You are probably wondering what we expect from you. Remember I said this was
going to be a working relationship? Yes you do need to do something.
But even more you have something that we do not, a local presence. As in the
example above with Kelvin Brown, we have found that our directories do much
better if a local person is in charge and promoting them.
A local person is much more likely to get picked up as a human interest
story in the local media. You can put a real face on the local
portal so people associate it as really and truly "their"
home town/city web portal.
The Best Thing to Promote Your Portal is to Sell Premium Business Listings and Power Pages.
If you do not want to contact local business owners business to business, or hire
salespeople to contact local businesses, you do not want to be a portal director.
This is the engine that drives our entire system. To do this:
1. Print the sales presentation booklet, click here.
2. Read exactly how to make sales with our proven system, click here.
The best thing you can do to make money with your portal and promote it is to sell Premium Business Listings
as we explained earlier for $300 to $1,200 or more per year. This promotes your portal
and at the same time creates income for you. You should be able to sell 2 to 3 Premium Business Listings
in less than a day's work by just showing the presentation book I gave you on page 5.
Optional Marketing Ideas
There are a lot of ways you can encourage business owners to use
the local portal. Below are some examples of what
you might do to promote your local city/town portal:
1. Pay an ambitious student to take flyers
to each business. You can get 1/4 page flyers printed for less than
a cent each.
2. Call the local businesses on the telephone and leave a message for
the owner.
3. Rent a booth at any local home shows or business shows where you know
there will be a crowd of people. Hand out flyers and have a poster
up so they can see.
4. Mail postcards to local businesses with the portal information.
5. Call all the classifieds in the newspaper and tell them owners they should
also place their ad for free in the local portal. If you can get the town using the
classifieds the portal will become a tremendous local force.
6. Go to your local Chamber of Commerce meetings. They usually let you
bring flyers about your business, after all the main thing about
those meetings are networking. This costs you almost nothing, takes
only an hour of your time usually, and is probably one of the most
effective methods. These are usually the more serious business people,
and they will take you much more serious at these meetings. Even easier
is that this is usually a social setting and everyone is talking to everyone
else about their own business. They expect you to talk about your business!
7. Post advertisements on free bulletin boards at local restaurants,
grocery stores, etc.
8. IF YOU HAVE CLIENTS just tell your clients you want to
help their business by giving them a free listing on your portal.
Some of our associates have their own businesses with many salespeople and
clients. All they really do is invite them
to join the portal.
9. As Kelvin mentioned above, if you go business to business
business owners love to take time to talk to you, because you are the
director of the local web portal, and that means exposure for them and
their business. (Dont' forget to take a digital camera with you!).
10. If you belong to a church, club, or community organization and they
have a newsletter, put in an announcement to business owners via the newsletter.
11. You could start your own free newspaper. Using your home computer
print articles about any subject that you think people would find interesting,
give it a name, print it on the front and back of two 8 1/2" by 11" paper,
fold it in half and you have a news paper!
You can distribute the newspaper to most local businesses. I have personally
distributed such things and almost all businesses are willing to let you
set them somewhere, however, here is where you can get an advantage.
The advantage is that you can offer the businesses a free listing in
your new city/town web portal for their permission to leave the newspaper
in their business for distribution.
If you cannot afford to print and distribute a newspaper find locations
for distribution first. While you are offering a free listing and
asking permission to leave the first edition of your newspaper in their
business ask if they would like to buy an advertisement.
How much advertisement do you need to sell? If you just want to
cover the cost of the printing, it should not take too much. You
can probably print a 2 page newspaper from Kinko's for about 5 cents
each. If you want to do a 5000 paper run it will cost you $250.00
for printing. That means you only need to sell $250.00 worth of
advertisments.
If want to leave 50 newspapers at each business, you will need 100
businesses. If you offer an advertisement for $25.00, only 10
of them need to purchase. If more purchase you have a profit
to expand your newspaper to either more pages or higher
circulation the next time.
Make sure you have a prominent advertisement for your local
city/town web portal, the main idea of running your newspaper.
Don't make a date for the newspaper. In other words, don't
call it the April Issue. Name it Issue #1 so that you can
leave it in the businesses for as long as it takes for
them all to be picked up by customers.
Are you unable to write stories? No problem! There
are thousands of free articles with permission for you to
reprint at http://goarticles.com
With no previous experience you can have your own
newspaper with you as Chief Editor or whatever title
you choose to give yourself.
You could even put an address in your newspaper for
local people to submit articles they have written.
12.
When you post to the blog, it not only posts on your
portal but on hundreds of web sites around the internet.
This is one of the many hidden benefits of your portal. The
trick is to get your post at the same time *G*o*o*g*l*e has
their bots going through them. When the bot starts to see
your post more often, they will start to send more traffic
to your portal. Thus your small posts start to turn into a
lot of traffic. We will post the best times to post in the
private forum.
These are only some ideas, and you probably can think of many others.
You are not required to do all of them or any that we suggested. You
only need to do what works for you, but you do need to do something.
Call free
1 (800) 399-9251 to listen to Timothy L. Drobnick Sr. on a 24 hour recorded message about becoming a portal
director for your town.
Sales is a numbers game! Pick Your Numbers!
Please note that some of our portal directors with experience in sales get 25% of
the business owners they give a presentation to purchase a premium listing. If you
are new to sales the industry standard is normally 10%. This in no way guarantees
you will have these percentages, but some of our directors report 25% closing ratio
once a business owner has been given a full presentation.
Experienced Salespeople's Chart
# of Free Business Listings Created This Week
# of Businesses Visited in Person
# of Presentations to Owners
$ of Average Sale
% of owners that purchase
Your Income This Week
100
50
20
$600
25%
$3,000
200
100
40
$600
25%
$6,000
300
150
60
$600
25%
$9,000
600
300
120
$600
25%
$18,000
100
50
20
$1,200
25%
$6,000
200
100
40
$1,200
25%
$12,000
300
150
60
$1,200
25%
$18,000
600
300
120
$1,200
25%
$36,000
New Salespeople's Chart
# of Free Business Listings Created This Week
# of Businesses Visited in Person
# of Presentations to Owners
$ of Average Sale
% of owners that purchase
Your Income This Week
100
50
20
$600
10%
$1,200
200
100
40
$600
10%
$2,400
300
150
60
$600
10%
$3,600
600
300
120
$600
10%
$7,200
100
50
20
$1,200
10%
$2,400
200
100
40
$1,200
10%
$4,800
300
150
60
$1,200
10%
$7,200
600
300
120
$1,200
10%
$14,400
Rights for City Portal Director in regards to territory. Portal Director agrees that there is no protected territory for Portal Director. Portal Director may sell advertising for Portal Director's assigned portal to any person, business, or area in the world. Portal Director understands that no other entity can sell premium listings for Portal Director's assigned portal without the permission of Portal Director. Portal Director understands that other Portal Directors may sell advertising to any person or business in the town with the same name as Portal Directors portal. Only one portal will be built per town. Portal director has control of assigned portal.
5. Call all the classifieds in the newspaper and tell them owners they should
also place their ad for free in the local portal. If you can get the town using the
classifieds the portal will become a tremendous local force.
