Offline Business Revisited: It’s Easier Than EVER
I wrote about how online marketers and copywriters should target offline business many months ago.
Every so often, I get another idea or two about how to approach this, and so I figured I’d write another post with some random thoughts on the subject.
Essentially, it’s easy to get into the online business competition business. In this industry, you constantly need better SEO, more content, better websites and it’s a treadmill.
When you switch the computer off and go outside, you realise that there are plenty of businesses – and even entire industries – where people don’t even have websites, let alone have good ones. Even if you search for “website design” a lot of times you get really terrible websites that have been around since 1999.
Yet most guys get into online business and inevitably start the whole “got to be a lifestyle blogger” thing, jump on SEO services and whatever…
Now… in some cases, that’s a good idea. A little bit of SEO can go a long way and there’s nothing wrong with running a blog for money. (Though you should probably think of it more like an authority business with a blog as a part of it.)
The big problem with the above approach is that the targeting is wrong. You can sell $5 ebooks on SEO to one-man bands or you can run a “website auditing” firm and target big businesses. One of these is a better idea than the other, and ironically, that’s the one with no competition.
Small Business Is Bigger Than You Think
If you’re on this blog, the statistics show you’re probably a young guy somewhere in his twenties. Maybe early thirties. You are interested in self-employment, marketing and online stuff. It’s likely you’re a one-man band and so you think in one-man band terms.
A lot of guys in this demographic read other motivational blogs that brag about “How to make $10,000 a month” and think that’s the be-all and end-all of business.
It’s a good beginner goal, let’s face it. It’s above average income and for a one-man band, it’s not bad.
In terms of marketing a business-to-business service however, you’re talking bottom-of-the-barrel. Selling $500 websites to guys on the internet is being a small fish in a small pond. This is how the UK tax office defines small business:
That’s a pretty massive business if you got your start on Fiverr and Upwork selling $5 articles, let me tell you. And that’s a small business on the scale of things. A turnover of 10.2 million a year.
Now, Mr. Live The Dream Life™ Lifestyle Blogger who makes 10k a month has a designation too. It’s on the lower end of what’s called a micro-entity:
Now, the HMRC is passive aggressive in a British way, so I’ll translate for everyone on the other side of the ocean: If your turnover is less than £632,000 a year… then you’re pretty much insignificant. They don’t even need you to do full accounts because you’re wasting some poor accountant’s time.
I’m being flippant here, but my point is this:
The Business World Is Much Bigger Than You Think
If you deal with the blogging/SEO crowd/online entrepreneur crowd too much, you start to think that $500 is a lot for a website and a $1000 contract to work for a whole month is amazing because it lets you be a digital nomad in Cambodia or whatever.
In reality, there are small companies who can afford to pay $2k a month to a fresh graduate with next to no skills to “learn social media marketing” or whatever.
There are companies that pay £10k a year having their offices repainted just so they get put down a tax bracket.
There are multi-million pound charities that are getting fleeced by “web developers” who still hand-code everything with HTML and charge thousands a month for retainers that include things like “uploading news” or “updating the picture gallery.”
When You Think In These Terms… Everything Bad Works For You
Alright, I spent too much time on the above sections. Here’s the useful stuff, and it basically amounts to stop overthinking everything.
Today, I found a website for professionals in a certain industry. It called itself [Redacted] and it charged a yearly membership fee for being a part of the union.
What did this membership buy you?
A profile page.
We’re talking a picture of you, a 300 word biography and what you can do. And you have to pay yearly for that.
The crazy thing… having a link to your website and appearing in the website’s search display was an upsell. Premium members paid more for a backlink and for their website to be worth anything.
Oh… and they got a discount to the yearly seminar the organisation runs.
Maybe the above only seems absurd to me, and to some of you, you’re going to rub your hands and think, “Woah… what a racket business idea.”
To the rest of you, bear in mind that this sort of thing is common and considered “networking” and “a useful resource” to a lot of professionals and industries.
But think… this sort of thing works in your favour:
- You only need longtail SEO to dominate stuff like this
- You only need to provide a service marginally more useful than the above
- It’s easy as anything to create something like this (like it is literally a fifteen minute WordPress, theme and couple of plugins with the default set-up type work)
Oh, and you can make more money and you don’t have to worry about the latest up-and-coming trends or anything.
That’s if you wanted to compete. If you wanted to help businesses like this, you could offer just about any service and it’d make them more money.
Final Thoughts
People are incredibly fond of saying, “Oh… that’s too hard.”
It comes in many guises, and when it comes to business, people say, “Oh, that niche is saturated.” Or, “You need tons of money to compete.”
This kind of thinking occurs only because people get led a merry dance down a single rabbit hole, and when they come back up, they can’t see the forest for the trees.
They’ll chase down an ultra-competitive niche like “How to convince 20-somethings to travel the world and make money via blogging” when they could just email – or send a letter – to a ton of professionals and say, “Hey… need any help with that tricky computer stuff?”