This is part three of my series on local search.

Today I wanted to touch on another easy way to make some local cash, and make some new business contacts along the way.

Starting a local website that helps people move to your area is a great way to make a few extra bucks, and there’s no real cost to you. Well, besides a domain and some web space. But if you’ve got a reseller hosting account, you’re set.

First, get a good domain name that people will easily remember. Even a .info is ok, but I suggest a .com if one is available. Examples for a town named “Thaxton” would include:

• ThaxtonLink.com
• ThaxtonOnline.com
• MoveToThaxton.com
• etc

Now that you’ve got a domain name and some web space, hop on over to Open Realty, download and install the newest version. (more…)

This is part two of my series on local search marketing.

As I mentioned in You’ve Got People, getting local paid leads can be easier than you thought. You’ll be surprised to find out that talking to people you already know can net you some nice cash. And we all like cash.

In the first article, I mentioned a story about a guy that is willing to pay me $200 per lead (sale, actually). So I’m going to build a website, rank for lots of local terms, and pass the leads off to him. While I can assume the guy is honest, and will pay me for each lead, how can I be sure?

Well, an easy way to be sure is to build my website in such a way that it offers a rebate to anyone who signs a contract as a result of my lead generation.

Here’s the scenario:

Visitor Bill comes to my site. He sees that my site has an offer, that if he buys a swimming pool from a referral on my website, he gets $50 bucks. He fills out a “Free Swimming Pool Quote” form. Bill then gets a thank you email from my website. At the same time, Bill’s information is forwarded to XYZ Swimming Pools, my ‘pool guy’.

The next day, Bill gets a call from Tom, a guy who works for XYZ pools. Tom comes out to Bill’s house, gives him a bid, and a contract is signed.

I just made $200 bucks. Now I have to hope XYZ Swimming Pools will pay me.

Shortly after signing the contract, Bill pulls up my email and finds a link I sent him. The link takes him to a page that lets him fill out some info, including which company he signed the contract with. Bill wants his $50 bucks, and now I know I need to verify the lead. Bill gets another email from me saying if the lead is verified, he’ll have his check within 4-6 weeks.
Sure enough, a week later Tom calls me and says he’s got $200 bucks for me. I get the check, send $50 of it off to Bill and pocket the rest.

The lead was generated (and verified) by the website visitor, and I have plenty of info in case my contractor doesn’t pay.

There are, of course, other ways to verify the lead without “losing” money, but I’ve found that cold hard cash seems to generate the most return visitors. They want that “free money”.

Next time we’ll look at some other ways to generate local money with real estate.

This is the first of several local-related articles. Local search is taking off, and if you’re not in the ballgame early, you’ll miss out on a huge potential for big bucks.

While you may not have a lot of money to spend on the ‘Net, you’ve certainly got plenty of ways to still make some nice money. Since you are alive and breathing, I’m sure that means you know people.

Do you ever go to the dentist? Good. So you know a dentist.

Are your kids in boy/girl scouts? Chances are a few of the other parents are business owners.

Go to church? Business owners galore!

Basically what I’m saying is that every day in our lives we run across people who have a local business. These businesses thrive on customers. New customers, as many of you know, are the hardest to get. They want new customers, but they know nothing about SEO. They don’t see it feasible to pay you thousands of dollars to optimize their site and run a PPC campaign.

But, mister or missus SEO amateur, why not use those mad SEO skills to your advantage?

Check this out.

Two months ago a guy who owns a local pool installation company asked me for a bid on redoing his website so he could get more business. Once I told him the price, he flipped out. That was pretty much the end of that deal, or so I thought. Then, last week I was reading Michael Wolf’s local search interviews when it hit me: I can still get these people’s business AND make probably more money than if they’d just pay me the original quote.

Here’s how:

I went and asked this pool guy how busy he wanted to be this summer. He (of course) said “Oh man I want to be swamped with work”. Sweet. In my most non-cocky-but-confident manner, I told him I believed I could refer a ton of work his way, and he could pay me for each lead I send him. First thing he asked was “What will this cost me?” Nothing up front, I replied. I’ll build a site, I’ll send you the leads, and you pay me for only quality leads.

So at this point, I’m thinking to myself it’d be nice to get $50 bucks per lead I send him. “What do you normally pay for a good referral?” I asked.

