The Lockwood Letter

Right now there is a great opportunity that a few people are taking advantage of: helping local businesses (such as stores, restaurants, professionals, etc.) market their businesses online.

Even though it seems like just about everyone in the Western world uses the Internet, you might be shocked how many businesses still don’t have a website. This is especially true of the “mom and pop” businesses that are not part of a chain. I’m talking about Mary’s Cafe, Yourtown Gift Shop, Sally’s Hair Salon, etc., not McDonald’s, Best Buy, or Walmart.

Many of those who do have websites aren’t getting very much out of them. The most common reason for that is that they hired a web designer who made them a pretty but useless site. Many web designers are great at graphics and programming, but they usually know little about marketing. This results in sites that do nothing to bring customers into a business. These sites are basically just expensive brochures or business cards.

In my research I’ve found hardly any local sites that even had an email optin form, which is usually the best way these businesses can get customers coming back again and again.

Next time you go out, start paying attention. Check to see if the business mentions their website at all, on their door or window, by the cash register, or somewhere else where their customers will see it. (If they had a site, they would let their customers know about it, wouldn’t they?)

When was the last time you went in a place like that and they asked you to sign up for their email list? That’s so rare that it really stands out.

Many of these places have dozens or hundreds of people walking into their business every day, yet they don’t even try to keep in touch with them.

Which of these do you think would be easier- to give those people coming in the choice of joining a list to get discounts, news, and specials, or to bring in new people using typical untargeted and untrackable TV, radio, newspaper, and Yellow Pages ads?

Here is one of the simplest and most effective things you can do for these business owners- build them a one page site with an optin form (a squeeze page) or add that to their existing site. I’ve seen people charging $400 - $1500 for that simple service.

Can you build a simple site like that, or find someone to do it for you?

(If not, I have to wonder why you are even reading this!)

The next step is to charge them a monthly fee for their ongoing email marketing. In other words, you maintain the list and send the emails for them. People are charging $200 - 500 a month for this service.

Some clients will want to do that themselves. That’s fine; you can charge them a fee to teach them how to do it and move on to the next client. But you’ll probably find most of them would rather just pay to have it done for them, just like I would rather take my car to the quick oil change place than do the work myself.

Do the math- you wouldn’t need too many clients to make a nice living at those rates.

I can already hear people thinking, “Who would pay $500 a month for that?”. If that’s you, you’re thinking like a consumer, not a business owner. If you check the prices for radio, TV, and newspaper advertising, you’ll find that’s not a lot of money.

This type of email marketing is just one service you can offer.

I have to admit I was skeptical the first time I heard about this.

I thought it might work if I were a born salesman, which I’m not. (You don’t have to be.)

I wondered why these clients wouldn’t just hire a web design firm. (I’ve already explained that, but I forgot to mention that the fees those firms charge are often way higher than the numbers I’ve mentioned, for sites that don’t produce results.)

I thought of a bunch more excuses, but those were the main ones. But I kept hearing more and more stories of people doing this successfully (including some I know personally) that I finally had to just jump in. Some of them outsource almost all of the work and still make nice profit margins.

I started looking for resources on providing this type of service, and one of the best I found is from a guy in Australia who has been doing this for years. He has a great deal right now, less than $20: Being a Local Internet Marketing Consultant

If you live anywhere near civilization, you can do this. I’m in a town of about 25,000 people, and there are more potential clients within 10-20 miles of me than I could handle in a lifetime.

The great thing is that I’m not competing with the whole world, just people in my local area. Actually there’s no real competition since so few people are doing this, compared to the number of businesses that can use this service. Compare that to trying to sell the same ebook to people when 1000 others are also selling it or even giving it away.

If you can build a simple web page, you can do this. That’s a skill you should have by now if you’re serious, but as I said above, you can pay someone to do that for you.

Unlike many opportunities, it doesn’t cost much to start this business. There’s no $997 course to buy (at least that I’m aware of). If you already have a website you probably already have the software you need… the other expenses are minimal, like business cards (which are optional).

You may be concerned about bad economic conditions. You might have experienced a drop in online sales lately. That makes it even more important to diversify and find new sources of income. The really good thing is that in a slow economy, local business owners need your help more, not less. Smart business owners do more marketing when times are tough, not less.

You could literally help someone in your town save his or her business and help people keep their jobs by offering this service, just by helping them keep customers coming in the door. If you’ve ever walked around a shopping center or business district where half the storefronts are empty (but didn’t used to be), you know what a sad sight that is.

Now is a great time to get going: Working with Offline Businesses

If you start doing this (or already are), write me and let me know how it’s going. I’m in a mastermind group where we are sharing ideas on this, and I’d love to get your input.

Willie Crawford has come up with a way to quickly get top rankings in Google and other search engines, and it’s nothing like any SEO info you might have seen before.

This has nothing to with writing articles, begging for links, keyword density, or anything like that, and there’s nothing blackhat about it.

You can grab this right now for under $10: Get Top Rankings

If you don’t see the value in that, I don’t know what else to say.

I recently bought a new PC, and I didn’t feel like buying yet another copy of Microsoft Office, so I decided to try an alternative.

Sun has released an office suite comparable to Microsoft Office, but it’s free.

It’s called OpenOffice, and it includes programs similar to Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Access, plus a graphics program.

You can download it here.

Versions are available for Windows, Mac, or Linux. You can order a CD for a small fee if you’d rather not download the software.

I haven’t gone through it feature-by-feature, but it seems pretty comparable to Microsoft’s version. It can even use the same file formats, so you can work with your old Word, Excel, or Powerpoint files easily. One nice thing it has that Word lacks is the ability to save a document in PDF format, so if you go with OpenOffice, you won’t need to get Adobe Acrobat or another PDF creator.

For some reason, Sun left out an email program comparable to Outlook, so I went looking for that piece of the puzzle.

I found two free Outlook clones: Spicebird and Evolution. Both looked good and included features similar to Outlook for email, contacts, calendar, and so on.

Unlike OpenOffice, neither of the email programs works directly with Outlook data files (.pst), but both include an import feature. The catch is that Outlook has to be installed on your computer for the import to work.

I’m not sure what the point of this is, since if you have Outlook, why would you be looking for a clone of it?

One suggested way to get around this is to download a free trial of Outlook from Microsoft’s website and install it to do your import.

I tried that with both Spicebird and Evolution after moving my pst file over from my old computer, and even with Outlook on the new PC, neither program could correctly import my old email.

If you’re starting fresh, either of those would be a good alternative (I would go with Spicebird), but since I need to access my old Outlook data, I’m going to have to stick with Outlook (which I can buy separately once my trial ends in a few months).

If you know of another Outlook clone that can properly handle old Outlook data, please post a comment about it here.

I’ll post more in the future about free alternatives to expensive software.