7 Reasons Why Location Dependent Business Opportunities Are A Great Thing
Do you want to live a free entrepreneurial life, roaming the globe and making money from a laptop wherever you set your feet?
If you do, then there are some great opportunities. However, there are also sharks in the water – for instance, people who sell you on the above dream by writing about living an entrepreneurial life, roaming the globe and making money from a laptop – wherever you are, whenever you want to work.
In reality most guys are better off looking at less exotic locations for their first entrepreneurial endeavours. I’ll tell you why in this article.
Also, shout out to Rob from 30DaystoX. One of his articles – I think it was this one, gave me the idea to use hyper-targeted local SEO terms. I’ll talk about this now.
Targeted Traffic
Most entrepreneurs in the lifestyle design area want to blog about lifestyle design – and a lot of them want to fake it until they make it.
That’s not the issue I’m going to talk about here. I’m going to talk about the fact that the SEO for lifestyle design and location independent terms is through the roof in terms of competition.
“How to make money online” is one of the hardest niches to get any traction in.
Web development and app creation are similarly bombarded with all the third world freelancers and guys looking to live it up in Thailand for no money.
What’s not competitive is city-dependent SEO.
You can rank for certain search terms and know that you’re going to get traffic.
Pick a small city near to you and type in something people will want. “Restaurant in X” or “how to buy cars in Y” are going to be easy terms to rank for. *
*Obviously, this is assuming your X and Y aren’t London, New York or Paris. Small city, your town, something reasonable.
You know the traffic is targeted because nobody can randomly happen upon “Best dog toy shop in Bury” as a search term.
Low Competition
With hyper-targeted traffic tends to come super-high competition.
Strangely though, a lot of location dependent search terms and business ideas are low in terms of competition. For instance, if you were to put in “copywriters in [city near me]” you might expect a lot of competition.
What you get is a whole lot of nothing. A few people spending entirely too much on Adwords, a few websites that look like they were designed in 1978 and then some of those random Google results that have nothing to do with the topic.
These Two Mean Your Knowledge Is More Valuable
Low competition plus highly targeted traffic is a win in any case.
When you’re talking about local business opportunities, you’re also at another advantage; your knowledge is actually valuable.
You know exactly the challenges facing local businesses, people and organisations in your area. You must in some capacity know how to deal with them as well.
For instance, something as simple as having a better “How to get to our office” page can be worth something to local companies.
As a local, that’s a service you could provide immediately.
Advertising Opportunities Further On
Let’s say you build a website about your city.
You write about some great restaurants, you see who has an affiliate program – either officially or unofficially – in your city and you write some reviews and sales letters. Maybe you’ll approach a few companies about services you can offer (like a listing or something) and you make a few pennies out of this.
In six months or a year’s time, when your site has got some SEO love and readership behind it, let me tell you what’ll happen: People will seek you out to advertise on your site. The relationship will change when you become the top five search results for “Best hotel in [your city]” and Hotel X isn’t on the list.
Suddenly, you can throw up ads and get free stuff. More on that later.
Easy Advertising For Your Stuff
Let’s hop back to the above website example – though you can do this with a lot of different business ideas.
I said about adverts and companies reaching out to you… well, what if you are the company that’s advertising.
I know a guy who runs a magazine. Most magazines run on ad money and so they’re constantly begging companies to advertise with them. Not this guy. The guy I’m talking about runs about ten little miniature businesses, and his magazine – which makes money on its own – is simply a lead generation tool for his other businesses.
If he gets advertisers, then great. If he doesn’t, he puts in his own ads and makes money either way.
You can do this and either promote your businesses in your area, someone else’s businesses or a combination of the two.
You Get Free Stuff!
Let’s assume you’ve done the above – created a few local business services and a website to promote them for your local area.
It’s always better to use one idea multiple times than come up with different ideas.
So you should rinse and repeat on the things that work. Go to the next nearest city, take a camera and do exactly the same.
Except this time, you know your value before you start.
I know a girl who works for a lifestyle magazine. She gets paid hardly anything in cash terms, but she goes around the country reviewing restaurants and hotels. Almost everything she does is a taxable expense for this little side-gig, and she gets to eat for free at top restaurants, stay in 5* hotels overnight – again for nothing – and she buys top-of-the-line camera equipment to “help her” do this little job.
Add in the knowledge that you can get from reading my site for a few hours, and you’ll be on your way to having that and more… which leads me on to the final point.
It’s Easy To Do
Trying the “digital nomad let’s live free in Thailand” thing is difficult. You’re competing with all the other guys that want to live the dream.
Doing location-based business is a lot easier by comparison. The competition is lower, the customers are easier to get and more likely to spend more. Also, unless you live in London, Silicon Valley or a major tech hub in your area, the actual work is easier to do.
If you up and move to Chiang Mai, you aren’t going to be able to sell $500 websites to anybody there. They’re all tech-savvy and looking to save every dollar they can. That’s not the same for middle-of-nowhere, flyover-state businesses who have been around since typewriters were new technology.
Final Thoughts
Starting a location-based company is easier to do than trying for an ethereal location-independent business.
I’ve given you the blueprint above, and there are many unique ideas that you can spin from the above advice.
That’s only the start though – there are legitimately hundreds of avenues you can go down with the ideas in this article. I haven’t assumed you have any particular skillset or other advantage whatsoever.
Assuming you have either of the above, the doors are wide open for you.