One Of My New Businesses

Wow, time is really flying!

I haven’t had a chance to post in a while because I’ve been so busy building my 2 new businesses. Both are taking off nicely, and since I’m no longer in the “guru business”, my life is much more relaxed and enjoyable…

I figured I’d share a few ideas with you that I’m working on right now because I think it will help you make money and that’s what this blog is about.

When starting a new business, there are a lot of thoughts and emotions that run through your head. Things like:

- Will this business make money as I put in all this time and effort?

- How much money will this business make?

- I don’t want to risk too much money in case something goes wrong.

and any number of other self doubt questions coming from the “voices in your head”.

I’ve started more than 50 businesses from scratch and purchased of 100 websites in the last 6 years, and I STILL have these questions coming up in my mind.

The fact is, there is never a guarantee that any business you start is going to make money. If anyone promises that to you, they are lying. But, as long as you are willing to put in the effort and stay focused, you will have a much greater chance of success.

One of the two businesses I’m working on right now was purchased. The other I am starting from scratch. I’m much more passionate about the one I’m starting from scratch because it is my own idea and I’m creating it from thin air.

The site I bought is making money and chugging along nicely, but I don’t have that connection with it. It almost feels like I’m just working on someone else’s project. That’s the downside to buying a site vs building a new one.

Anyway, the new site I’m building is a hybrid of an offline service mixed with a website and internet marketing aspect.

I really think this is where the money is right now. By focusing on your local market, you can avoid 99% of the competition online. The fact is, the MAJORITY of people in your local town or city have NO IDEA how the internet works.

Since I’ve been working online full time the last 6 years, I am an extreme expert compared to the offline business owners in my city. Compare me to experts who focus their businesses teaching people online, and I’m probably considered an “average guy who makes money online”.

Many of you reading this blog already have more knowledge than people in your area with offline businesses.

So, rather than being a small fish in a big pond online, you might want to consider being a big fish in a small pond offline like I’m doing right now.

Here’s why I like helping offline businesses with their online marketing:

1) Offline companies are used to paying lots of money for stuff.

Yellow page ads are $25,000 per year. Leases are up to $8,000 per month. TV commercials are $300 a day and typically generate little to no results.

Compare that to people online who are used to getting everything for free and where you can literally start a business for $15 including a domain name and hosting. There is a completely different mindset between these two types of people.

If you want to sell a training program to people online, you have to struggle to convince people to pay you $37 for your ebook. Offline, businesses will literally throw $4,000 checks at you for basically the exact same information (and not complain or ask for refunds either!).

If you can provide a do it for them service, those checks increase even more.

2) You can actually help them improve their business and feel good about what you are doing.

When you come across companies who spend $100,000+ per year on various ads and then you find out they have no way to track the effectiveness of these ads, you can have a life changing impact on their business.

Since everything online is trackable down to the penny, you can help local businesses put together ads online and show how these ads are working. Also, you can use the internet to help track the effectiveness of offline ads for these companies.

If the business is doing radio ads, simply buy a new domain name and use that in that one specific radio ad. Setup a simple hit tracking on that new domain name and you can see exactly how many people are responding to the ad.

Nobody is doing this kind of simple tracking offline, even though it is like marketing 101 online for the rest of us.

3) Little to no competition.

Since everyone wants to live the “internet lifestyle”, people are flooding strictly to the internet because they think that’s the easiest way to make money. When these people start trying to make money online, they are immediately hit with fierce competition and quickly give up their dream of making it big online.

Over the last 6 years online, I’ve seen the changes taking place and I see how much more competitive it is to work strictly online compared to a hybrid of offline and online mixed.

4) You get to work with real people.

One thing that can be hard when working online is you don’t have the personal interaction with real people.

Sure, you might have some instant messaging friends or have your buddy “supercool98″ from a web forum that you chat with, but you hardly ever talk with real humans. You spend all your time typing messages that are just words on paper.

When you work with offline companies, you get to meet some great people. Business owners in the town you live in who have lots of local connections. Some may be very wealthy business-people who want to partner with you on a new business idea.

I guess my main point is, when you think about wanting to make money, don’t limit your mindset to only setting up “adsense websites” or selling ebooks. That stuff is pocket change compared to what you could be making by doing internet marketing for offline businesses or combining your online knowledge with local business problems.

Anyone else tried this hybid model before?