Helping small businesses build a brand and online presence. Waste of time?

[Mcslothin]

Hey everyone. I have an idea that is not one in a million, but locally I don't know anyone who does this. The idea is to approach small local businesses that do not currently have a website/logo set up, or a bad one, and offer them my services of setting up a website, getting them a logo made, and quality photographs to use on the website/instagram/personal use.

Is this worth spending my time on? I already have a domain set up that I think would be perfect for it, the name directly represents those who are dreamers and want something more in life. In a thread with a similar topic some one made a great point that those without a website that could benefit from one, will either never get one, or if they actually show interest will probably learn to do it themselves.

With that said my offer may be a little different since my packaging includes a graphic designer (logo), photography (I'm already a photographer so this will be cake), along with the website creation. I would label this all as "branding" them, or helping solidify their brand. What do you think?
Must or bust?

 

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[Michał Kóska]

If you don't try you will never know how this will work out. Remember that small businesses may have limited resources for such investment. It also depends how much time vs earnings you must spend.

 

[Baku]

I think a lot of people do it already, so you can do it too. If you'll be good at it you will have more clients than others, you will earn more than others, but it isn't something new, but you propably know it.

If you want to earn some money in slowlane way, this could be a good idea, and pretty nice.
Anyway if you need some graphic designer feel free to mail me, here are my works ) https://www.behance.net/baczynski

PS. If you develop your activity and transform it in big agency, company this can be fastlane also. Can you link your website?

 

[Mcslothin]

If you don't try you will never know how this will work out. Remember that small businesses may have limited resources for such investment. It also depends how much time vs earnings you must spend.

That's also an issue. I would have to find the right market to sell to. I'm thinking the service could have different package options. Maybe ranging from $250-$500 and $500-$1,000. The key is making them think they need to have a logo, quality photos, and a website.

As for how much time that would go into this I don't think it would be much. I could knock out a simple but elegant website with wordpress (or even squarespace to make it that much easier) in one or two nights, the photos could be taken in a day, as for the logo - I digress.

I would ideally like this to take the place of my primary income (which is already less than $1,000 a month..) so I can focus on expanding this (if it works) and/or working on other business ideas So realistically three sales per month. Four at the most.

 

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[Mcslothin]

I think a lot of people do it already, so you can do it too. If you'll be good at it you will have more clients than others, you will earn more than others, but it isn't something new, but you propably know it.

If you want to earn some money in slowlane way, this could be a good idea, and pretty nice.
Anyway if you need some graphic designer feel free to mail me, here are my works ) https://www.behance.net/baczynski

Thank you! Yes that's what I meant in my first sentence by I know this isn't a "one in a million" idea. It has worked but I would like others' opinions as to if I should focus my time and energy on something else.

I'll definitely take a look at it! However I'll be doing all designing myself to cut down costs. If business ends up switching lanes I absolutely want to outsource as much of the work as I can. I'll keep in touch.

 

[Baku]

Promote yourself in social sites from now, create profiles on behance.net, dribbble.com, flickr.com. You can also search job in this field on oDesk.com.

Ps. maybe some youtube channel or blog about photography, design could be helpful.. : ))

 

[Mcslothin]

Would anyone have any ideas on how I could get traffic to the site? Of course most of my business would be through cold calling and face-to-face sales, but I would like to generate some sort of traffic to the site. How could I engage interest? All I can think of is blog posts, but that's so mundane and out-of-date seeming.

 

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[ChrisJTurner]

The thing with local companies with no internet presence, they have old business models and it's an absolute nightmare convincing them to take a leap of faith.
If they have no website or logo, they have not clearly designed their identity and doubt they have enough money to pay for the complete remodel and the time it will take to convince them.

I have experience of this and trust me, it's a long arduous road.

Maybe work with companies that have a logo (which needs improving) and an unsuccessful website, that'll be a bit easier I think.

 

[Mcslothin]

The thing with local companies with no internet presence, they have old business models and it's an absolute nightmare convincing them to take a leap of faith.
If they have no website or logo, they have not clearly designed their identity and doubt they have enough money to pay for the complete remodel and the time it will take to convince them.

I have experience of this and trust me, it's a long arduous road.

Maybe work with companies that have a logo (which needs improving) and an unsuccessful website, that'll be a bit easier I think.

Ideally I would be going after those with a very badly set up website.

 

[Andy Black]

Paid search? People searching for website themes, logos, website designers?

