Make Money Creating Websites For Offline Businesses

This is probably one of the easiest ways to get started making money – I wouldn’t recommend it for a long term thing, even though it is possible, but if you want to see success before you try internet marketing it is always easier to start offline than online (less competition, it’s easier to sell face to face and so on).

We’ve covered a few shady / blackhat things on here so it’s time to cover something a bit cleaner. Don’t worry, we’ll still be walking you through all kinds of ways to make money (Casey has a guide on eWhoring coming up) but we aim to stick to mostly whitehat stuff.

If you want to make money online, you’ll need to know how to create a basic website. No matter what you do related to internet marketing, having the ability to setup websites will save you a lot of time and money. Me, personally – I can only play around with Wordpress and basic HTML templates, but that’s more than enough.

Wordpress is the BEST ever creation to come out in the webmaster world – it reduces tweaking code to none if you don’t want to and there are hundreds of free, high quality themes and decent quality plugins that will make your job so much easier. If you don’t know what it is, or how to use it – we’re not going to cover that here, but Google it or check out their main site. You can also set up HTML websites if you prefer doing this – Open Source Web Design has some nice designs. If you have a bit of cash to spare, buy licenses to WooThemes and Revolution – they’re all you need.

What you will be doing here is offering businesses that don’t have a website already the chance to have one created for them (for a price, of course). It’s not as difficult as it sounds – I asked a few of my dad’s friends the first time I did this and got clients easily. First try asking friends, or people you know that are running their own businesses – you can offer your services at a discount or even for free in exchange for solid (aim for video) testimonials that will help you down the line.

You will need to approach the businesses yourself, or work with a friend – contrary to belief you do not need to have a popular website of your own to profit off this model. Obviously if you want to offer them further services (marketing, SEO etc) you should have some experience in the area but as all you’re doing is setting up a basic website all you need to know is how to outsource.

Treat business owners as friends first, and customers second, and you’ll make much more money.

Ask them what they want to achieve with their website.

Tell them the benefits of having one.

Show them successful businesses in their niche that are benefiting from having a website (for example if you approached a local restaurant you could point them at your local McDonalds website).

Tell them what exactly they’ll get from you if they hire your services. Make the package so appealing that there’s no way in hell they’ll turn you down.

I like to offer the domain, the website set up, hosting, maintenance and content updates. I’ve charged anywhere between $500 to upwards of $1,000 for a simple 5-10 page website and the thing is… businesses are ecstatic with what they receive.

If you look offline, you’ll notice that local services can often charge tens of thousands of dollars for websites that look like shit, like they were designed in five minutes using Dreamweaver. If you can offer them a better solution at a fraction of the price, who’s going to turn you down?

Make sure you take care of anything ‘techie’ – ask the business owner what they want on their website, how they want it to look and you can take care of the rest. Of course, keep them updated via email or phone and you could even run other ideas (like sticking up an opt in form, personalized emails or videos depending on the niche). Don’t rip them off but conversely don’t sell yourself short.

The reason I don’t recommend this as a long term thing (and the reason I stopped doing it) is that although it can be easy money, especially if you outsource it… it becomes too much like a normal job as you have to keep looking for clients. Exactly the same reason I stopped freelancing. The whole point of IM is passive income streams, or (at least for me) using your creativity to destroy and make yourself huge amounts of income… for me, this model can become repetitive fast.

Of course, it’s not a bad way to get together your first four, five figures capital to invest in your online projects.

Now… as for actually setting up the website.

As I’ve mentioned repeatedly, I love outsourcing. Partly because I’m lazy, partly because I don’t have the skills to do the stuff myself (or it would take me too long to do it).

The best place to find cheap people to outsource to is job boards like Elance, GetAFreelancer, RentACoder etc (need to pay to list). You can also try forums like Digital Point. Make sure you get each freelancer you work with on some sort of email / instant messenger so you can keep on using them (even when you stop with the offline thing).

You shouldn’t aim to pay more than $50 – $100 for a fully setup, customized (custom logo if need or customized colours) website. When you’re charging $500… you can see, the rest is profit.

You may want to do the work yourself even, if you’re capable.

Keep in touch with business owners, give them a call every so often to see how things are going – you’ll often find that they want various updates or have friends that want to use your services. Nothing sells you better than a happy customer telling their friends.

Sorry for the delay in posting – we were waiting for the new theme to be done before the next theme went up but the coder has proved surprisingly difficult to contact over the last week and a half.

One of the newer features of posts on this site is that we will try to reply to questions – so if there’s something about this specific method that you don’t understand, drop a comment and we’ll try to respond. Cheers!

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