"Offer One Page Websites to Businesses for Free" Anyone Know of This Method?

Hi Danni,

What kind of business do you think is going to be interested in a one page website from you?

Even if you do manage to locate this 'method', you need to know who your target market is.

Bearing in mind your stated skillset, lack of funds and (seemingly) experience, I think you may find it difficult.

It really would be better to learn some more skills in order that you can offer a more professional service which isn't designed purely to gain a hosting affiliate commission. Most business owners are only still in business because they have business smarts - in other words, they will probably see through this and therefore you could struggle.

If you have business smarts yourself, then you really should be able to work out this 'method' - basically, you need to give them a reason to want this website, one that's based around them benefitting from having it.

If you don't know how to optimise a website, what do you know? How to build a direct response page, a squeeze page, a lead generation page? If you don't know these things, how are you going to ask the right questions which will provide the information you need in order to sell this idea to them (based around the type of site they require)?

Even if something is free (which it's actually not in this case), you still have to sell it. Most people learn their skills by building sites for themselves and then later on when they understand what they are doing they might approach businesses.

What specifics do you need??
I assume you know how to do basic html or are able to setup a blog.

Now make a list of services you are able to offer for free and write a small half page salesletter! Go to Kinko (or whatever copyshop is in your area and get a couple of them printed)

Take your mini salesletters and post them on blackboards, community boards, lamp posts, windshields, mailboxes, approach local business owners, churches, sport clubs etc etc...

Spent a weekend doing this and see how far it will get you - maybe you will find clients or maybe not, maybe this will lead to different things/opportunities

After you found your first clients, ask for a testimonial and put it on the salesletter ask for referrals etc..

Got a PM from Don- couldn't reply (even though I had typed a ton of great info)

Yes, I am using WEEBLY as the 'free site' as is discussed in this and other threads.
Weebly does not have it's own Autoresponder or SEO packs. It does have templates and for anyone who may be thinking of using Homeseatd, I don't know. I've never used them before.

Weebly has a click and drag function. I actually learned about them a few years ago from someone else (not John Durham) on this very site!

If you can read, you can make a website. You get a ton of sites for free- some I pay for, (take ownership by assigning my own domain name) but that is just Go Daddy's cost, not Weebly. I also upgraded with Weebly a long time ago and pay a small fee yearly I think.

I say go check them out if you like free AND easy. It may not have the functionality of WP but I have been building my sites for sometime now and have had the opportunity to learn along the way.

Hope this helps you out Don!

Why not? I know several people here on the forum who run a sales team to sell their services to offline businesses.

If not phone calls, try post card mailings. Or classified ads in the local paper. Or radio spots.

Regardless of the method, you should have someone answering a phone for people who would prefer to call. Give people the choice of learning about your service on your website or by phone with a person.

I find that I close well if I answer the phone myself.

I despise cold-calling, but if they call me, I am happy to talk to anyone.

Seems like a lot of work without offering other services, at 5.95 a client per month... even if you got 100 clients which would still be quite hard for this method as I know others that went this route thinking they'd be able to get dozens of clients a day... it's still less then 600 a month, thats a lot of work for just that.

Look into offering other services even if outsourced.

What are you basing that statement upon?

I am giving FREE one page website to any business owners who are running small businesses such as neighborhood food stall owners, neighborhood barbers,carpenters,plumbers, painters etc. These people are aware of the existence of the internet but they are not internet savvy, so they need people like me to assist them with the online things. Furthermore, this website is FREE, don't tell me it is hard to give away something that is FREE to people who might need them?

You're right that it's not a problem, but there's a lot more wrong that's with this approach.

Care to tell me what's wrong with giving away FREE items on the front end in the view of generating leads so that you can sell them services over and over again?

Except the important part - it will take some time to get this revenue and in the meantime you are dealing with 30 new clients with all of the expense that goes with that. Are you stopping after one month, or getting 30 new clients in the second month - because you still won't have those payments after just one month, especially if you don't get every single one of them clicking through the links on the first day of the month.