Odesk etc.

Plenty of businesses doing this badly, and well.

Listen to
www.tropicalmba.com/consulting
www.tropicalmba.com/services
www.tropicalmba.com/7daystartup


Just thought... other potential clients are digital marketing agencies or freelancers like myself. One of our big problems is our client websites suck.

 

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[ChrisJTurner]

Ideally I would be going after those with a very badly set up website.

Yeah, that's the best bet!
Ateast they understand the concept of Internet.
You'll just have to put together some metrics / stats to show them what they are missing out on and typically what rivals are doing in the Internet space.

I think if you target this market, it's a great idea.

For traffic, you could utilise white label SEO.

 

[Baku]

Think who can be intrested in your service, but more precisely. Small food shops, little-known sportsmen, organisations, bloggers, websites, developers, construction companies, electronic shops, florists, online shops?

I mean people from different markets. Aand then search places where they meet together. For example facebook groups, type in fb search "work in developing" "android programmers", "hairdressers" whatever comes to your mind. In such group can be 50 or 5000 people. Yup, you have contact to 5 000 guys who code android apps. Offer them that you can brand them and help increase their income.

You need a good message, writed by copywrighter best. Look for clients actively, don't be passive, why they should choose you? Why they need a logo? What benefits they get?

Then deliver them high quality service and they will feature you to others.

Put your heart into it, take intense action and the results for sure will.

 

[Andy Black]

^^^ Good answer, I forgot about forums and other "hangouts".

This would beat paid media hands down (paid media is typically "cold traffic" because they don't know anything about you when they visit your landing page).

Determine a niche to focus on, partly by whether there are forums where they are active-ish online talking amongst themselves.

Let's say you pick B&B owners.

Find forums for B&B owners and see how active they are. Do they have sections where they ask how to build their website, how to get more bookings, who they recommend for website development, etc?

Now go hang out there adding useful content.

Do a case study in there where you take a member's site and make it better. Show results in increased business/bookings.

Spend 80% of your time as a practitioner, and 20% of your time preaching about what you've done. (Numbers vary obviously... but you get the point.)

Get known as the B&B website guy.

 

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[Mcslothin]

Thanks a lot for all the advice guys. I think the first thing I need to knock out before I get started on this is going to be to put together solid selling points. Pretty much a winning sales pitch to give to anyone I would come across - regardless of the niche - then modify it to fit each situation.


I have one question about the name also. I own Dreamersalive.com. I really like the name and I think it would fit very well with what I want to do. Small business owners are generally dreamers and people who want to do more with their life. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? I would also like to use the tagline I had set with the name previously, which is Lifestyle of the Inspired.

 

[EN_VY]

A while back, I targeted car dealers that didn't have a website, and charged them a one time fee. Cars.com offers dealers websites, and their lowest package is $99 per month. My pitch was that in a year the dealers would pay 1200, and the website still wouldn't be theirs. Although Cars.com offers marketing packages that lets you post on the cars.com site, as well as ebay and others, those packages run around 500.00 a month.. So my main target was dealers that just needed a place to post their inventory ( I basically matched what the $99 cars.com package did)

In a month I was able to pull in around 10K. It was all door to door by the way. There was many times when I visited a dealer for the first time, and within 30 minutes, walk out with a deposit check. Feeling is amazing, reminds me of what TMF says... If you create value, the money will come.

 

[Alan at SE]

It's not the most fun job but it certainly helps with your money management skills, time management skills, people communication skills, and process skills. But I do know tons of guys making low to mid five figures a month doing this. The problem is that it gets to a point where scalability becomes an issue without external help.

 

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[BigBrianC]

It's basically social media/branding consulting.

 

[Mcslothin]

It's not the most fun job but it certainly helps with your money management skills, time management skills, people communication skills, and process skills. But I do know tons of guys making low to mid five figures a month doing this. The problem is that it gets to a point where scalability becomes an issue without external help.

Low to mid five figures a month would be way beyond what I hope to achieve from this. If you read one of my previous posts I say that ideally I would like this to be able to meet or exceed my pay at my current job (which is only $1,000). The reason for this is so that I can focus on working for myself and any extra money can go towards more scalable businesses. So that issue is no problem to me at all.

