Sept. 27, 2012
A site member has a problem. He is trying to make money with two hopeless projects. He has a third in mind. The third one could work.
I have the following projects. One is tutoring. This keeps my nose above water. A poor use of my time since it is so underpaid. But I started this last year on behalf of the children of a couple of friends. The second project is writing articles for a website that a friend is driving traffic to. For this to work moneywise, I have to produce 3-5 short articles on popular topics each day. It starts at about $10/day; he says it can only go up from there. The third project will be writing ads for local businesses. For this business, I'll need to spend time with company owners, getting to know their business.
The goal of my site was to write a few articles a day, business articles. I want to promote businesses. Promote its owner, product, or service. When I asked to see a sample of a press release, I think I just got lazy and was hoping that a resource would kick-start me to get me moving again. I'm disappointed with the press releases that I see online. Was thinking that they should resemble more of a sales letter than one that just announces the opening of a new restaurant.
I've been working these past few months on building a wordpress website where I have placed my few micro-stream projects. The time invested was worth it than to pay someone $85 an hour to build it for me. Now I know a little on how to build websites; as I continue building mine, I might be able to provide such a service a year from now.
The site member has the right idea. He is investing time rather than money. This is the way that most new businesses should be designed. The person launching it should not commit too much money. This is what I did to launch my publishing career, and I have done it repeatedly ever since then. I'm in the information business, so I launch newsletters, e-letters, and websites.
The tutorial project is a dead end. He should immediately drop that project. It will never pay him enough money. It will affect the lives of only a handful of children, and it is draining his most important resource, which is his time. Absolutely, categorically, he must drop this project by the end of the week. There is no hope for it. If it works, he is doomed, and if it doesn't work, he's wasting his time. There is no way that he can monetize this project, and his time is too valuable to waste.
The second project, writing articles for somebody else, is also a loser. If a person writes an article for somebody else, then he ought to be paid for it up front. The minimum that he should be paid is $25 per article. If he writes three articles a day, that is $75. That is nice as supplemental income, but there's no way to make a living at it. Frankly, I think he ought to be paid $50 an article. But, for somebody who is starting a site, he cannot afford $50 an article.
This means that the individual is spending time that he does not have to supply somebody else with no money with articles that are not important. If the articles were important, they would be worth at least $25 apiece. So, by definition, they are not important.
Anyone who gets strung along by means of a promise that "one of these days the articles will be worth something" is naïve. He is being strung along by somebody who knows that he can get the person for $10. Why should that person ever raise the payment to what it ought to be, which is at least $50 an article? There is no way that the buyer is ever going to readjust his thinking to imagine that an article might be worth $50. He is building his business based on paying peanuts, and he will not readjust his thinking if the money ever starts coming in.
This leaves the third project. He writes for himself. In other words, he writes for what he hopes will be an audience, and the audience will for some reason pay money. Of course, the readers will never pay him a dime. They may pay a local business money.
The site owner may be able to get business owners to pay him something, assuming that his articles are essentially press releases. They are business-promotion articles, and maybe a businessman will pay to have that article posted. The trouble is, if the person does not have a lot of traffic to his site, the businessman is not going to pay the money to get a press release written for posting there. So, it is a major problem for anyone to build a site based on traffic. Who is going to come to a site to read press releases? What benefit is a local resident going to get from the site that promotes local businesses? Would you visit a site like this? I know I wouldn't.
So, he has a problem. He has two problems. The first problem is the problem of building traffic to a site that will emotionally compel a return every day. This means he has to have powerful copy, and reader benefits-laden copy. In other words, the articles have to be advertisements. But it is a lot more profitable to sit down and write advertising copy for somebody, and charge that person for the service.
He needs to design a website for each business, plus a landing page for each product. He is really in the advertising business, and he ought to face this fact squarely. I think he knows this. He needs to have a way to get people to come to the site, in order to read the articles, and then use the articles to direct people to landing pages to promote particular products. This is a multi-step process of selling products.
The overall idea is a good one, in terms of the need to bring traffic to an advertising page, but since the businessman does not know how to write an advertisement, and he does not know how to write a press release, and he does not have a commercial website, and he is a complete dolt about anything related to the Internet, he will never be able to convert clicks to his webpage into money.
The individual who creates the webpage has got to do everything. He has got to interview the businessman, write the article, post the article, drive new traffic to his own site, create the webpage for the business, create the advertising page for the business, show the guy how to set up a business account, and do this over and over and over. The only way to make this pay is to charge for the complete service.
A businessman should be willing to pay at least $2000 for the initial service. That means he needs to have a website, a way to get money from it, which means a merchant's account, and someone to write the advertising copy for each product. The businessman needs someone to write the press releases. He needs some way to get people to see the press release. All of this is going to cost him money. He knows this.
If a person can write advertising copy, he need never starve again. If a person can set up a website, set up a merchant account, and go through whatever is needed to write a press release, he will have a stream of income. Businessmen know they need this, but they don't know how to get it.
I would create a low-cost membership website, and I would create videos and training materials on teaching businessmen how to do this. The materials really would train them, but basically the materials are sales devices. They are saying the following: "Yes, in theory you can do this, but you don't have enough time to do it. I am an expert on how to do it, as I am proving by the fact that you're reading my materials. Therefore, I will set up the whole thing as a turnkey operation for you, and I will write advertising copy for a product once a month, and I will create a press release for the item, and all it will cost you is $2000 to set up the initial operation, and $300 per advertisement and press release."
Any local businessman who would turn down this offer is not a good prospect. He does not know anything about marketing, he is not going to be successful, and you should ignore him. I would jump at that kind of an offer if I were a businessman.
So, the initial website should appear to be a how-to website, which it technically is, but in fact it is a front door to a back-door offer. The back-door offer involves the creation of an initial website and online ordering program. The businessman knows he needs this, but he does not know how to get it. Anyone who has the knowledge of how to create a commercial website using WordPress.org materials is in a position to help local businessmen do what they know they ought to do, but they don't know how to do.
I think this business strategy would work in almost any urban zip code in the United States. It would certainly work with any businessman who has a constant stream of products that he is trying to sell. If the products have a price over a couple hundred dollars, he needs a website and landing page advertisements to sell these products. If the business is a service-oriented business, then he needs constant repeat sales, which means that he needs a way to contact these people on a regular basis to invite them in to spend their money. He needs a regular e-mail operation system, and businessmen do not know how to create this, either. So, a person could offer this service on a regular basis at something like $100 per mailing.
The idea is to sell a service to someone who knows he needs the service, and who has money to pay for the service. That is Bill Myers rule of success: "Find out what people want, and sell it to them."
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