Emer­gency Cash Tip #9: In­ter­net Mar­ket­ing for Lo­cal Businesses

If you have any ex­pe­ri­ence with In­ter­net mar­ket­ing, you prob­a­bly know a lot more than the av­er­age lo­cal busi­ness owner. 

In many cases, lo­cal busi­nesses do not have web­sites; and do not ac­tively mar­ket their busi­nesses via the Internet.

You should take ad­van­tage of the knowl­edge and ex­pe­ri­ence you have to sell In­ter­net mar­ket­ing ser­vices to lo­cal businesses.

A Web­site Is A Must For All Lo­cal Businesses

In gen­eral, most com­pa­nies can ben­e­fit from a web pres­ence, even if it doesn’t gain them any ad­di­tional new customers.

This is why it is a good idea to con­tact small, lo­cal busi­nesses (who have Yel­low Pages list­ings, but not web sites) to of­fer to help them setup a site.

Of course, you should al­ways pre­pare in ad­vance be­fore you con­tact any com­pany. If your sales pitch is weak or ill-in­­­formed, there’s a good chance you’ll be re­jected fast.

So, start by writ­ing out a stan­dard pitch. In your pitch, make sure you com­mu­ni­cate clearly that hav­ing a web pres­ence will al­low ex­ist­ing cus­tomers to gain more in­for­ma­tion about the com­pany on­line, which has the po­ten­tial to in­crease sales, even if the cus­tomer base does not increase.

Fi­nally, con­sider start­ing a sin­gle site for a given town. On this site, cre­ate an in­dex of all busi­nesses that are will­ing to pay a small fee (per­haps $50/year, ini­tially); and then op­ti­mize the site for search en­gine traf­fic. On each business’s page, place per­ti­nent in­for­ma­tion about what they do, where they are lo­cated, and what they sell.

If you re­ally want to make an im­pact on the busi­ness owner, cre­ate a page for their busi­ness in ad­vance and put it on your site. When you make the pitch, you can call the owner, ask him to look at the site, and then get back to you about whether he would like to pay the fee to keep his business’s list­ing on your site. Re­mem­ber, you can do this with many cities and many businesses.

Lo­cal Restaurants

One good place to start is by sell­ing your ser­vices to lo­cal restau­rants. One thing you might do for lo­cal restau­rants is of­fer to get them con­nected with In­­ter­net-based or­der­ing services.

In many places in the U.S., sites like Foodler.com and Grubhub.com al­low vis­i­tors to or­der from sites on­line; how­ever, many lo­cal restau­rants do not use these sites and many not even know about them. By join­ing these sites, lo­cal busi­nesses have the op­por­tu­nity to sig­nif­i­cantly im­prove the amount of or­ders they re­ceive; and also to stream­line the process by re­ceiv­ing them via the In­ter­net, rather than over the phone.

Your role in this process would be to as­sist the restau­rants in this process. You can do this by of­fer­ing to setup Foodler.com and Grubhub.com ac­counts for nom­i­nal fee. This would en­tail col­lect­ing in­for­ma­tion about the restaurant’s menu, hours, etc.—and then sub­mit­ting it to these sites.

Af­ter you com­plete this process, you can of­fer to mar­ket these busi­nesses in other ways. For in­stance, if they do not have a web­site, you can of­fer to cre­ate and main­tain one for a small fee (per­haps for $200 for the startup, but then $50 per month there­after). Since these sites are likely to re­quire lit­tle main­te­nance, you can ac­cu­mu­late a large port­fo­lio of sites.

Now, if you’re not fa­mil­iar with web de­sign, do not worry. With­out know­ing any HTML, you can cre­ate a web­site us­ing a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) ed­i­tor. If you own a Mac, you can use iWeb. If have a PC, you might choose to do this with Front­Page or DreamWeaver. Al­ter­na­tively, you can do this us­ing a free pro­gram, such as https://kompozer.net or https://www.w3.org/Amaya.

What­ever you do, make sure that you spend enough time work­ing with the WYSIWYG ed­i­tor be­fore you try to do any work for your clients. If you do a very poor job on a site, you can ex­pect your client to be very an­gry and dis­sat­is­fied, since this will be his/her only web presence.

Sum­mary

Fre­quently, In­ter­net mar­keters over­look an im­por­tant group of buy­ers: lo­cal busi­nesses that do not have any web pres­ence. With­out even em­ploy­ing cut­t­ing-edge tech­niques, you can help these busi­nesses to gain a web pres­ence while earn­ing a hand­some re­ward in the process.