A while back, I targeted car dealers that didn't have a website, and charged them a one time fee. Cars.com offers dealers websites, and their lowest package is $99 per month. My pitch was that in a year the dealers would pay 1200, and the website still wouldn't be theirs. Although Cars.com offers marketing packages that lets you post on the cars.com site, as well as ebay and others, those packages run around 500.00 a month.. So my main target was dealers that just needed a place to post their inventory ( I basically matched what the $99 cars.com package did)

In a month I was able to pull in around 10K. It was all door to door by the way. There was many times when I visited a dealer for the first time, and within 30 minutes, walk out with a deposit check. Feeling is amazing, reminds me of what TMF says... If you create value, the money will come.

That's not a bad idea at all. I do a lot of automotive photography and a while back I was thinking of going to locally owned small dealerships that had no/bad quality inventory photos and pitch how high quality detailed photos could make their advertising and marketing much more effective resulting in more leads and ultimately more sales. Combining that idea with this sounds pretty good.
If you don't mind me asking when you went in door to door and walked out with a check - was there any contractual signatures? Also who did you ask to speak with when you walked in? I feel like part time salesmen are not the people to pitch ideas for the company to. I'm also young (20 yrs) so I'll have to try much harder to get these people to take me seriously.

 

[Bort]

We run an independent pharmacy in the UK (small business) and are creating our own website and sell our over the counter products online (we already do on Ebay and Amazon).

I would definitely have accepted your offer of maximum $500 to set up the website, logo, photos etc as this so far has proved a very long process with a few problems along the way doing it by myself. I've hired a web developer who's done a good job, but due to other issues (e.g. card payment processing) it's been 2 months since we've got the ball rolling and we're still not ready to go live. I know now in hindsight it would be have been easier if just one person (like yourself) sorted it all out, but now I have to find photographers etc to finish it off. My only concern was to do everything at the cheapest price, but now I wish I just had one person sort EVERYTHING out requiring minimal effort from me

I think this would work for those businesses looking to go online and who don't have much experience with the things you offer. Especially if you offer a full package deal with your own ideas leaving no stone unturned for the small business.

 

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[Mcslothin]

We run an independent pharmacy in the UK (small business) and are creating our own website and sell our over the counter products online (we already do on Ebay and Amazon).

I would definitely have accepted your offer of maximum $500 to set up the website, logo, photos etc as this so far has proved a very long process with a few problems along the way doing it by myself. I've hired a web developer who's done a good job, but due to other issues (e.g. card payment processing) it's been 2 months since we've got the ball rolling and we're still not ready to go live. I know now in hindsight it would be have been easier if just one person (like yourself) sorted it all out, but now I have to find photographers etc to finish it off. My only concern was to do everything at the cheapest price, but now I wish I just had one person sort EVERYTHING out requiring minimal effort from me

I think this would work for those businesses looking to go online and who don't have much experience with the things you offer. Especially if you offer a full package deal with your own ideas leaving no stone unturned for the small business.

That's a great response. Thank you for the info. This forum has definitely been useful. Ask for advice from those doing it and I get advice from those needing it. Thanks to everyone so far.

 

[David Wills]

Hi Mcslothin,

I think that it is a brilliant idea. I think that when it comes online business, trust is extremely important and this trust is achieved through a good presence and branding.

My opinion for you will be how important is the first approach. I think that you can create a profile, prove how good you are, what can you add to the business and then get customers get to you. I am not saying have a passive campaign in marketing because obviously this does not work. What I mean is that if you approach someone saying your website is not good you can get negative responses. Firstly, it could be his or her own work and take that as a personal offence. Secondly and more important, branding goes with the kind of customer that you have and you, as external person to the organisation, cannot know all kind of consumers that this particular organisation should have.

In any case, I think that the idea is brilliant and it has a really competitive price compared to UK designers. Best of luck and keep us updated!

 

[Mcslothin]

ex

Hi Mcslothin,

I think that it is a brilliant idea. I think that when it comes online business, trust is extremely important and this trust is achieved through a good presence and branding.

My opinion for you will be how important is the first approach. I think that you can create a profile, prove how good you are, what can you add to the business and then get customers get to you. I am not saying have a passive campaign in marketing because obviously this does not work. What I mean is that if you approach someone saying your website is not good you can get negative responses. Firstly, it could be his or her own work and take that as a personal offence. Secondly and more important, branding goes with the kind of customer that you have and you, as external person to the organisation, cannot know all kind of consumers that this particular organisation should have.

In any case, I think that the idea is brilliant and it has a really competitive price compared to UK designers. Best of luck and keep us updated!