I don't see any problems with forking out a little bit of expenses in order to generate leads for my business. In case you didn't know, I am planning to do all this services for FREE only via emails and telephones.
In the event these business owners need my assistant to walk them through the purchasing of domain names and hosting accounts, I will be charging them $40 for transportation fees. More often than not, they will need me to come down to do that for them as they are not internet savvy and it is here that I will have my cash flow to cover my advertisements and time.

Can I ask, is this based on experience of going out and getting 30 new offline business clients in a month, or is this based on what it looks like on paper?

I have checked in my local business directories that they are literally hundreds if not thousands of small businesses who does not have any website of their own yet. Don't tell me it is hard to call them to offer FREE websites? Do you find it difficult? I personally don't. Out of the few hundreds or thousands business owners, I will quit marketing totally if I cannot give away a decent one page websites to at least 30 people! within one month. I will walk to their office if I have to and most of them are only a couple of kilometres away from where I stay.

How are you planning to communicate with these businesses? Email, telephone, in person?

I planned to advertise in my local papers on all major languages, that is English, Malay, Chinese and Indian. With these kind of advertisements plus some email marketing , tell me that I cannot get at least 30 or even 100 of them? Impossible!


How are you going to deal with peripheral issues, for example - most decent sized companies require proper invoicing for their accounts department, and 1001 other things that take time, money and effort.

I plan to deal with simple business owners since it is a simple website. I am in control of this offer and if I find that they are too demanding and negative, I will give them a pass and move to the next one.

Do you have experience of outsourcing things like this? Do you realise how problematic it is when the client deals directly with you, therefore whenever they want slight changes made it involves three different parties all communicating, with the person in the middle (you) being able to decipher what either party really wants? Multiply this by thirty and it gets really complex.

This is a simple ONE PAGE website that comes with the terms and conditions. I will only allow one changes for each website and nothing more. If they want the luxury to make more changes, they can purchase from me a complete websites that cost $599 and which are still much cheaper than those that are being sold on the market now.

So they're likely to be upsold on a bigger/better website, even though their shiny new one page website has achieved 0 traffic?

Yes! when they realized that their one page website are not sufficient enough to bring them the desired traffic,that is where they will be upsold on other things. it will be much easier to explain to them that they need MORE CONTENTS in order to get the site ranking high on the search engine after they have their one page website. Otherwise, the one page website is already good enough for them to buy PPC advertisements or make their company look more professional on their business cards and other marketing platforms. So, a one page website is not totally useless as you painted it to be.

Can you expand on what you mean by 'do a good one so that they will be impressed' - in terms of a one page website?

You know when something is ugly or pretty don't you? Don't tell me you don't know whether a website is crappy or presentable? As an Internet marketer, if a particular website look presentable to you, chances are it will be "gorgeous looking" to the non - internet marketers and in this case, the local business owners. example of a one page website Simple Site Builder

Contrary to popular opinion, I don't like being negative unless I'm doing it constructively to help someone - in this case, it's anyone reading this.

But your post sounded total negative and very rigid. At least to me.

The way this is written is like a typical salesletter - all of the difficult stuff is glossed over or ignored and it's written using verbage which seeks to minimalise everything that's impossible to minimalise in reality -

EG - 'the offers are literally endless.'

Please explain how/why they are 'literally endless'?

If you can generate leads from these local business owners that are interested in your FREE offer, don't tell me you don't know how to capitalize on them for maximum profits? Do you think that you can offer products that can complement their one page website or to sell them NEW products that can help them in their business? (e.g ebooks from clickbanks that are related to their niches?). Or offer to expand their one page websites to a more complete websites, offer to set up autoresponder services for them, offer facebook fan page for their businesses, offer them SEO, Google placings, video marketing, email marketing etc etc?

