Andres1986
Elite Member
- Sep 14, 2011
- 2,691
- 636
Hey guys,
Over my years here I?ve learned a lot from this forum; enough so that nowadays Internet Marketing is my full time job and I earn a pretty comfortable living from it. As a way to give back to this wonderful community, I would like to share with you all a ?method? (I really prefer to call this a business model, as it?s fully scalable and you would be offering a very valuable service and dealing with real businesses, but lets call it ?method? as the word is of common use in IM forums when describing ideas like these) that till this day adds up a nice surplus to my monthly income (low $XXXX figure/month) and that I?ve NEVER seen it outlined anywhere else before (not in the way I apply it at least)
The first thing you might ask yourself is why am I sharing this if it?s such a unique and potentially profitable method. The answer is two-fold:
1- As soon as I start describing the method, you?ll realize that range of possibilities in which it can be applied is really HUGE. There is a very slim chance that you ever get to hurt my business by attempting to do this the same way that I do it, and you?ll also see that this method is about making real businesses money, and once a service of yours becomes profitable to a company and you are consistently bringing them revenue, you are LOCKED IN; you don?t even have to worry about a competitor stealing your business. You will be golden (almost literally) to them and they?ll treat you accordingly.
2- I?ve moved to bigger projects and I don?t actively pursue this business model. I do keep a couple of clients with which I have solid business relationships and I obtained via this method. Because of the reasons exposed in point 1 above, the possibility of losing these 2 clients by outing this method is almost non-existent. And if I ever decide to pursue this again and get a few more clients, as I said, the applications of this method are so vast that even sharing this in a public forum wouldn?t hurt me then.
Alright, lets get down to the important details:
- Who is this for?
This method is for anyone who has access to no-English speaking) traffic. Ideally, you want to speak the language of the country/countries you?ll be trying this at and living there as well (or JV?ing with a local guy).
- What will you be selling and to whom?
You?ll be selling local leads (from the non-English country you decided you can work with) to US businesses whose target audience is represented by these leads.
To illustrate and explain the whole process better, I?ll give you a step-by-step guide on how I applied this:
1- Pick your niche/vertical
Your first step will be making a list of all types of US businesses that sell products or services to foreign clients. With some brainstorming you?ll quickly realize that there are many of such businesses.
In my case, the vertical I worked with was US Immigration Lawyers/Law Firms. Naturally, a big percentage of their clients will be foreign people looking for counseling on US immigration laws, how to get a US visa, etc.
You don?t have to necessarily work on this vertical; as I said, the possibilities are enormous. A few more options are: buying real estate in the US (in which case you would want to act as a middle man between US real estate agents and local people looking to purchase real estate in the US), starting a company in the US, studying in the US, etc, etc.
2- Research the local market:
In this step your research skills will come into play. You need to find out the local demand for the products and services sold by the US businesses you listed in step 1.
A good way to go about this (and the way that I did it) is using Google Adwords data. Just load the Keyword Planner and start checking the volume of different seed keywords that people looking to purchase a US service or product could be entering in the search bar. You don?t need huge volumes, as we?ll be selling these leads for a premium fee. If you see that the total search volume for a niche-specific group of keywords amounts to 200-300 monthly, you can consider the demand high enough for this to be profitable.
In my case, I would look for keywords in Spanish (this is the language I work with) such as ?trabajar en eeuu? (?working in USA?), ?conseguir visado eeuu? (?getting a US visa), etc.
3- Set up a company's website:
You?ll be approaching real US businesses to offer them your services. You can?t contact them with your gmail account and expect a reply. For this to work properly you need to transmit a professional image in the first place, and the best way to do this is by setting up a professional looking company website.
You don?t need to hire a high-end web developer for this. Just get yourself a nice, business-looking wordpress theme and populate it with content. The essentials are a Contact page, About Us page and a section where you clearly outline your service and how it can help X type of business to grow their international clientele.
4- Test your traffic sources:
Before embarking on a specific direction, I would suggest to test your traffic sources first to make sure you can deliver what you promise.
For this you?ll first need a landing page and a form to collect information (complete name and email at the very least, but the data you?ll require will depend on the vertical you decide to work with). Make sure to clearly explain to your visitors how can they get a solution to their specific needs with your help (be it getting advice on how to get in touch with the most affordable US immigration lawyers, incredible deals on US real estate, etc).
There are many ways in which you can drive traffic to your landing page. They can be divided in online sources and offline sources (I?m sure you recall how I suggested you ideally target a country in which you or a partner of yours resides). The first category includes sources such as SEO, Adwords, FB ads, forums, local classifieds sites, etc. And good offline traffic sources are flyers, newspaper ads, etc.