I absolutely agree that saying your website is bad can have negative impacts.I think instead of saying "A and B are bad on the site" it could be rephrased to "I see you've done A and B, it could potentially be improved by doing X and Y. It can really help project professionalism leading to increased sales. I can help with this, would you be interested?"

Absolutely. However, simply working with the organisation/business I would of course first figure out what it's all about, as well as their market. Then comes the "market research". Which thinking of it now in that perspective, could be a selling point to add to the "package".

 

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[Andy Black]

I do a lot of automotive photography and a while back I was thinking of going to locally owned small dealerships that had no/bad quality inventory photos and pitch how high quality detailed photos could make their advertising and marketing much more effective resulting in more leads and ultimately more sales.

Real estate agents too?

 

[healthstatus]

Ideally I would be going after those with a very badly set up website.

Nope, those people reply, I tried that and it didn't work.

You are selling the wrong thing, they don't want branding and a website, they want customers.

Build yourself a local site that promotes all the various trades in your area (painting, plumbing, electrical, etc), then have people send in their info when looking for a person to do that sort of work, give a few leads to prospects, tell them you can build them a website that generates leads like this for $2k up front and $200/month for maintenance and you will have all the business you want.

 

[Kevin90]

@Mcslothin - thanks for creating this thread. I have been considering starting a side hustle type business and the social media management model has my attention. A lot of restaurants and shops in the suburbs where I live have virtually no online presence. Even if they do, it is very outdated and does not represent the establishment well.

The biggest hurdle seems to stem from the owners of these restaurants being more "old school" in their business perspective. They simply do not see value in having a strong online/social presence. Perhaps our idea is trying to force feed them a service they simply have no interest in?

 

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[randomnumber314]

Your idea has merit, and there is money to be made, but...let me tell you a story. I had a service company recently. I realized that I was spending $1 in ads to get 40-50 in revenue. When I close the company I saw huuuge potential in selling that ROI to service companies. So I called them, and we chatted, and I called, and we spoke.

I called at least 300 companies from concrete to plumbers to heating guys. I told them about the ROI I could get them, I told them about much more business they would get. They were stoked...0 committed to spending money. The dirt secret is most "guys in a van" don't want to scale--whether it's fear or a hundred other reasons, they are as busy as they want to be.

So, yes, there is ample room in the market to brand companies with no online presence, just be warned that your customer acquisition process is going to be very, very, very hard. That's probably good, because it's a hurdle. Just be warned, it's probably a 1:500 call to conversion ratio.

 

[Mcslothin]

@Mcslothin - thanks for creating this thread. I have been considering starting a side hustle type business and the social media management model has my attention. A lot of restaurants and shops in the suburbs where I live have virtually no online presence. Even if they do, it is very outdated and does not represent the establishment well.

The biggest hurdle seems to stem from the owners of these restaurants being more "old school" in their business perspective. They simply do not see value in having a strong online/social presence. Perhaps our idea is trying to force feed them a service they simply have no interest in?

There will definitely be people more "old school". At the end of the day you'll have to make the decision to move on or to keep pitching to them. In my opinion if they're stuck on online presence unimportant then I won't waste my time. There are hand-fulls of leads to move on to. Now I understand some would call this giving up, but you just have to know when to walk away. You're not giving up on the goal, just the point that may or may not help you reach it.

 

[Mcslothin]

Your idea has merit, and there is money to be made, but...let me tell you a story. I had a service company recently. I realized that I was spending $1 in ads to get 40-50 in revenue. When I close the company I saw huuuge potential in selling that ROI to service companies. So I called them, and we chatted, and I called, and we spoke.

I called at least 300 companies from concrete to plumbers to heating guys. I told them about the ROI I could get them, I told them about much more business they would get. They were stoked...0 committed to spending money. The dirt secret is most "guys in a van" don't want to scale--whether it's fear or a hundred other reasons, they are as busy as they want to be.

So, yes, there is ample room in the market to brand companies with no online presence, just be warned that your customer acquisition process is going to be very, very, very hard. That's probably good, because it's a hurdle. Just be warned, it's probably a 1:500 call to conversion ratio.

Yeah I definitely expect lots of excitement with little commitment. However I don't plan on aiming at the guys in a van, but the guys in business attire in an office. I also don't plan on trying to pitch my services to a company I feel can't genuinely benefit from it.

 

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