There was a lot of buzz in the past few months about making money by selling SEO services to offline businesses. The fact is there is a bunch of money to be made and it’s quite easy too. The problem that most people have is that they don’t like talking to local business owners. Nobody likes to cold call. It sucks, but the truth is you need to have some social skills to get clients in your local area. The local business owners are not online searching for ways to market their business. With them it’s all word of mouth. If their friend tells them something works they will try it otherwise forget it. It’s slowly changing but for the most part that’s how it is.
Anyway, how can you sell your SEO services to these people? They obviously need it if they want to grow their business and stay ahead of their competition, right? I used a cool technique I call “Hold them hostage” 
LOL you are not actually going to walk in their business with a gun telling them to pay you. That’s illegal! But what I have tested recently worked amazingly well with the local businesses.
Check this out
I first find a local keyword phrase I want to go after. For example “[city name] real estate agent” or “[city name] pizza” now some cities are bigger than others so of course those terms could be highly competitive, but on average they are not very hard to rank for.
Next, I register a domain name like “bestpizzain[city].com” or “realestateagent[city].com” and develop a site for those terms. Usually we just use wordpress and just put up a decent site optimized for the specific keyword phrase. Second, you need to rank that site before you even do anything else. Get it ranked first. To do that you can just use some simple link building tactics like article distribution and press releases. That will be enough to score Google front page placement for those terms.
Once you have the site where you want it to be then you try to sell it This is where the fun begins. Something like this is easier to sell obviously. You don’t have to pitch all your SEO stuff and have 1000 benefits for them to see the value of your service. Just call 5 real estate agents and tell them you got a site ranked on the front page of Google already and you are willing to sell it with the domain name and everything. Tell each one of them you called his or her competition too so you can get the maximum price. Cool ha?
It’s an easy sell! Then you can offer them monthly support for a fee with it or whatever. It works quite well. I have sold a few sites like that already and I am telling you it’s fun when they start bidding for it.
Everybody else out there is teaching you to go out and be a sales person and pitch them your services. This is way easier guys! Try this and see for yourself.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I like this method.
Great Stuff Pawel.
I was thinking about selling SEO services in the past and I decided it was not for me because I wouldn’t feel comfortable talking to local business owners. But your method is definitely worth trying. Thanks.
I agree that this is something that is do able. I’ve been wanting to get into offline marketing for a while.
The steps you’ve outlined are acheivable, if you take action. Thanks for sharing.
Brian
Sounds like a great winner to me, will have to give it a try.
Gary
Great post. Thanks. I’ll have to give it a try…
How many searches should the site get per month and how do you decide on a price? Is there a general forumla we could use for price based on number of searches?