Thread by @yemi_uc

First, pick a niche.

Focusing on a niche is very important and it helps you craft the right pitch.

When picking a niche, consider how much the average businesses in that niche makes.

If they sell an infrequent product with low demand and each new client they get fetches them $20 in additional revenue, they are not going to be able to pay you more than $100 - $200 per month.

However, if businesses in that niche earn $500 - $1,000 on every new client or they are a business with high margins and huge demand, they might be willing to pay you good money.

That is just 1 reason why picking a niche and focusing on it is important.

Branding yourself as an SEO expert for eCommerce, or a Web developer for restaurateurs or a Social media expert for sport & gyms makes it easier for people to have faith in your work and refer you too.

Why you will get clients

Many offline stores are looking for online solutions, and some owners are trying to hack it themselves so they take their job to Fiverr and Upwork. If you can reach them via direct email before they go to those sites you will most likely close the deal.

Pricing

Many SMEs will change their current agency if you can offer them a service that is just as good or better for half the price. Often, the agency most SMEs are using are pretty bad at the job they are doing. So if you are super-skilled and cheaper you will get the job.

Finding clients

The Google Maps team and Google My Business team are quite aggressive in getting small businesses to claim their business listings. Many of these businesses do not have a website or any web presence, safe for Facebook and Instagram, so your market is big.

Google tries to give these SMEs a website on a `*.business.site` subdomain. To find clients in your niche with minimal web presence, try this Google advanced search:

`$niche site:*.business.site intext:$physical_store_location` .

E.g: I know home services are quite expensive in the USA, so if my niche was plumbing services in towns across the USA, I would type:

`Plumbing site:*.business.site intext:Austin`

Google says there are 200 results for that query which means there are ~200 plumbing businesses in Austin, Texas I can sell my services to. You could expand the scope in your niche by changing cities. In my example, I used Austin, Texas.

The plumbing niche is very competitive too, you can see that people are running ads even for very random queries related to plumbing, so you can tell that people in this niche might be eager to spend money with you.

Make sure to consider niches were businesses spend money online

Also remember, the reason why the query works is because free websites given by Google always contain `business.site` and they force every owner to include their physical address on the website.

Many small businesses also either use a free `.wordpress.com` site or a free wordpress theme. You can find them using this query:

`$niche site:*.wordpress.com intext:$country` OR `$niche intext:"powered by wordpress"`

If you can find a niche were most of the business owners use the same free theme, like in Ecommerce where many sites use WooCommerce default free theme - Storefront.

You can try this query instead `$niche intext:$footer_text`.

E.g: `antiques intext:“Built with Storefront & WooCommerce“`

Often Ecommerce stores that are not optimized as their competitors in profitable niches, need help in getting there.

Many of these businesses are often in smaller, more obscure locations, so you can take the area where they are located and type in `$niche in $location` in Google Maps to get more businesses like theirs that do not even have a `.business.site` domain or any website.

How to contact these businesses for cheap

Many of these businesses have less than 10 employees and the owner is the decision maker. Unfortunately, their emails are not published on their site as they are most likely using a Gmail or yahoo mail.

Fortunately, their phone numbers are published on these free websites and in Google maps. Often it is the phone number of the owner.

Luckily, Skype has many cheap plans where you can call an unlimited amount of phone numbers an unlimited amount of times.

They have a $3 plan for the USA where you can call US phone numbers an unlimited amount of times. You can also purchase a US phone number from Skype.

See the link - secure.skype.com/calling-rates?…

Spam calls are on the rise in the USA. So make sure your call does not sound like spam. When you call, get an email address to reach the founder.

It is easier to build a relationship via email than you trying to cold pitch them directly on the phone.

Depending on the niche, you will be told No many times. If you do not know how to pitch or be convincing on a call or you get demotivated by Nos. Hire someone to do it for you.

If you are not American, and you are calling American businesses you do not need to fake an accent. Just be audible and do not be vague. There are a lot of immigrants living there so they are sort of used to it.

If you are calling from a developing country, especially Nigeria, you do not want to review that until you have built a relationship with them over email and they are ready to convert.

There are stereotypes out there that could hamper your sales by name dropping your country.

For easy tracking, maintain a spreadsheet with all the businesses you have discovered in your niche with the phone numbers and email addresses of the owner.

Twitter has a thread limit. So, I will be starting a new thread on how to pitch and close the deals.

Here is the final part of the thread.

https://twitter.com/yemi_uc/status/1077212228770775044

Time for a plugin:

I write my best content on yemijohnson.com

Some of the things I've written:

- How to be right 96% of the Time

- What happened after I googled sugar mummy

- All the free stuff I got after writing 100 Nigerian companies.