The first step is to know your market then start doing research on the perfect sub-niche. By far the easiest step to find your market, just to go to Google and type in the search phrase US cities (or any Country) by population. You don t need to use quotation marks I m just including them to show you the exact words to type into the search box. The first listing you should see is a Wikipedia entry.
List of United States cities by population click on this link. It will take you to a page that lists all the US cities with populations greater than 100,000. These are the ponds where you want to fish.
You might find the right conditions in smaller cities, but you’ll definitely find them in this list. So why work harder than you need to? If you limit the size of the cities to no more than 299,999 people, you’ll end up with a list of 209 cities. Just working with these cities you’ll find enough business to keep you going for years (and make more money than you ever thought possible). Now that you have your market list, it’s time to move on to the next step.
Find Your Niche
Here is where you decide what kind of business or profession you want to work with. I strongly recommend you stick with just one type of business, to begin with, because you can essentially copy and paste what you do for each of your clients, without having to go back and do a lot of original research.
What I mean by that is you are going to pick a niche and figure out what the money keywords are (and by money keywords I mean the words and phrases most likely used by people who are ready to buy from your client people searching for house painters are not necessarily looking to hire one, whereas people looking for experienced Phoenix house painters are in a buying frame of mind I’ll go over all the keyword selection stuff shortly).
Once you figure out what those keywords are, the odds are tremendously in your favor that those same words will work in every one of the cities you target for prospective clients. So why put yourself in a position to go back and start from scratch for a new client in a new niche when you’ve already done the work for one which you can use over and over again?
The other reason you want to stick with one niche is that as you go along in this business and start getting clients onto Page One you’ll want to put together case studies showing how you helped that client improve their standings in the search results.
If you are helping house painters, how powerful is it when you show a prospective house painting client that you have already helped other house painters jump to Page One in their markets? It almost sells itself at that point. You appear to be a house painter specialist when all the other folks out there doing this kind of work don t have any specialization at all. Your prospect starts to think he d have to be crazy to go with anyone else BUT you.
I don t want to stray off-topic here, but if you become the go-to guy for House Painters, you charge $2500 a year for your services, and you work until you have a House Painter client in every city on your list of 209, you’re looking at an annual gross income of $522,500. Since you can outsource all of the grunt work that needs to be done for pennies per month, you’re looking at a half-million dollars a year coming in each year, with very little continuous effort on your part.
If that doesn’t t get you excited, I strongly suggest you get someone close to you to call the local mortuary and start making arrangements on your behalf. Because you’re obviously DEAD! (lol).
So how do you find your niche? Start with an antique you probably have lying about your house somewhere: The Yellow Pages. Read through their list of categories to get an idea of what kinds of businesses are out there in every town.
There are white-collar professions (doctors, lawyers, dentists, chiropractors, etc.) blue-collar professions (plumbers, electricians, etc.), and a host of retail establishments you can choose from. I chose a subset of the legal profession, simply because I come from a family of lawyers, and I know how they think and what hot buttons I can push to get their attention. At the end of this manual, I’ll give you a case study on the first lawyer I worked for, and show you exactly how
I took him from Search Engine Oblivion to the first page of Google and got his phone to start ringing every day courtesy of this newfound stream of traffic. As intimidating as it might sound, lawyers are people too (well, most of them are, anyway). And they have the same fears and pressures faced by anyone in business for themselves: payroll, rent, utilities, a social-climbing hag of a wife (I tossed that one in for my brother, who will never, ever read this if I have anything to do with it).
All of those things take money, and most lawyers are in dire need of a constant stream of new clients to keep their practice up and running. But the same can be said of any business person, whether in a profession, a trade, or a retail type business. New clients are the lifeblood of a business.
Your prospect knows that, which is why they have a website in the first place. All you need to do is help them get their site to start doing what it was intended for in the first place: finding them new clients. So grab a copy of the phone book and start looking at the various categories until you find one you think is in a niche that
(1) has at least some decent cash flow, and
(2) you would enjoy working with. Or, just scan the list of High Dollar Businesses at the end of this manual. It is in no way a complete listing of ALL High Dollar prospects, but it should be enough to get you started in the right direction.
Once you’ve decided on a niche, move on to the next step.
Find the Money Keywords
Since you are going to work on a local basis (meaning work with clients who service one limited geographical area) you might as well start with your own hometown or the town nearest to you on the list of towns with populations greater than 100,000. Using Google, type in the name of your town and the name of the niche you selected. For instance, type in Charlotte Plumbers.
See how many pages come back, and scroll through the first 5-6 pages to see how many local plumbers have existing websites. I just did that and found around 15 websites belonging to Charlotte area plumbers that were buried on Page Three and beyond.
Now that you know there are a bunch of prospects that can use your service, you need to draw up a list of money keywords. It’s actually easier than you think. All you need to do is put yourself in the position of a person who needs that particular business, and asks yourself what you would type into the search box in order to find the information you are looking for.
In most cases, the money keywords will be the name of the town or geographical area where the prospect lives, along with the word or words that best describe the goods or service offered. Examples: Charlotte Plumber. Denver Bankruptcy Attorney. Tampa Electrician. When you are putting together your list of keywords, don t forget to pluralize the business: plumbers, bankruptcy attorneys, electricians. Some people will search in the singular, other in the plural.
You might as well cover all the bases on this one. You can take this a step further by adding in additional terms like best cheapest fastest and others, which are also used by some searchers. However, these types of extra qualifiers usually do not generate enough searches each month to justify trying to dominate the search engines for those phrases.
Later on, you can suggest to your client that they add additional pages to their websites that target these phrases. But for now, just target the major keywords. After you’ve isolated the money keywords, go back to Google and use their AdSense Keyword Analyzer to see how many searches those keywords get each month.
You can get to the Analyzer by going to Google and typing in Google Keyword. The first choice that should appear will be the adsense.google.com link that will open the Keyword Analyzer. Type in your first keyword or phrase into the box labeled Word or phrase, fill in the captcha security check and hit submit. In most cases, you should get a list of keywords and phrases that are related to the one you just typed in, along with the number of searches conducted on Google each month, both locally and globally.
I typed in the search phrase Charlotte plumber and Google returned 100 results, the vast majority having nothing to do with plumbers or plumbing.
To be completely transparent here, apparently, there are several different semi-famous people named Charlotte Plummer (and since most internet users no longer know how to spell, they search for Charlotte Plumber ), so some of those 1900 searches for that specific term might be related to her.
However, for the remaining terms, these are all people who are looking for a plumber in Charlotte. (And that raises one more point: look at common misspellings for your keywords and phrases, such as Plummer [for Plumber], Panter [for Painter], that sort of thing you never know when you’ll find the motherload of traffic from well-intentioned but poor spellers).
You are going to want to keep note of your keywords and the number of searches performed in a month, as this information will help you close the client later on. Now it’s time to move on to the next step.
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