“If I close the deal, and it was a referral, I pay the person $200 bucks”.

I about shit my pants. I told him we’d work out a deal this next week and I’ll start sending him leads by the spring. So needless to say, I’ve already purchased a domain name and started building a site.

Now back to my point. You’ve got people. There are people you meet every day that are in need of your SEO expertise. Even if you don’t know a lot about SEO, you know enough to target a local campaign, most likely with little or no competition. You’re crazy not to.

Later on this week, I’ll tell you how I’m going to track and confirm every one of the leads I send to this guy.

One of the things that you’ll hear over and over (and over) again when you’re first starting out in SEM/affiliate marketing is that you need to find a niche. Problem is, not many people even know what the f#@% that is. Dictionary.com defines niche as

a place or position suitable or appropriate for a person or thing: to find one’s niche in the business world.

Thats a great definition, but what does it mean for you? You keep hearing over and over that you need to find a niche, but how?

Well, you’ve probably also read that you need to focus on something you like. Trust me, this is true. When I first started doing SEM, I jumped in head first and started buying domains on high paying keywords, thinking I’d start making money quickly. But there are several problems with this approach:

• Everyone else is doing the same thing, so competition is beyond what a n00b can ever handle.
• It will take forever to rank for one of these terms, and chances are you never will.
• Your site won’t have any content. And if you get content from free article sites, you’ve already penalized yourself by offering duplicate content. Building a quality site with original content takes forever.

Most likely, on top of that, you’re probably not interested in Lemon Laws in Alaska anyway. So the chances of you keeping interest in a topic like that are probably slim.

So where do you find a niche that you can make decent money at, and that you are interested in?

Start by making a list. Get out a piece of paper and a pencil (remember those?). Write down things you’re interested in.

• Hobbies.
• Games you like to play.
• Careers that you’d like to have or did have.
• Things you find interesting.

Now lets do one more thing. Take a look at your “Favorites” in your Internet browser. What types of sites does it show that you visit often? Entertainment news? Clothing/Fashion? Camping in the mountains? Whatever it is, add that to the list. Obviously you’re interested in that or you wouldn’t have it there.

Last, if you visit the library and check out real books, what genres do you normally get? Vampire novels? Western non-fiction? Cookbooks? Write those down.

Now take that list and narrow it down to one field that you’re really interested in. Make sure its something that you won’t lose interest in a month from now.

Also, while we’re at this decision-making stage, don’t make the decision based on the amount of money it might make you. Doing that could possibly sway your decision towards something that you’re kinda interested in but it probably isn’t your best choice.

Alright, so now you’ve got a niche. Well, maybe. We need to look at how specific or non-specific it is. If it’s obviously generic, you’re gonna have to focus it in.

Examples of generic niches would be (but not limited to):

• Finance
• Medical
• Automotive
• Computing
• Entertainment
• You get the idea (I hope)

If you fall into one of these generics, look back at your list. Perhaps you can combine two of your favorites.

• Interested in Entertainment and camping? How about a site on Celebrities who “rough it”? How do celebrities go camping as compared to “the rest of us”?
• Interested in the medical field and love coffee? How about a site on caffeine, or a site on the effects of sugar vs. aspartame vs. NutraSweet?
• Interested in finance and spend some time as a dirt track race car driver? Perhaps a website that hooks up fledgeling race car drivers with sponsors.

The amount of niches are endless. And nearly all of them are profitable in some way. Find one that you like and start there. You’ll be glad you did. Start building content and writing original articles about your passion. Find a forum or two that is related to your niche and post some helpful information in them. Be part of the community, and provide a link back to your site.

Lastly, make sure you sign up for a few affiliate accounts around the web. My favorites are:

• XY7
• Pulsar
• LeadFlash

These affiliates (and many others) have endless campaigns. Certainly one will fit in with your site and help you start generating some income. Don’t expect it to come quick, but patience and persistence will reward you in the future.

For most new people to SEM (whom we refer to as n00bs), the concept of RSS is difficult to grasp. Even for a techie, the concept can be a bit overwhelming. Funny thing is, it’s so simple once you understand it that you have a hard time realizing that you once struggled with the concept.

I really don’t want to go into what RSS is, there are plenty of websites out there that will do that for you. What I did want to mention is related to one of Google’s newer products, Google Reader.

