As hard as it may be to believe, there are still some businesses out there that don’t have an online presence. But they don’t all want or need a huge website with complicated ordering processes, yet that is often what all the best design companies are offering.
The main reason for many businesses to get online is to raise their profile and attract more customers – and that is exactly what you can offer them. You don’t even need to be a web designer either; the main idea here is to do things for them that they cannot do themselves.
And that is where the money making opportunity lies.
There is a lot of potential here to offer a lot of services to businesses who don’t yet have an online presence.
If you have basic design skills and you feel confident in creating simple websites then you could offer a service for a flat fee which includes a domain name and a basic website of a limited number of pages. But there is plenty more you can do as well.
For example, if you are good at writing you could offer to write articles around the subject of each business and submit them to a number of online article directories. You would then provide a link at the bottom inviting people to call the number of the business if they want to find out more. You would usually include a web address here but a phone number would work if they don’t have a website.
Similar services would offer classified adverts, written and submitted to those markets which would get them the best publicity. You could also set up a package to create a blog around the subject of their business, writing a couple of unique posts to it every week and gradually building up a following from there. If you did this you would probably find it better to charge an initial set up fee to help cover the domain name and hosting costs, followed by a small monthly fee to keep the site going.
There is also the possibility of writing brand new press releases to promote a new service or product that a business has launched. You could then charge a fee to write and distribute these to a specific number of outlets.
As you can see there are plenty of different ways that you can help offline businesses get some kind of presence online, and even if you start off with basic services you can add others as you go along. The trick is to be as versatile as you can and perhaps even offer a discount for opting for more than one service.
See what other people are currently doing as well. Some graphic designers offer a number of add on services to their main design service that you could offer yourself, without having the headache of website designing that goes along with it.
Make sure you create a proper list of services and prices and promote them offline by contacting businesses via leafleting and so on. This should start to bring in your first few clients and you can then build up your business from there. The trick is to start finding freelancers to help you get all the work done once you get to the stage of being really busy.
Do you have any more ideas on how to help offline businesses get an online presence? Leave us a note below!