Most Powerful Site Monetizing Strategy for Business Success that is Often Overlooked

• What we overlook
• How to Take Advantage
• Where to Make Sales
• Follow Up Sales & Recurring Sales

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time this spring, summer and fall talking about the campaign of presidential candidate Dr. Ron Paul. What does this have to do with making money online? Well, a lot. Just stay with me…

Dr.Paul’s campaign took a “life of it’s own” on the Internet as people who had the time and knowledge to explore the issues took notice and organized themselves very well. That’s what happened…

It was much more interesting WHAT DIDN’T HAPPEN, and that’s what you need to understand to make money using your online skills.

Here is What Didn’t Happen:

• Even though the Internet was used by the campaign, Dr. Paul’s message took very long to get accepted by the voters.
• The younger crowed, including us and most readers of this blog, could understand the message.
• However, the 45+ crowd that makes up about 60% of the voters in any given election didn’t get the message –Unless it was explained to them the old fashioned way, by word-of-mouth.
• The Under 45 voting block makes up 40%, but even with 20% to 30% of that vote, a candidate cannot complete in an election.

The summary of the situation:  Online the support and participation may seem very high, but the penetration of the message to the people who are “not so ‘net savvy” is rather low.

Now to My Point:
Often we are taking it for granted that we know how to do various tasks online. However, very few people know much beyond reading a newspaper, checking e-mail and watching a video. Most people only “Google” something online. It’s astonishing to know how many people search “www.richsage.com” on Google as oppose to typing it in the browser window! Often when I meet someone, and I say my site name, and that my brand is the “Rich Sage” I leave it up to them to find the site. Then I sit back and watch. Even people who use the Web regularly search it, as oppose to inserting the URL into the browser.

What you need to understand is that beyond the VERY BASIC, very few people have the expertise and know-how to get the job done.

Where you live, these people are all around you, and it’s very easy to sell them services! I know. That’s how I’ve built my business –one person at a time. Delivering to them what I talk about here. Helping them build their own online business.

Going Online Directly:

Often those who go online to make sales do so because they don’t like the process of “selling”. However, if you take into account what you have to establish online to make sales, especially for large ticket items, then you’ll see the value in making sales locally, to bricks ‘n clicks type of customers first.

Then your business will keep growing, and you can keep building products for local customers and work on building online products.

You’ll See Some Immediate Advantages:

• Higher Margins
• Much Higher Ticket Items
• More Referrals
• Ability to “team up” with other professionals to build your business locally
• More consistent  business model

ACT Locally, EXPAND Globally:

If you look at many of the key words and phrases, they are all “taken” or are so expensive, it’s prohibitive to bid on them without a clear, direct monetizing model.  Only the large companies with million dollar ad budgets can afford it.

However, take the same key words or phrase and stick the name of your local city and state somewhere, and you’ll see that the completion is much less.  Often far less.  Furthermore, in pure organic search, the competition is not savvy and it’s easy for you to make your client number one in your area for a Google, MSN and Yahoo search.

This gives you the perfect opportunity to build a business locally and service a pool of clients.

Lastly, expanding globally –This part of your business plan can be achieved by working with advertising networks, many of them I present here, that allow client referrals.  Just about all of them do.  Once you start earning from them, your customers can be anywhere.  That is the idea behind the Maxsimo Network, which I am building.

Making More Sales & Expanding:

Once you establish your business, look to existing clients to refer more and more new customers, by doing the following:

• Put your company, agency name at the bottom of each project linked to your website.
• Certainly reward existing customers for their referrals by giving them free services or paying them referral fees or just crediting their billing with a “Thank You” for their efforts.
• All the while, make sure to build your local brand by participating in civic groups, local media advertising, sponsorship of school and non-profit groups, etc.  If you are looking for proven ideas to get started with local business building, look to the ideas in Guerrilla Marketing, by Jay Conrad Levinson.

Once you get started with online money making success, using a local approach, you’ll see that it’s far easier to make much larger margin sales, and build a service business that can out perform a purely online marketing model.  Once you start putting everything that you learn online, building your own website or blog and even a brand, it’s much easier to expand that skill to help the local businesses get their share of traffic and sales.  I think you’ll be amazed at what people really know and what you can do to help them. Even more amazing is the income you can generate from your knowledge and online make money skills.

Rich Sage