in context of the prospect’s business, it becomes hard for the prospect to ignore the benefits of your offer.
Can I Speak With You Later
A lot of prospects will try to avoid wasting time by telling you to get back in touch later. When anyone says this to you, hand over the list of business names (that you created in step 4) and tell the prospect that you are sending this offer to all of these businesses and that you will be able to accept no more than 2 of these
businesses as your clients.
Irrespective of what the client says, make sure that you emphasize that the offer is on a first come first serve basis and that, based on past experience, this offer will be lapped up by two firms by the end of the day.
This will create a sense of urgency and a fear of losing out to the competition and help you in closing the sale.
When you make your offer, tell the prospects that the results will be deliverable within a period of 60 days and offer them a 100% money back guarantee should you fail to deliver. This will help you overcome the last bit of resistance that might be left in your prospect to accept your offer.
Step 6 – Accept Clients & Build links
If you follow the steps mentioned above, you’ll definitely end up with more than two clients. There’s not been a single case where I have failed to land less than 4 clients for any given market/city combination.
Now remember how (in step 5) you told your clients that you can accept only two of them? Forget about that and go ahead and accept more than two prospects (with a maximum of 5 clients). If you have more than 5 prospects, sort them in descending order of the website page rank/domain age and select the top 5.
Why are we doing this? It is because we don’t know exactly how Google ranks websites and we can’t be sure of which websites will rank better. By selecting 5 websites, you increase your chances of ranking at least two of them on the first page of Google search results.
Once you have accepted your clients (max. 5), you can start the link building process. The process which has worked best for me has been to do a scrapebox blast to at least 1000 auto approve sites, post an article to the top article directories and post a couple of press releases on free press release sites (for each of the 5 clients).
To do this, you’ll need one article (max $5) and one press release (max $5) which you can use for all the 5 clients by changing the firm name in the article/press release.
This link building alone should get at least two of your clients’ websites to the front page of Google. If this doesn’t, repeat the process another time and it should get the job done.
So far, I have never had to do more than two rounds of the above-mentioned link building process to get two websites to the front page of Google.
Step 7 – Close the Transaction
Once you have a particular client’s website on the first page of Google search results, get in touch with the client and present the results of your service. At this time, get your client’s signature on a document that states something to the effect that you have delivered what you had promised to deliver. This will be important to indemnify you should any future change to Google’s algorithms knock your clients’ websites off the first page.
Do this for each client whose website you have been able to rank on the first page of Google.
For the rest of the clients, get in touch with them and return their money back.
Economics of the Method (Pricing/Refunds/Profits)
You can price your service anywhere from $200 to $500 and still be able to land clients. I personally price this service based on the category of business and the average value of a single customer to that business.
If a single customer is worth $100 (on average) to a business, I’ll charge a minimum of $200 for this ranking service as it is easy to help prospects rationalize investing in the service (by saying that getting just 2 new clients due to this service will help them recover its cost).
Assuming that you charge a minimum of $200 per client, here is how the economics of the method work
(assuming you get 5 clients):
1. Cost of article: $5
2. Cost of Press Release: $5
3. Cost of link building
If you have tools like Scrapebox/GSA/AMR – $0
If you use a service like fiverr – $50 ($5 x 5 clients x 2 rounds)
The maximum total cost is $60 assuming that one round of linking isn’t enough. However, if you own any of the above mentioned tools, the cost for a single category/city combination is just $10.
If you get two websites on the front page, you will earn $400 out of which your profit will be anywhere from $340 to $390.
Final Word
This is an incredibly simple and powerful method which has been working well for me over the past several months. Once you have these clients, you can always upsell other services down the line which can provide you with recurring income and boost your profits.
I hope that you can put this method to use and kick start (or supplement) a profitable business.
Note: If you have questions, post them in this thread and I’ll try to answer them.
