Haven’t posted for six days, which is mainly due to things heating up here. Anyways, had time for a short one. :)

The problem with the Internet is that although it’s so broad, meaning that you can succeed doing almost anything if you work hard enough at it (and have the right amount of luck) it is also insanely competitive. Let’s just take a look at this starting out from a writers perspective (which is how I started) – when you start out, with no experience it is very difficult to charge more than the industry standard $0.01 per word, especially with hundreds, if not thousands charging the same if not lower.

You get outbid by people living in countries where the cost of living is less, and thus people that don’t need to make as much to have a comfortable standard of living.

What if you could eliminate having to worry about those people?

You can.

I’ve talked on here about offline marketing quite a bit… the Revolution magazine theme coupled with a logo designer and local companies is one of the easiest sells you’ll ever find. However, how about selling locally – from online to offline?

Recently, I found a local auction website, which is apparently pretty big… I’d heard of it before, but hadn’t really looked at it too seriously. The auction site is Souq.com, which is basically an online marketplace like eBay.

I thought that Dubai wasn’t really developed with online business, but saw they had an eBook section… with more than 300 odd eBooks! Now, I looked into that a little more closely, and came across a user that had quite a few of them. All of them were the standard private label rights eBooks you can find a dime a dozen – dog training, cooking, dating etc.

However, I came across a user that was making a sale or two a day… at around 35 DH (which is around $10 USD) per eBook. Nothing spectacular, but by taking ten minutes to copy and paste in the sales pages of each PLR product, he is making consistent income for the last year or so.

What another user is doing is burning the eBooks onto CDs… which would have cost less than a dollar. He’s charging double what the other one is, and although not making as many sales he’s still making a few hundred USD monthly.

Local markets are a lot less competitive… I’m going to go the whole PLR route, but maybe a little more professionally with print advertising. It’ll definitely be interesting to try out. There are just so many ideas you can look at, and if you’re creative in your own country (or city) I don’t see why you can’t have some fun (and hopefully make some money too!).

It’s pretty obvious that local markets are willing to pay more than your online customers, who are used to Googling bargains and paying less, even though the benefits may be the same. Getting an experienced webmaster to pay you anything more than $100 for a simple HTML five page website is near impossible, but getting a local company to pay you $1,000 is easy.

If your own city doesn’t have an auction website, or a main go-to blog, why not look at setting one up? Things that seem common to you because you’ve had online experience may be novel ideas in your local community… there was quite a hot product on the Warrior Forum a few months back about a non-tech person who was making around $10,000 a month locally by basically selling ads on a souped up proxy.

Don’t be afraid to test things, see how it goes. I will update here if things go well (or even if they tank horribly, which is definitely possible. We’ll see. :razz: ). Hope you guys took something from this one, enjoy the weekend. :)

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