One advantage of this method is that international, non-US traffic cost is in most cases pretty low (in case you decide to go the paid traffic way) and if you go for the SEO approach, you should have no problem ranking for these low volume keywords in your local SERPs, which most likely will be a lot less competitive than US?s for similar keywords.
5- Get in touch with US companies/businesses/professionals that might be interested in your service:
Now it?s time to start knocking on some doors. Here you have several options too. What I did was the following: I made a list of businesses websites and started getting in touch with them using a contact form. My ?sales pitch? was nothing fancy, and I advise you to follow the same approach. Just present yourself, provide a link to our company?s website and describe shortly how you can get them more business with the services you provide. End it (this is pretty important and I?m sure it was key to my high reply rates) offering them a few free leads to test your service. To you, each lead?s cost will be very low once you have your system properly set up and if only one of those converts to them, you can be sure they?ll want more and we willing to pay for them.
How much should you charge for each lead? That?s completely up to you and depends heavily on the type of business you target. A good way to determine the price per lead would be to estimate how valuable each lead is to a specific business. For example, to a real estate US agent, a lead that converts could bring in 4 figures easily. In such cases, It would make total sense to price each lead somewhere in between high $XX to low $XXX.
As you can see, this was a pretty general description and you might feel that some gaps are left. The reason is that specific details and approaches will vary considerably depending on aspects such as niche/vertical you decide to work with, country, traffic source, etc. Regardless of that, I?m certain that what was described above will be enough to get your head spinning with ideas and twists. Remember that with an economy as global as the one we have, the volume of business happening internationally on any scale is practically limitless. You just need to position yourself in the middle of one of those transaction systems (out of the thousands available) to make a profit by joining both parts involved.
This method is highly twistable in its application as well: you don?t have to necessarily sell leads, you can sell SEO services, social media services, SEM services, etc. You don?t have to limit yourself to the US business-international client model either. People looking to buy real estate in France, of move to Italy, or start a company in Japan,(etc.,etc) and businesses/companies that could provide a solution to that would also benefit from a middle man service such as yours to bring them together.
If you guys have questions about anything of what I mentioned, I will gladly answer and try to help. Just post in this thread and I?ll get back to you as soon as I?m able.
Over my years here I?ve learned a lot from this forum; enough so that nowadays Internet Marketing is my full time job and I earn a pretty comfortable living from it. As a way to give back to this wonderful community, I would like to share with you all a ?method? (I really prefer to call this a business model, as it?s fully scalable and you would be offering a very valuable service and dealing with real businesses, but lets call it ?method? as the word is of common use in IM forums when describing ideas like these) that till this day adds up a nice surplus to my monthly income (low $XXXX figure/month) and that I?ve NEVER seen it outlined anywhere else before (not in the way I apply it at least)
The first thing you might ask yourself is why am I sharing this if it?s such a unique and potentially profitable method. The answer is two-fold:
1- As soon as I start describing the method, you?ll realize that range of possibilities in which it can be applied is really HUGE. There is a very slim chance that you ever get to hurt my business by attempting to do this the same way that I do it, and you?ll also see that this method is about making real businesses money, and once a service of yours becomes profitable to a company and you are consistently bringing them revenue, you are LOCKED IN; you don?t even have to worry about a competitor stealing your business. You will be golden (almost literally) to them and they?ll treat you accordingly.
2- I?ve moved to bigger projects and I don?t actively pursue this business model. I do keep a couple of clients with which I have solid business relationships and I obtained via this method. Because of the reasons exposed in point 1 above, the possibility of losing these 2 clients by outing this method is almost non-existent. And if I ever decide to pursue this again and get a few more clients, as I said, the applications of this method are so vast that even sharing this in a public forum wouldn?t hurt me then.
Alright, lets get down to the important details:
- Who is this for?
This method is for anyone who has access to no-English speaking) traffic. Ideally, you want to speak the language of the country/countries you?ll be trying this at and living there as well (or JV?ing with a local guy).
- What will you be selling and to whom?
You?ll be selling local leads (from the non-English country you decided you can work with) to US businesses whose target audience is represented by these leads.
To illustrate and explain the whole process better, I?ll give you a step-by-step guide on how I applied this:
1- Pick your niche/vertical
Your first step will be making a list of all types of US businesses that sell products or services to foreign clients. With some brainstorming you?ll quickly realize that there are many of such businesses.
