The recipe for a $200K per year job

[medicalhumor]

QFT, bb's plugin gives you the flexibility of WordPress and the ability to import any .csv and have a full ready to go directory/portal in under an hour.

Wordpress + bb_wolfe's reviewpluginforwordpress.com + assorted plugins = good enough to charge $$$

Don't waste time nitpicking with anything new. I thought I needed to use something super fancy, so I fucked around with Joomla and Drupal for WAY longer than I should have.

So long, in fact, that I don't even do the directory thing. I pissed around with the idea while I got busy with other things, and still haven't had a chance to get back to it. I _do_ sell internet marketing services to local businesses. But as of yet, I don't have a directory.

One thing I do is lease websites. But yeah, still haven't done a directory.

 

[vinny lingo]

Isn't leasing sites the idea of this thread?

Y'know, it's been so long since I read the original post. Yeah. It is. However, Kimboslice's twist was to create directories (I think).

Fuck, now I don't know. Whatever. I was going to make directories and then I didn't. And someone else said they were going to make directories so I told them not to fuck around and get it done so they didn't fuck off and not do it.

</retard-rant>

 

[Barbarian]

You guys should see CitySquares.com - they charge $75/month, and have quite a few advertisers.

 

[TeeBird]

+ Rep - This is a business in 1000 words or less. Great tip on the phone tracking, that is the key that brings it all together.

Being that this post is getting pretty popular I'm going to try and give some hints of what I do to work with offline companies and some of the products I use to make it happen.

I work with a select niche (for fun let's say it's plumbers) I thus have a portal site that isn't to bad looking. It has a blog with a bunch of indian written stuff that I have someone rewrite in english for me. Total cost of those 40 posts is under $100. I have this because google likes content and it makes it look like what it is. A site about plumibing. I have this one on a domain lets says it's "listofplumbersinyourarea.com".

The home page looks something like the old citysearch homepage used to look like. Lot of links to the cities I have “plumbers” in. This then links to a page that for some reason looks alot like the sample page shoemoney had for his dental client in the article he wrote on local affiliate marketing. For the life of me I don't know why they look so similiar. But it converts well and I'm split testing it against some other lps I just had made for me (I'm lazy and don't like to make my own.) total cost of two other really quality lps $200.

How I get clients. I don’t like to cold call. So I don’t. But someone does. Thanks to the crap economy I pay someone to call and say 3 sentences and then fax or email a one page intro of what we do. I think get someone better at calling on the phone to call back the next day and talk about what was faxed or emailed. Crazy thing it works.

Why it works? I tell them I will give them 5 leads for free. If you do this write it should cost you at most $100 in PPC. After that you say that you will keep providing more (tell them once you geet your marketing dialed in you will get htem 5x more leads a month also) for XXX dollars for EVERY CLIENT they get. Don’t sell them leads youcan make more selling them clients. Tell them you know that XX% of leads turns into clients and then hold them to that when you send your weekly report saying you provided 10 calls and 2 emails that week.

But how will I know who called or emailed them. If you don’t know how to set up an aweber form that forwards to someone you should probably stop reading. The phone is a little more tricky but only in finding a provider who does all of the handful of features you need. And I found that company. It’s ifbyphone.com. What you do is by an advanced package from them it’s like $50 a month or something and you can buy as many $3 a month phone numbers as you want. You then forward these numbers to all of your clients. But the best part is that they have what is called an “Audio Whisper” when you plumber client picks up. This is the Holy Grail because now your plumber gets told by the whisper “This lead provider by XYZ plumbing referral service”. It’s fabulous and fixes the biggest problem I had the first 3 months I did this. Thank you twitter for connecting me with this service. But I digress.

That is the jist of my business model. If you have any question feel free to ask and I promise I won’t be a smart a$% back. But if I do answer your question and then ask you one about what you are doing and I don’t get back a reply I will post on this forum how big of a tool you are. Just and FYI.

 

[kelhalla2]

^^that's awesome. valuable info for sure