Back in June I decided to start targeting offline bricks and mortar businesses in my local area of Ammanford, South Wales. I decided it was about time I put an update on how it is all going and I can’t believe it was in June that I made this decision and last posted here, boy have I been busy!

I have not been able to post for a couple of other reasons as well, holiday, moving house (so without internet connection for a few weeks) but apart from that I have been busily putting together the framework for my new business.

It has been a huge amount of work which is still not all done but I am getting there. I decided I wanted to offer my local Amman Valley businesses a full Internet Service if you like with 3 different elements:

Marketing (including making them a website)
Hosting
Advertising on my marketing site and my Directory

Further explanation of that is that I can offer them hosting if they already have a website (or free as part of a web design package). I can offer marketing and a website tailored to their business and ranked well locally in google. And I can offer advertising as well in my local business and community directory (portal as they are more often know online).

Not all of those three elements are complete yet, still work to do but it has been fun (and hard work) – in recent weeks I have been concentrating my efforts solely on the Business and Community Directory, by adding listings to it and trying also to make it a fun and informative place for local people because you need to get repeat visitors locally to make it attractive for local businesses to advertise on.

For a sneak peek at some of what has been going on you can visit the directory here if you have a mind to:

Amman Valley Business and Community Directory

But please remember this is still a work in progress. I mentioned in my previous post about outsourcing some work that you may not be so good at and more to save me some time I am outsourcing my logo work for the header of the directory and at the moment, still waiting on that.

The other thing I wanted to mention for anyone who is interested in tackling their local area is that I have got pretty much most of my help and advise from a great bunch of people who are members of “Local Biz Builders” and in particular the “special forces” section of that forum. I also mentioned Andrew Cavanagh, in my last post, here is a member there and regularly answers lots of questions – it is a great place to get help and learn your trade, also to give help as well.

If you want to check that out, then please click the button size banner in the right hand sidebar, the button at the top.

Right back to work for me and I will try and report back a little bit sooner next time.

Something I realized just a few short weeks ago and have been cramming information into my poor little brain since then is one very simple fact that I am absolutely sure is going to help me start earning a wonderful and steadily growing income.

That simple fact, which probably applies to most Internet Marketers (yes even you new to the game guys and gals) is that, everything you have learnt to help you build your business online is most probably an absolute goldmine of information to an “offline business”.

I know that in my little area of the world in South Wales, UK that most people barely know how to switch their computer on, let alone how to use it to increase business to their offline interests BUT and this is the important bit, a lot of those very same people are now realizing that they NEED an online presence but yikes! they have no idea how to go about it, nor the time it would take to learn what to do.  Well can you see where you come in?

Are you a copywriter and can you put a site online, e.g. a self hosted wordpress site?

If you can’t put a site online but you know a little about online marketing then you can outsource the other work.

If your an SEO expert this is perfect for you as well.

In fact, all you really need is enough online marketing knowledge to get a business owners attention.

Well I have, what I thought was a little bit of knowledge in each of the above areas (after a bit of offline research I am now realizing, it’s a fair bit of knowledge compare to offline business owners) and with the contacts I have made online, I know I can, if I want or need to, outsource some of the work at very reasonable costs.

You are probably thinking, well that’s going to cost me a lot to get this business set up if I have to outsource some of it.. well no actually.

You see, offline businesses are used to spending way more on Marketing than we online people are used to, so you simply include the outsource into the quote you will give them, they invariably are still getting marketing cheaper than they normally pay and you are left to do the part of the business that you are good at, or perhaps just love more than the other bits, whatever your personal reason would be to outsource.

OK so before I go off on another tangent, which I am apt to do, sorry LOL let me give you this link to a pdf I found that is going to help me set about doing this because if this idea interests you at all, well I reckon you want me to stop blabbing and get to the point LOL.

This is by “Andrew Cavanagh” who is a member of the marvellous Warrior Forum and it’s called “Offline Gold for the Online Marketer” and yes there is a price tag, at the moment that is $19.99 and I am told, that price will go up – take a look and see if you think it’s something you could do, oh and wish me luck as I embark on this endeavor which I am very excited about.

I am very tempted to say I will give a progress report here BUT I also realize I might be to damn busy! Hey let’s see how that goes, perhaps a monthly update will be a doable thing and we can all compare notes.

Do you want to give your visitors a new toy to play with?

And do you want to make it easy for them to bring over all their friends to do the same thing?

Well, soon you will be able to, read on:

Google Press Release just announced “FriendConnect” and basically it is going to give webmasters the ability, by adding a simple piece of code to their website (any kind of website) to allow their visitors to interact even more with your website and more importantly, bring over their friends easily as well.

For the visitor it means they get to do all kinds of things on your website AND takes away the boring task of continually filling out registration and profile forms, so less work for them, that’s gotta be a plus right there in my book.

I am sure most webmasters can see endless possibilities with this new application from Google, I certainly can but I would love to hear from you so please do comment and add your thoughts on this Google Press Release.

Below are some quotes from the press release and then a link to go read all of it for yourself:

“Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social — and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect.”

“Google Friend Connect has been developed to lower two barriers to the spread of social features across the web. First, many website owners want to add features that enable their visitors to do things with their friends, but the technology and resource hurdles have been too high. Second, people are tiring of needing to create new logins and profiles and recreate their friends lists wherever they go on the web. Google Friend Connect offers a solution to both these issues.”

“Any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming — picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.”

“Google FriendConnect” Press Release