In my case, the vertical I worked with was US Immigration Lawyers/Law Firms. Naturally, a big percentage of their clients will be foreign people looking for counseling on US immigration laws, how to get a US visa, etc.
You don?t have to necessarily work on this vertical; as I said, the possibilities are enormous. A few more options are: buying real estate in the US (in which case you would want to act as a middle man between US real estate agents and local people looking to purchase real estate in the US), starting a company in the US, studying in the US, etc, etc.
2- Research the local market:
In this step your research skills will come into play. You need to find out the local demand for the products and services sold by the US businesses you listed in step 1.
A good way to go about this (and the way that I did it) is using Google Adwords data. Just load the Keyword Planner and start checking the volume of different seed keywords that people looking to purchase a US service or product could be entering in the search bar. You don?t need huge volumes, as we?ll be selling these leads for a premium fee. If you see that the total search volume for a niche-specific group of keywords amounts to 200-300 monthly, you can consider the demand high enough for this to be profitable.
In my case, I would look for keywords in Spanish (this is the language I work with) such as ?trabajar en eeuu? (?working in USA?), ?conseguir visado eeuu? (?getting a US visa), etc.
3- Set up a company's website:
You?ll be approaching real US businesses to offer them your services. You can?t contact them with your gmail account and expect a reply. For this to work properly you need to transmit a professional image in the first place, and the best way to do this is by setting up a professional looking company website.
You don?t need to hire a high-end web developer for this. Just get yourself a nice, business-looking wordpress theme and populate it with content. The essentials are a Contact page, About Us page and a section where you clearly outline your service and how it can help X type of business to grow their international clientele.
4- Test your traffic sources:
Before embarking on a specific direction, I would suggest to test your traffic sources first to make sure you can deliver what you promise.
For this you?ll first need a landing page and a form to collect information (complete name and email at the very least, but the data you?ll require will depend on the vertical you decide to work with). Make sure to clearly explain to your visitors how can they get a solution to their specific needs with your help (be it getting advice on how to get in touch with the most affordable US immigration lawyers, incredible deals on US real estate, etc).
There are many ways in which you can drive traffic to your landing page. They can be divided in online sources and offline sources (I?m sure you recall how I suggested you ideally target a country in which you or a partner of yours resides). The first category includes sources such as SEO, Adwords, FB ads, forums, local classifieds sites, etc. And good offline traffic sources are flyers, newspaper ads, etc.
One advantage of this method is that international, non-US traffic cost is in most cases pretty low (in case you decide to go the paid traffic way) and if you go for the SEO approach, you should have no problem ranking for these low volume keywords in your local SERPs, which most likely will be a lot less competitive than US?s for similar keywords.
5- Get in touch with US companies/businesses/professionals that might be interested in your service:
Now it?s time to start knocking on some doors. Here you have several options too. What I did was the following: I made a list of businesses websites and started getting in touch with them using a contact form. My ?sales pitch? was nothing fancy, and I advise you to follow the same approach. Just present yourself, provide a link to our company?s website and describe shortly how you can get them more business with the services you provide. End it (this is pretty important and I?m sure it was key to my high reply rates) offering them a few free leads to test your service. To you, each lead?s cost will be very low once you have your system properly set up and if only one of those converts to them, you can be sure they?ll want more and we willing to pay for them.
How much should you charge for each lead? That?s completely up to you and depends heavily on the type of business you target. A good way to determine the price per lead would be to estimate how valuable each lead is to a specific business. For example, to a real estate US agent, a lead that converts could bring in 4 figures easily. In such cases, It would make total sense to price each lead somewhere in between high $XX to low $XXX.
As you can see, this was a pretty general description and you might feel that some gaps are left. The reason is that specific details and approaches will vary considerably depending on aspects such as niche/vertical you decide to work with, country, traffic source, etc. Regardless of that, I?m certain that what was described above will be enough to get your head spinning with ideas and twists. Remember that with an economy as global as the one we have, the volume of business happening internationally on any scale is practically limitless. You just need to position yourself in the middle of one of those transaction systems (out of the thousands available) to make a profit by joining both parts involved.
This method is highly twistable in its application as well: you don?t have to necessarily sell leads, you can sell SEO services, social media services, SEM services, etc. You don?t have to limit yourself to the US business-international client model either. People looking to buy real estate in France, of move to Italy, or start a company in Japan,(etc.,etc) and businesses/companies that could provide a solution to that would also benefit from a middle man service such as yours to bring them together.
If you guys have questions about anything of what I mentioned, I will gladly answer and try to help. Just post in this thread and I?ll get back to you as soon as I?m able.