Starting Your Offline Empire
“Whenever you see a successful business, someone made a courageous decision.”
-Peter Drucker
The Basics
When starting any business there are a few things that you should have in place so you can present your business to other local business owners and be deemed an authority. Some of the items mentioned in the section are general things that any small business owner needs others are things specifically for Internet Marketers.
Business Needs
Business name
- Think about the image that you want to portray when you’re picking your business name and what you want your company to represent. The most basic of course can simply be <Your Name> Marketing Group or <Your Name> Internet Marketing. You can also go with something more general like Local Marketing Experts LLC . Either way having a real business name is better then approaching a small business owner and saying “Hi I’m <Your Name> and I’m a freelance internet marketer and I can rank your website in Google.”
Business License
- Before I begin this section I would like to say that the information is in no way shape or form legal advice and you should consult with proper legal representation. With that being said I would suggest that any new business start a LLC (Limited Liability Company). In most states you can visit your local courthouse and set this up for a nominal fee. You also have the option of visiting a website like Legalzoom and completing the paper work online. Either way once everything is set you will be able to do things like open bank accounts in your company name, fill tax returns etc.
Business Cards / Marketing Material
- Next you may want to invest in some branding material for your business. For example you will need business cards (VistaPrint), which you can leave with prospects and clients. There are plenty of templates to chose from you just want to make sure your basic information is readily available: Business Name, Your Name, Address, Phone Number and Website.
- Invest in other office supplies as well including company letterheads, brochures, and flyers. You can visit GraphicRiver to get great packages for everything that you will need to brand your new business.
Now those are some of the basic things that any small business will need when starting up. As a new small business owner this includes you. Investing the money in these items shows that you are serious about the success of your new business. Moving on, the following items are must haves for someone starting an internet marketing business.
Web Marketing Needs
Business Website
- You will need to get a domain name (does NOT have to be keyword rich) and create a website to promote your offline services. Personally I suggest using WordPress for all of your website needs. There are plenty of templates to choose from, you can even outsource the work if you like. Your website is very important because it basically is proof that you can do what it is your selling.
- Now it doesn’t have to be some expert looking blog with thousands of post. A few pages including: services offered, portfolio, testimonials, a slider and contact page will suffice.
Mobile Optimized Site
- If you are using WordPress as I suggested you will have two options for mobile options. First you can use a theme that is “responsive” which means your website automatically adjust to any screen size it is being displayed on. You also have the option of downloading plugins which convert your website into mobile friendly versions.
Social Media accounts
- Nice optimized social media accounts are a must for your business especially if you will be promoting these services.
Payment Processing
The next big question I get asked by those starting a new business is, “what do you use to process payments?” The easiest and most effective is PayPal. Everyone knows and trust PayPal so you don’t need to explain to offline clients what it is. I use PayPal to collect payments from all of my clients. Now you may have heard of horror stories about PayPal accounts being frozen, however that has never happened to me and I don’t think it will happen to you. As I mentioned before once you set up an LLC for your new business you will also be able to set up a bank account for that business, when that is done you will be to also create a PayPal Business account as well. It is very easy to do and this makes it much easier to separate your business gains from personals gains. In the event that you want to research other payment process companies here are two other popular choices.
- FreshBooks has been around a long time and lots of business owners use Freshbooks for their payment processing needs.
WePay is an online payment processor similar to PayPal. However it is not as well known. It does include many of the same features as PayPay. Finally one important part to any Internet Marketing Business are the tools that we use to achieve our marketing goals. With that in mind I would like to show a list of the tools that I use most often in my internet marketing. Now I have tested and wasted a lot of money on bogus internet marketing tools, and some that were too time consuming to learn how to use so they are not shown on this list. Theses tools are the best of the best in terms of what’s needed for an OFFLINE Marketing business.
- Quite simply…. “old faithful”
- This tool is a nice combonation tool for keyword research and Pay Per Click research
- This tool is the swiss knife of my offline marketing efforts. You can pretty run your offline business using this tool only
- This is the only tool that I use for my backlink analysis. Best of all they offer a free 90 day trail, which is more than enough time for you to get real value out of the tool!
- The tool is crucial in both my initial client website analysis and competition analysis. This tool will show you all of the keywords that a website currently ranks for and all of the PPC keywords the website currently targets. It also creates great graphs which I use in my initial client proposal. This is a must have tool.
- This tool is absolutely amazing, it automatically builds backlinks to your backlinks. This helps makes your backlinks more authoritative and creates more link juice. I use this tool on all of my backlinking strategies.
- This is the easiest and cheapest outsourcer you can find. Most of the work is quality and you can find outsourcers that you can use for the long run.
- We all know that search engines are relying heavily on social factors when it comes to the pages they rank. Well This handy tool will automatically set up social bookmarking accounts and automatically create high PR social backlinks for your sites. This tool literally saves me hours of work and makes my rankings skyrocket.
- This is a handy time tracking software. Keeping track of your time is very important especially if your a “One Man Army” or if you charge for work by the hour.
- Project management can become very difficult if you are keeping track of everything your doing at all times throughout the month. This is a great solution for your project management needs.
Local Business PLR
- You may want to invest in some Offline Marketing PLR or create some of your own. There are warriors that have great material out there to help you promote / introduce your offline marketing services.
- Call tracking for all of your offline marketing needs. Call tracking enables you to see exactly how many leads you marketing efforts produced. Call Fire in particular has some great features that you can use to get new clients for your business. Highly recommend.
What’s Next
Now that you’ve made it through training number one, its time for the hard part…. TAKING ACTION! To begin make sure you start getting the items you need for your starting your business. That would be setting up your LLC, ordering some marketing material and getting your domain name. Also do some research on each one of the offline marketing tools I covered and test a couple out. We will be covering all of the tools throughout the next thirty days so it will be nice if you can use the tool when we cover it in the training.