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A while ago I wrote an article directed at people who’ve been working online for a reasonable time (9 months to a year). I said that you probably under-estimate how much you know and suggested some ways you could use that knowledge to earn additional income from local, off-line businesses in your area.

I just wanted to post a quick update to that article with my own experience over the past 6 weeks or so.

I currently have 5 projects in the pipeline – from doing nothing more than talking to people in social settings about what I’m doing.  (Building my own websites and working online).

This last weekend I did the first bit of proactive ‘marketing’ of my services.

I’m on the mailing list of a live music venue here in HK and each Monday I receive an email setting out the schedule of bands and musicians who are playing over the coming week.

Is that or is that not a perfect application for a blog!?

So I set up a new WordPress installation in a folder on an old domain that I use as my admin domain – where I keep things like my privacy policy etc.

I then did a quick search for “Free Wordpress Music Themes” and downloaded one that featured guitars and a guitar player.

I uploaded and activated the theme and I cut and pasted the two most recent schedules that I’d received from The Wanch into two different blog posts.

Next step was to use the ‘About’ page (which I re-named to ‘Read Me..!’) to do a bit of very soft selling.  Nothing more than a ‘you could do this, you could do that – the choice is yours’ kind of approach.

I then hit reply to the weekly email, wrote a bit about a website being able to bring him new customers – e.g. people planning on visiting HK doing a search for live music in HK before leaving – inserted the link and sent it off.

Here’s the reply I got:

“Hi Martin,
That is very cool would like to get with you on setting that up as soon as possible.”

Now how tough was that..?  A free Wordpress installation in a folder on an old domain, a free music theme, no need for any plugins (it’s only a demo site), no need for any tweaking, not even any need to come up with tags!  Set the blog visibility to block search engines (again – only a demo site), copied and pasted some copy and sent him the link.

Basically it was no more than 2 hours’ work at no cost (other than my time).

The next time I do it – for example maybe a restaurant – I just download a different theme, activate it, put in some different content and send them the link.  And I can keep doing that over and over again.

Because you’re showing the business owner a website which features the name of their bar, restaurant or whatever, with some of their own content in there, plus a few benefits, they can immediately connect with the idea.

It seemed to work this time, anyway.

Leave a comment telling us how you got additional work – we can probably all benefit from your experience.