Changing Affiliate World – Part 3

Let’s have some fun – and try to do it with no (little)money!

Concept: People are broke – and small business is to – but they still need to advertise.

The “changing affiliate world” is a series I’m doing in parts to give those going through the 30 day guide some ideas to get something off the ground.  You can see all the posts on the “Changing Affiliate World by looking at the “Changing Affiliate World” Category.

As I noted in part 1 I’m going to be burning through my “idea” folder and just posting them all.  Today I’m going to post one that I can’t believe I never got around to doing – and be warned, I’m going to be jumping into this with two feet this coming week.  I’m so dang nice though that I’m going to share ALL my notes.  Since my handwritting is horrible I’ll type instead of scanning them in.  I won’t pretend there aren’t a thousand spin offs for this – so there is room for you to do it as well in any capacity.

Some background on where this idea came from…….

In my case I was a plumber for about 10 years.  For the last 5 years the hardest I’ve worked is typing (a lot).  I’m getting a little chunky around the middle but don’t really like to work out.  I need a purpose for just about everything I do except play with the kids (which I guess has the effect of making them happy).  I also miss interacting with people face to face.  So I’ve been considering doing some side jobs for folks.  I’ve got a few ways of going about and doing that – most revolve around flyers, small ads, etc…

Boring – I’m a black hat webmaster.  If I want to be rank well for plumbing repairs in my area I can certainly do it.

Lightbulb moment.

Well I’m sure I’m not the only guy out there looking for small jobs. In fact I know about a dozen guys in different trades that all do side jobs.

Why not create a localarea sidejob.com website?

But let’s take it a step further (and we will pretend sidejob.com is actually available for this idea – obviously it’s not).

Get your domain.  Get a host with a LOT of space – baby plans don’t work, but you will be fine with a decent sized hosting plan, or a VPS (liquid web is great – link in the sidebar of this blog).  You are also going to need a phone line and a second server/host  if your going to scale this up a little.

In the root of your site you are going to need a landing page style ad.  Your trying to sell ads to service providers here – cost is up to you.  My initial thoughts are $199 set up fee, and $29.99 per month.  (don’t worry we have a way to make more off of every single person who signs up – we will get to that).  The goal here is not try and sell services to the end client but to get small service providers to sign up for your advertising package.

That should include -

A blog that covers a local keyword or two for them, and the service they provide. Example:  DoverDelawareLandscaper.sidejobs.com  (notice you don’t have to buy them a domain.  Make them provide you with content – or sell them the content.  They don’t need a lot of posts to rank for Landscaper in Dover Delaware for example — they also don’t need a whole lot of links (see the next thing you give them).

A Basic Marketing Plan: Something like 40 inbound links that help get them indexed. Also make sure you get them in Google Local – it’s easy and takes just a few minutes.  They most likely will never know how you got them there – and you can call or e-mail them to let them know they are showing right at the top as soon as it happens.  Might have to be a bit sneaky here since they will have to answer the phone to verify.

If they have tried to get a on-line presence going and called around locally your prices will amaze them – and you probably know as much about SEO (probably more) than most brick and mortar webmasters.

How could you extend this:

• Offer extended plans that cover other surrounding towns and counties.  Charge as you wish.
• Offer to handle thier mailing lists.  Sign them up at aweber with their CC info (not yours) but you manage mailing out the discounts and keeping their customers informed.  If your really feeling froggy you could handle thier print mail, etc…
• Offer “real domains” to them.  Custom graphics, photo’s, video of them working, etc….
• Offer some PPC ad service.  The bids for local keywords aren’t very high – but potentially lucrative for your client.  Personally seems like a lot of work and I don’t enjoy PPC —— I really hate explaining PPC so I would sell them an enhanced marketing plan and use some of those funds to set up PPC with limits and never tell them I’m buying the links.  I’ve NEVER not confused someone who wasn’t a webmaster explaining PPC.
• Change your pricing structure to be more per month with no set up fee.  If they stop paying you, well you have the local term right there ranking already. I’m sure you can find someone else in the area that wants it…. ohh it’s aged, and ranking and you can sell it for more.
• Sell them leads on top of things — all it takes is for you to rank in thier area for their terms. (this is where the phone and additional hosting comes in).
• So how do you get rankings in all these areas?  Personally I’d use the script that’s in Microtargetniches (very lite version in 30 day guide and also included in NSS 2).   It’s set up with all the cities and states in the U.S. and it’s really easy to add in an “AD” for your sidejobs.com site.  Heck get an 800 number for about $10 bucks a month that e-mails you with the messages.  Just forward the details to your clients and ‘bill’ them.  I’m thinking 5 bucks a lead wether it pans out or not.  Sure you are going to need a few more domains, and to promote a few more sites — but it will be worth it.  If you were a landscaper and saw 4 listings for “ads” for a service provider ranking in your town instead of the competition who would you hire?

In case you didn’t realize it that last bullet point is probably the most important.  You hopefully have learned enough by now that you can rank lots of pages very fast (read the 30 day guide if you haven’t).  You should be able to own “landscaper in bumbleville” if you work at it for a few weeks.  Sure you are competing against your clients – but if you use something like the microtargetniches script you can always put up links in the cities in just a few minutes for each of your clients.

Well that’s it – that’s my chicken scratch re-typed and cleaned up a bit.  You can target any service sector – as long as there are “small time” business men doing it.  I’m sure you could do the same things for banks and other corporations, but they are a nightmare to work with and a lot of red tape.  I’d rather work on a handshake and invoice method   You can scale this up pretty fast – and I guarantee with just a few fliers handed to lansdcapers, roofers, carpenters, electricians, etc… you will have your first clients.

I talked to a few of my buddies as I was writing out these notes and they were all interested — even the ones with full time jobs just looking for extra money on the weekends.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2009 at 6:38 pm and is filed under Changing Affiliate World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.