It's been over a year now that Handshakin turned from an online marketing services company to a web property investment company. ... What the heck does that mean?
It means we build our own websites on our own domain names. Instead of building websites for clients. Here's a concrete lead generation website. We built a referral website "Fort Collins Concrete Contractors" and after waiting and blogging for 6 months, it started to rank on the first page of google! We have signed agreements to get paid a 15-25% commission of the concrete jobs we refer to concrete contractors that are closed.
I have a sales manager in Philippines who answers the calls it receives and we help pair the customers with concrete contractors who have signed commission agreements with us. Before we had been charging on concrete contractor a set rate each month, but this month we've already made more than that amount by charging AFTER the concrete contractor closes a job. It's easier to sell a $0 up front commission agreement and makes more money. Our last payment was $799.50 after refering a job over $5,000 to a local concrete contractor. That came from one phone call, our best month this year did 222 phone calls.
We actually build all of our websites on Weebly, so your tech skills don't need to be advanced at all. The due diligence of a smaller US city, paired with a profitable niche (we picked Fort Collins since it's not as big as Denver, and concrete jobs are more expensive than çarpet cleaning jobs, for example).
One of our newest websites is Concrete New Mexico, and you can see it is a fully built website with original content, and most importantly a blog and social media accounts!