I used to do a lot of offline marketing of online products and made some good money. What I mean by this is selling sites/hosting/newsletter hosting to small, local businesses. I did this when I was tight on cash, since it can usually be done in a weekend: research a local group of businesses (ie. dentists or furniture stores) using Google Maps and grab all of their info. See which businesses don't have websites - an…
I posted an article from SAI the other day. Only 25% of local businesses are advertising online. Mostly because it's complicated and scary as shit to them. Of those 25%, 60-80% churn. That's because the companies doing this are so bloated that they only spend 50-60% on the actual ad buy and the rest on admin expenses. So yeah, the performance sucks. I also read 91% of local businesses are unhappy with their online ma…
Businesses spend a ridiculous amount of money on offline advertising (ie. Yellowpages), so much that when you come to them offering online advertising for ridiculously low prices ($50-100/mo.) they just go for it most of the time. A Yellowpages ad can cost $500-1500/mo. for a tiny little placement.
My friend essentially built a network of niche sites for his city, so {cityname}furniture.com, {cityname}dentists, {cityname}antiques etc. The sites were just simple directories with some content, a contact/request a quote form and a list of local businesses. He'd gather a list of businesses and contact them all explaining the site and how it would cost them $50/mo. for a listing, it would help their search rankings, bring traffic, generate leads and new business, etc.
He said his best money was actually made off dentists and he had to break the site up into {neighbourhood}dentists because there were so many in the city interested. A typical site would feature 3-4 banner ads that cost $100/mo. (little 125x125 squares for each dental firm), and then around 10 or so $50/mo. business listings (custom page, images of office, testimonials, etc).
It's fair to say a single site would net him $800/mo - of course this varies on the type of business being targeted, but there are so many kinds of businesses to target that you won't be able to capture every market in the city.
On top of things, he made money generating leads for the businesses. For the dentist example, he had a "request a quote" form that basically got people to explain what they wanted done, budget, their contact info, etc. He sold leads for ~$20 each (would make the different dentists bid on them). This is nothing for most places as a lead can turn into $1000 worth of business in the first appointment, and thousands more over the years as that patient returns.
If you can create a value added service locally and get people onboard for next to nothing (as they see it, $50 is nothing), then you have a real opportunity to make some cash. Take this to the next level and start managing their PPC campaigns and managing ad deals and you have yourself a healthy local market - most of which you can find someone cheap to handle (around the cost of a secretary, anyone with a bit of technical know-how will do).
Bringing all this stuff up again kind of makes me want to go back into it.. hmm. weekend project perhaps?