Yesterday, I posted a new video about 'Selling your skills - the fastest way to earning income' and this email will share how this worked out for me.
Because this quick story will take you 'deeper' on the topic.
You deserve more of the story as a subscriber! 😉
But, real quick! If you haven't watched the video yet, click the link above and do so now! It is a powerful one!
Watched it? Good!
Ok, story time.... Let's rewind about 8 years...
I'm stuck in a cubicle every day from 9 to 6 doing customer support trying to convince the mean boss-man to let me build and grow an affiliate program for them... And I commute about an hour each way.
The boss resists my attempts to grow their reach/sales online and I hate everything about being there.
I wake up a few hours before work every day to do keyword research and optimization on our past posts...
Melanie is working a full time desk job too... And she is writing, writing, writing with every free moment. Growing that WP site with content is our #1 priority!
She is creating content based on the keywords I was finding... Together we were a content marketing machine.
I search the keywords, she writes the content, I publish and optimize it for search... Onto the next.
Well, about 6 months after this, we moved to Lake Tahoe.
We both quit, Melanie got a job managing a metaphysical shop at Tahoe and I was going to start over. I just couldn't handle that toxic environment anymore.
During the growth of our website, I had been publishing little screenshots of our google analytics account on Facebook celebrating the victories.
Showing the month over month organic growth, etc.
I started getting messages from friends...
"Hey, can you help me get more traffic?"
or
"My aunt runs a store in Smalltown USA, can you help her show up on Google"
I replied with 'Of course! Let's have a chat...'
At this point, I'd ask a ton of questions...
I'd ask them about their goals (it was always more customers and more income) then I'd educate them on keywords and keyword research.
I'd ask them about their customers, what they bought, what their problems were, where they came from, etc.
Then I'd explain how Google and their customer's behavior is built on keywords and relevant content about those keywords.
I would end that first call or coffee chat with a question...
"Do you know what your most profitable keywords are?"
They never knew.
So I offered a keyword research session for $49 that would help them answer that question and give them a clear idea if there was opportunity for SEO for them.
It was an easy sell...
And I made very little money on that sale... I often spent 4 to 6 hours or more doing the keyword research.
But when it was done, I had a clear picture of their best keyword phrases (the ones with buyer's intent), the trend, the difficulty and the traffic potential.
When I sat down with the client I could say "here are the top 20 phrases with over 300,000 monthly searches... If you showed up in the #1 spot for all of these you could have 100k - 150k more visits to your site each month..."
I went on... "If you had over 100,000 people who searched this phrase find your website next month, would your business have more customers?"
This is when it 'clicked' for them...
To grow their business, they needed to be on the top of the search results page for their most valuable keyword phrases...
Then traffic, leads and customers would flock to them!
And this is ALWAYS a business owner's #1 goal!
This is when I would introduce the content marketing services... Monthly services I offered that ran $1000 - $2500/mo.
That is actually what I wanted to sell from the start... But that is a BIG leap in a first meeting with a client...
In the first meeting they had no idea there was a correlation between keywords, content and more customers for them!
The keyword research session was the easy sell and PROVED the value of traffic from the search engines and PROVED the need for content marketing.
Some said yes... Some said no. I didn't care either way.
Those who said yes often stuck around for years... Because I set the expectation that this was a long process... And I shared stories about how my wife and I were building our site for YEARS to get the traffic we enjoyed.
This is how I built my first income stream of over 10k/mo and I ended up outsourcing most all of the 'work' so I could keep selling!
But I never outsourced the Keyword Research... I ALWAYS did that myself because it was such an intimate process learning about their clients, business, etc.
The knowledge I gained about their audience through this research is what made me the obvious choice in the discussion about traffic that lead up to my monthly package offer.
If you aren't an absolute whiz with keyword research yet, you are missing out.
I just put together a new playlist with the 3 must watch and must study videos I've made on Keyword Research, here:
There is a TON of opportunity doing this still, today... And if I had to 'start all over again' this is exactly what I'd be doing.
Educating business owners on keywords, relevance and content marketing...
Selling keyword research packages...
Up-selling content marketing services in the second meeting.
You can do this if you'd like... I had no map, no coach, no mentor, just the knowledge of how to do this and that it would work for them...
Plus a MOUNTAIN of student loan debt that was suffocating me... I had walked away from a cubicle job and had no income... Again!
I had no choice but to hustle.
And hustle I did.
I made a ton of mistakes along the way, and learned more from the mistakes than I did from the successes!
All in all I helped a lot of businesses out maneuver their competition and built a ton of skills in the process.
This went on for about 4 years, until I had paid off my 50,000 in student loan debt and had my emergency fund topped up for the first time ever.
This is possible for you... If you want it bad enough and you are able to march out into the unknown and figure it out!
Miles "Keyword Meistro" Beckler
P.S. If they weren't on WordPress for the content marketing and they were on some sub par system like Wix, Weebly or SquareSpace, I'd sell a WordPress site, too.
Because I'm not going into a race to profits handicapped by a sub par system... They often got that and I was able to charge an additional $1500 - $2500 to migrate to WP, too.