How To Make Money Online With Offline Clients – Part 1: PR

Tired of filling out surveys or doing data entry for nickels and dimes? Then keep reading. We’ll show you how to utilize the hours you spend making little money, and show you how you can make big money instead.

We have decided to post a whole series of articles on how to make money online with offline clients, and the first one is about doing Public Relations (PR) for your local clients.

“But I’ve never done PR, and I don’t know anything about PR, so how could I, or why should I do PR for local clients?” Here is why:

• Easily make an extra $2000 a month with only a few hours of work per week
• Get tons of perks – free party invitations, products, services, you name it!
• Make valuable connections with the press and bloggers, so you can get bigger clients or release your own products and have them write about it!
• PR is easy, and it’s fun – anyone can do it, and you can start right now!

Here is a very easy way of doing it, and this is how I personally used to make money online when I started with internet marketing:

1. Find a local business client – tell them that you will handle their PR online, which will give them exposure, increase their rankings, and generate more sales/leads.
2. What to charge?I would usually pitch them with two or three options, and they are all a monthly retainer with a 3 month minimum commitment:
   1. 500 dollars a month will include 1 press release a month and a weekly report.
   2. 1000 dollars a month includes 2 press releases a month, follow ups with the most important online outlets, and weekly reports
   3. 2000 dollars a month could include unlimited press releases (you’ll probably never do more than 2-3 a month for a small/medium sized business anyway), distribution through Associated Press (a service that distributes your press releases to all major news outlets in the country), weekly reports, and perhaps trade show monitoring or something else that would apply to your client.
3. Most will probably go for option 1 or 2 to test you out, so let’s get started on those.
4. Writing a press release is not very hard, but it does require a little bit of creativity. I suggest checking out the resources on PRWeb.com on how to write a press release if you absolutely want to write it yourself. I would suggest outsourcing it to someone who already knows what they’re doing. I always use people from Warrior Forum (www.warriorforum.com). You can have someone write a very good press release for under $100 there.
5. After that, we need to distribute the press release. For the smaller ones, I use WebWire (www.webwire.com) and the $19 option, or PR Web (www.prweb.com) and their cheaper options.
6. If you really want to do well, I suggest you find blogs, forums, magazines and podcast sites that talk about the niche that your client is in, and that you contact them with the press release to see if they want to publish it.
7. Automatic monitoring and weekly reports? Easy. Set up a Google Alert via www.google.com/alerts, put in the keywords you want to monitor (company name, and a couple of keywords that relate to them), and you will get alerts delivered to you! No need to look for them! If you really want to impress, I suggest you put in some alerts for their local competitors, and whenever they are featured somewhere, you contact that site/magazine/whatever, and ask how they can feature your company as well.
8. Every week, sit down with your clients, show where the press release has gone out, show them the features, and upsell them to the next level.

So, in short – imagine this – get 4 clients, 500 bucks each, which equals 2000 dollars a month. Outsource the writing, all you need to do is upload it to the distribution sites and press “Send.” The monitoring takes 10 minutes to set up. The only time consuming thing is doing some actual research and following up with the blogs you really want to get featured on. This shouldn’t take you more than an extra 3-4 hours a week, so if you do the math, you’re making $500 an hour (4 hrs x 500 dollars is $2000).

In the near future, we will be releasing a full step by step guide for doing this, including sales scripts to use – both for phones and in person selling – and templates for press releases and a bunch of extra bonus resources, so after you’ve tried this, you can upsell your current clients and make double the amount of money!

In the next couple of posts, we will take a look at creating online marketing plans for local companies, doing PPC management, SEO campaigns and much more! Stay tuned!