Local Botting Ideas

[illmill 87]

There was an interesting topic that came up on the skype group, so I thought I would start a thread about it.  The question was, "what are some ideas to make money from selling bots to local businesses?"

 

TJ popped on with a good idea about a bot that can do lead gen for local auto dealerships.  I won't repost the exact strategy here since it's his idea and I'm not sure if he wants it on the forum.  But I have had a lawyer ask me to create a bot that scrapes a database for people who have filed a certain type of lawsuit before.

 

With local businesses, it's all about picking up the phone and getting in touch wit the owner.  This isn't very hard, but I think most people are afraid of it or maybe just afraid of actual work in general.  This is what I would do.  Think of local businesses who want more business (which is basically all of them).  Come up with your own ideas on how they might get their leads and see if this is something you could automate.  Pick up the phone and ask them how they get their leads and what their conversion rates are (it's surprisingly easy to get people to tell you this on the first call).  Tell them you can create software that will do all this for them (of course, only if you actually can create the software, but don't call it a bot, call it software).  After you complete it, charge them an upfront license fee and then a recurring (either monthly or quarterly or whateer) fee to keep it running and provide support.  Charge them $500 or over $1000.  Trust me, if it saves them money or time or both, then they will pay it.  Call all their competitors and offer the same software.  Rinse and repeat.

 

What are your ideas on this topic?  How have you actually made money from local businesses?

[Sirfrank 17]

just sold something similar for 1000 euros. local business costumer management panel

[illmill 87]

just sold something similar for 1000 euros.

Nice!

 

local business costumer management panel

Can you explain what this is?

[CreativeWurks 9]

Good idea opening up this topic.

 

My first trial at this was doing a general promotion for software automation. My pitch to the local and offline businesses was that we can "Automate any task".

 

I believe the interest in the services were weak because I left the market target waaaay too broad. Just like in local SEO, the business leads start rolling in when you demonstrate that you know enough of their business to show them how it can be done more efficiently through automation. (Sorry about the run-on sentences... its 2am and im tired.)

 

Once I start this new targetting campaign, I am sure the leads will flow through, and super-targetted.

[Sirfrank 17]

Nice!

 

Can you explain what this is?

add me to the ubot skype think tank, and i will share it happily

[illmill 87]

 

My first trial at this was doing a general promotion for software automation. My pitch to the local and offline businesses was that we can "Automate any task".

 

I believe the interest in the services were weak because I left the market target waaaay too broad.

Yup, I agree.  That's a good point.  I have told business owners this same thing and they just stare blankly.  They have no idea what this even means and they don't understand that the repetitive things they pay people to do can be done by software.  I tell people I specialize in lead generation software that gets unlimited leads from various social networks.  This, they can understand and they are interested in.

[Fabier 11]

So I saw Eric post this last night and it piqued my interest because I am about to be targetting a very specific group of local businesses and so I started thinking of things I could create a bot for which might get their attention. It is funny, really, because like always, I just figured out services which I would use bots to augment. This is why it took me two years to upgrade ubot studio to the dev license.... Because of the 200+ bots I've written in the last two years, only one bot was one which a customer even saw (and I still was the one typically using it).

 

My experience has been to sell a service and then write a bot to automate all or part of it. The business owners I tend to work with just don't have the time to play with some new piece of software and would rather shell out some money for someone else to do it. The good news is that it isn't very difficult to be that "someone else". But based on this line of thought I came up with a few ideas which I might use...

 

1.) A headline generator / content generator bot.

 

One thing I collected long ago was a list of catchy tabloid like headlines (I have a few dozen). These are heavily tested to get people's attention, and about 99.999999999% of business owners are just using crappy overused headlines for their blogs / social media services.  (How to write an article versus The six immutable laws of content that puts customers in your pocket.) Putting all these headline templates together into one bot would turn it into an interesting content sales engine. If you have customers who are trying to write content, work out an agreement with some article company to upsell their content and build a bot to give to clients that generates unlimited content ideas and then they can just order the articles that sound most interesting to them.

 

The bot could even be a freebie then. At $50-$100 / article you could have a pretty healthy business going by just generating articles off of about 30 - 90 headline templates.

 

2.) In the same vein as above, I have always wanted to create a bot to ease the development of Animoto videos. By stripping their branding and plugging in to their site directly, you could write a seemingly extremely powerful video software which is simply powered by Animoto. Or spice it up by again just having the bot put in orders which you can fulfill -- then you can integrate voiceover scripts and more.

 

3.) Using Aymen's SQLite and HTTP Post plugins you could build a small but powerful CRM software which integrates with almost anything that has an API. This could be a big deal if you tie it into something like Twilio for text message marketing or Mailchimp for email marketing. By using the power of ubot's flexibility the sky is the limit on the integrations here. You could open up entirely new forms of marketing to local businesses by simply marrying their CRM database with marketing services they never could use before.

 

Also don't forget about the potential for reporting if you have access to their client CRM. I've been working on a bot recently to crunch some reports for a client of mine. These reports are going to tell my customer which paid ads he posts net him the most profit since we have collected data through the entire sales process (this is an idea in and of itself, but it is more difficult to mass produce since it tends to have quirks for individual customers).

 

Anyways, those were a few ideas which came to mind. Was trying to think out of the box, hopefully it sparks some ideas for you guys .

[illmill 87]

 

3.) Using Aymen's SQLite and HTTP Post plugins you could build a small but powerful CRM software which integrates with almost anything that has an API. This could be a big deal if you tie it into something like Twilio for text message marketing or Mailchimp for email marketing. By using the power of ubot's flexibility the sky is the limit on the integrations here. You could open up entirely new forms of marketing to local businesses by simply marrying their CRM database with marketing services they never could use before.

 

Also don't forget about the potential for reporting if you have access to their client CRM. I've been working on a bot recently to crunch some reports for a client of mine. These reports are going to tell my customer which paid ads he posts net him the most profit since we have collected data through the entire sales process (this is an idea in and of itself, but it is more difficult to mass produce since it tends to have quirks for individual customers).

 

Oh wow!  This is an amazing idea.  Now I'm thinking of about a thousand ways to add on to this concept.

[Kev 69]

So far I have ran two training courses on how to create and sell software to local businesses.

 

I've made competitor monitoring bots, update Website bots, twitter lead generation bots, video creation bots, pricing tables updating bots, local media site monitoring (lead gen), cheaper calls bot (twilio and php integration), derivative type bots (generate HTML pages and upload the content) and lots more. I usually get the business owner to tell me what software they need and agree a fixed monthly fee to make it.

 

Most of my bots are made for local businesses. I usually do SaaS and give them a webform rather than the software itself so I manage the tool on my server and apply updates where needed. Eliminates licence hassle and non payment issues (simply deactivate their form).