PS: it seems that Mike Filsaime has similar strategy here. I don't know, he could be mistaken too http://www.the-profit-platform.com/webinar/replay

Qamar

USD125X30 = USD3,750. (only one website per day) This amount maybe small for a successful businessman like you, but it can mean a lot to many other people and the best part about this model is, it is fairly easy to achieve within one month period, because it involve giving away FREE product to people.
If you write articles, promoting a Clickbank product, how many quality articles do you need to write in order to convert that kind of affiliate commissions within a month, if you ever could?
I don't know, but I just have to disagree that this is a weak business model. In fact it is very feasible.




Qamar

Before taking any sides, I'd like to share a resource that could be used with this method. It's free.

Open Source Web Design - Download free web design templates.

Qamar,

Don't you think the first question they'll ask you is:
"Why didn't you tell me that BEFORE?"

It is obvious that you knew about it before you gave the person the free website. Sure, it was free but I wonder what it would do to your credibility.



I see what you're trying to say here. But then, would this model become a GOOD model if we do cut out the middleman? Let's say someone makes enough their first month to get a reseller account and now, there's no middleman - they can provide hosting themselves.

Would that make it 'workable'?

I personally think it's up the actual person offering the service - not everyone can/would like to mess with a Reseller account.

Sagar

I was aware of this 2-3 years ago, there were many variations of this method about at the time.

It doesn't have to be B2B, it can also be B2C.

Yes, but be clear that they respect your work and don't just respect that it is free. Because if it's a "whatever it's free" mindset then you run into the issues described above where they think you misled them.

That's possible too. I just assumed he was making money from it. I don't know what the payout is from Hosgator, but I know he requires people to take at least a year hosting to get that service. He's not the only one. There is a Wordpress for Beginners blog that I saw which does something similar (I don't recall the name off hand). I do know however that knowing what I know now I could set up a basic Wordpress site with a half dozen plugins installed and configured in under 10 minutes. I imagine whoever does it for him does something similar.

Offering a FREE front end product is a way of establishing relationship and introducing yourself. To you, those business owners are no longer cold leads whenever you want to sell them something. It's easier for them to set aside time for you to hear what you've got to say

Do it well, you will rejoice. People who are generous are rich. Give Give Give, but don't forget the reason why you're giving,....... so you can RECEIVE. Expect great results.

Offer so much value, to the point they don't have an option but to listen to you. MORE VALUE will lead to people feeling like they owe you.

You can even sign them up for a weekly teleconference at a certain price....instant profits.

You can even start your own networking business through this

You see, all those google products that are FREE. It's just publicity and good deeds. Do you know...... GOOGLE earn billions per quarter every quarter, but some people still think they do everything for FREE.

They have created this FREE search engine so you think, FREE DOCS, FREE EMAIL, etc all of that creates a network of fans through out the world. You can consider it as a list of loyal subscribers.

So everyone is going to this FREE GOOGLE search engine to look for whatever. Google then create a system of selling advertising. People bid, GOOGLE makes a lot of money. All parties benefit.

There are those who will use GOOGLE all their life and never pay them a dime. But there is a remnant of those who will use google's traffic to profit and they will pay GOOGLE for advertising.

The moral of the story is......Create your own Network like GOOGLE and profit.

Even though some businesses cannot buy anything on the back-end, you will still get rich, because there is a remnant of business who will pay you for your VALUE.

FOCUS on the back-end

MY question is....what is your FREE front-end product to publicize yourself? Make sure it's valuable, not crap! GOOGLE search engine, though FREE, it's very valuable.

No excuses guys. Offer your fron't end product for FREE. But please, upgrade your skills daily so you can help your business owners. If you don't know how to do something-----outsource. No excuses. No guys!

Go and build your network like GOOGLE.

See you at the TOP!

Ok, so you spend a load of time and money getting all these businesses to get your free website or 5$ hosting or whatever, then what will you upsell them? A bigger site, which you sell for 500$? an ebook? What is the point of all that, when you can go to a business and sell them something that costs 3 grand in the first place. Then charge them maintanance, upgrades and seo services (hint hint this is where the cash is) on a monthly basis.

Plus, have you ever actually tried to convince a business to have a one page website?