Evan Carmichael advises keeping your day job while building an SEO consulting side business, then securing monthly retainers with existing clients before going full-time. Focus on overdelivering to get referrals, get local media coverage, and niche into specific industries like law or car dealerships to stand out.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's video, I'm going to answer a question from one of my YouTube viewers, Al, who's asking about how to turn his part-time business into a full-time business. So he wrote in saying, "I have a question for you. I'm doing SEO, internet marketing consulting, in addition to my full-time job." but I really wanna do my own business again. What steps do you recommend me to do this from a side thing into a profitable full-time business? So, Al, congrats on getting this business started. I'll often recommend to new entrepreneurs to start on a part-time basis. You still have money coming in from your job as you build up your business. It's more important to take steps every day to grow your business than to invest tons of energy in 3 months and then shut the business down because you haven't built up a profitable base and you haven't let the momentum grow for your company. So it's It's great to start part-time. What I would do is start approaching the clients that you've already done some work with and see if you can work out some kind of monthly retainer system. Because when you quit your job, there's that security that you got that money coming in regularly. So all of a sudden that's gone. So what you wanna try to do is line up some contracts where you can get consistent money coming in, especially in the early days of a business, so you know you can pay the rent and, you know, put food on the table. So I'd approach those companies and see if there's anything you can do to make it a monthly ongoing job with them and think of other ways you might be able to help them expand and grow their business. And then focus on overdelivering, wowing them, offering as much value as you can so they love you, so they wanna talk about you, tell their friends and other business partners and colleagues about you to help you get some of that referral business coming in. Customers are really busy, they have a lot of, you know, things that they have to worry about, so you really have to overdeliver and provide so much more extra value for them to wanna talk about you, right? You wanna make sure that you're on their radar map when they're talking to other business owners. The next thing I would do is try to become an expert. So, it could be in your local area, so you might be a local SEO marketing expert. Try to get known, try to be featured in the local, you know, papers, the local media, local blogs, and be seen as the guy in your area who's the expert on SEO. I then also try to niche myself out to pick up certain categories. So maybe you're working with lawyers, professional services, or manufacturers, or contractors, or car dealerships, whatever it is, find a niche because there's so many guys who are SEO consultants and internet marketing guys. So if you can show that you're the best at what you do for a certain category, then if a new car dealership is coming on and they want to hire somebody, well, you're the guy to go to for car dealerships. So you'll know a lot of their specific problems, have packages that can tailor right to their needs, and you're much more likely to land those clients. So that would be my advice for you. Good luck. It sounds very exciting. If you guys liked the video, please give it a thumbs up below. And also love to hear what your advice for Al would be if you want to leave a comment under this video. And stay tuned for the next episode. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
