Following my Success Without College post you might think this is going to be a lecture on studying diligently. Thankfully not 
. When doing business with anyone, whether you’re trying to sell something to someone, buy something from someone, or do any kind of partnership or other business deal, you absolutely must do your homework on your prospect.
Yesterday, a guy offered me $230 for 5 “permanent” “non-spammy” (“spammyness” to be determined at his discretion) text links in the footer of one my sites. After I politely declined, and proposed a monthly fee instead of a one time “permanent” fee (never do a deal like that BTW), his reply pitch was that the $230 would help me pay my hosting fees. A simple google search on my name would have revealed that I own a pretty sizable Internet media company and therefore, his pitch fell on deaf ears. Paying my hosting fees is the least of my problems and his pitch needed to compete with all of the other advertising and monetization opportunities that are available to me.
It’s important to get a sense of the size and savvy of your prospect: are they a struggling student? Are they a mogul working for Google? Are they married with five kids, trying to pay their bills? Are they a hairdresser by day and a blogger by night? Or, are they a successful entrepreneur with a 13 year history of developing and monetizing websites? Who the prospect is makes a huge difference in how you approach them, what fees you propose for any monetary consideration, and how you sell them on your product/service/idea.
Doing the Research
You needn’t become Magnum P.I. or a stalker here. This shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes:
1) If you know the person’s full name, start with a Google search. Look for corporate bios, articles, news stories, websites. This will be easy if you’re dealing with a Harold Weinzapper and a bit harder with a John Smith, but you can also use some industry related keywords or the prospect’s company name or corporate domain name to narrow it down.
2) If you have an email @ a domain, check out that domain. If it’s a corporate site, look for the about us page with your prospect’s bio.
3) Look for Linked In profiles.
4) Find domains and websites that the person owns with a whois registrant search. Note that this can be costly, so only do this if you absolutely need to know about all the businesses that your prospect operates. If you know of another source for these searches, do let everyone know in a comment.
5) Look for blogs at technorati and google blog search.
6) Get a facebook.com account and search for their profile there.
With this information in hand, you will be able to optimize your relationship with the prospect and will be much more likely to appeal to them on their terms and on their level without coming across as an ass or an idiot and without selling yourself short.
The dude clearly pissed you off!!
some very good points there.
I am a naturally cynical person and I always suspect the worst hence I try and find out as much as possible about people, places and services before making a decision.
The issue of how to value links or advertising space is a difficult. I have been approached by a local lawyer about advertising on one of my local information websites that ranks very well. The traffic isn’t very high, but the competition is very low. How do I go about pricing an advert?
Jim
I wonder what his definition of permanent is as well as spammyness.
Perhaps $230 is a lot of money to him.
$230 could be a lot of money but not when you consider that I’d be stuck with his (probably spammy) links on my page for 100 years. $230/month, maybe. $230/lifetime, no.
Funny that you should write about this. I received a similar “offer” about a month ago. One time payment for permanent links on my site.
Give me a break!
Vic
Heh.. I think I was contacted by the same dude. I got an offer of $130 for a “life-long” text ad in one of my music blogs.
Good points you wrote here, thanks. It reminded me to do some homework before contacting the owner of one site I have been interested in. The problem is that the site has no contact information and whois gives nothing. I have no idea how to figure out the owner.
You could email the owner from another account (not as yourself) asking a question about his site and see who replies to you, then search his name.
The problem is that there is no contact information. It is link collection site that has Alexa ranking around 150 000. There are only links, no ads at all. By re-organizing and adding some ads I could make a small, but consistent passive income. It is one of those sites I am interested in, but I have not figured out who is the owner.
That was obviously not a good deal for you. But when you are spamming people, it is hard to do homework on a list of 5,000 e-mail adresses. Was the email at all personalized?
Yeah it was personalized and we had about a 3-4 email dialog too.
i agree with scott