Google Reader (GR) is an RSS aggregator. Basically, it takes ‘feeds’ from different sites and puts them all on one page for you. Why is this cool? Well, assuming you’ve been around for even just a short time, you’ve discovered some great blogs targeted to the SEO/SEM industry. You probably have these blogs in your favorites, or maybe in links across the top of your browser. You visit them every day or every few days to see what’s new, to soak up some good tips, and just to keep a Pulse on the industry.

Problem is, you keep discovering new blogs, adding more links, and pretty soon you’re visiting so many sites that you can’t remember if you’ve read this one or not. In steps GR.

Your first (and hopefully most obvious) step is to sign up for GR. Easy enough, I hope.

Next, let’s get some feeds loaded. You’re gonna need a few browser windows going, probably.

So let’s use this website as an example. Poor SEM has a ‘feed’, which you can subscribe to. On the home page, look for this icon:

You’ll notice that you can click on the icon, and you’ll end up here - a page with a bunch of crazy looking code. What good is that? (Not much to you - at least in that format!)

Back to the home page. This time, right click on the icon, and copy the shortcut (in IE it’s Copy Shortcut. In Firefox it’s Copy Link Location).

Back to GR. On the left you’ll see a green bar that says Add Subscription. Click that, and paste in the “feed link” that you copied earlier, then click Add. You should see the page refresh, and Poor SEM will show up in the bottom left area as one of the feeds you read. In parentheses you should have a number, which tells you how many posts you have not yet read. On the right you’ll have the posts, or at least the first few paragraphs of a post, depending on how the site owner set up their outgoing feed.

Now go to another site you like. Chances are, they’ve got a feed button. It may look similar to my icon, or it may actually be an “Add to Google” button. Unfortately there is no set standard for feeds, but the most common is defeinitely the little orange box like mine.

So there you go. Add all your feeds to GR. Delete all those buttons across your link bar and just add the link to GR. As you continue to use the reader, you’ll find out some blogs don’t interest you as much. Delete, add, and tweak to get just the news you want every day. GR does all the work, you just click and read. Google Reader might just become your best friend!

I have two gambling domains for sale. One has a site on it, the other does not. Neither one has been promoted much, and has not made me much income, thus the sale. If you’re interested in more info, email will at TechLH dot com.

Without getting in too deep into SEO tactics, I wanted to touch on the subject of buying a domain name. Often times GoDaddy, Registerfly and various other domain registrars have sales on .info domain names.

Now, some of the bigshots in SEM say that .com is the only way to go. Bullhockey. I’ve had plenty of good luck ranking .info names, including several number one spots on Google, Yahoo! and more. To me, the idea that .com is more trusted than the others is probably of little value.

Back to the sales on .info. If you keep an eye on various SEM blogs, which I’m sure most of you do, you’ll sometimes see mention of .info sales. I’ve even seen FREE .info names for a year. Most recently, I heard that a registrar had them for 88cents, and I believe GoDaddy currently has .info on sale for 99 cents.

So go grab a few .info domain names. They’re cheap, and you can get some pretty good keywords to help you target your campaign.

Back in the day, many web designers got started by building a free local website. By building a website for their town, they could get local visitors and rank pretty easily for terms related to their town. The site usually had tons of local information, including phone numbers to local agencies, restaurants, local businesses and even rentals/real estate items.

Why did they build a site with all this information for free? I mean, that’s a decent amount of work (trust me, I know) just to give all the information away for free. Where’s the money?

Well, back then, the money was simply in brand recognition. Building a nice local site (and then promoting it) gave the web designer a great ice breaker when approaching local businesses. Offering the businesses in town a free ad on your site could lead to a web design job, as well as the networking value that just contacting the businesses gave.

So if you’ve got an affiliate offer that you want to promote, how can you give away free content that will lead many people to your site, and ultimately your affiliate offer(s)?

Think outside the box, as they say. Don’t just build a site that obviously pushes people to your offer. Give them value.

Pushing mortgage loans? Offer a free mortgage calculator.

Pushing ringtones? Offer a cell phone forum. (Then watch for posts from people looking for information. Find that information and build more pages)

Pushing zit cream? Provide information on acne doctors (by state) all around the country.

Pushing something like PhotoBlocker? Find out what cities around the country are putting up red-light cameras and post articles about speeding.

Got more?