The Marketing Local Business Online Agency Coaching Course is almost ready to launch! Local Marketing Source, LLC plans to launch the course on Thursday November 12, 2009. Make sure to register to your right if you want to be informed when the course goes live.
LMS has been providing some great content lately, such as the Selling Local Internet Marketing Services video. This is about 25 minutes of a 60+ minute webinar with open questions.
I’m not going to give you my words, since of my employees did such a good job of informing me of such changes this morning, I’m going to simply re post his email.
Scott,
Not sure if you saw this yet but today (10/13) www.articlemarketer.com was retired. The article distribution services have been taken up by two new companies – www.distributeyourarticles.com and www.contentcrooner.com. Our service has moved over to contentcrooner. The interface is exactly the same as AM. However, the process of submitting articles is much faster. I just submitted 14 in an hour and am sure I could do this number pretty consistently – the pages load much faster. Except for the author account page which takes almost a full 3-4 minutes to load up – which really sucks because this is where you have to go each time to correct articles. Another plus is that contentcrooner allows for pen names.
On a related note, Traffic Geyser has just rolled out their article distribution service. Unfortunately, it was built specifically for TG’s transcription services -they take your video and submit the transcription (which they do for a fee) to article sites. I have been testing it with existing, text-only content like we are doing and only a handful of the 30 or so sites in TG get submitted to correctly. It seems like they have a lot of bugs to work out.
Brian
Disclaimer: The links on this page are affiliate links. While if you end up purchasing the above mentioned services, Local Marketing Source, LLC is the owner of the affiliate link. They will be paid a commision. Whether this was an affiliate link or not, we use these services in our business and fully endorse them, not because we’re paid a small commission, but because I truly believe in these services.
Today we’re launching a fairly extensive campaign for my Internet Marketing Agency. Apparently we’re in a recession, but the agency would never know.
June 2009 we had a record month, and thus far in July we’re set to break another record. The funny thing is that June and July are hands down, the worst business to business months on the calender. Not to mention we’re apparently at the bottom, the worst, of the global recession of 2009, the worst recession in 80 years.
So why is an Internet Marketing agency that caters to small local businesses doing so well? Timing is a key factor. This is the time because the local business is being transformed, despite the negative factors. I’m excited and terrified as to what is about to come in September of this year. What happens when the economy does turn around? It’s a good thing I’ve built a business that is highly scalable.
I share this with you because I want to talk about our largest marketing campaign we’re launching. It’s costing us peanuts and I want to show you the objective.
Most people just don’t get it!
Yesterday I had a prospect from Toronto tell me we’re 4 times the price of a competitor and that my competitor promised #1 results in 4 weeks. Good for you Mr. Customer, spend money on your business in times of recession is good, just make sure you are cheap and buy the lowest cost provider. We’re all the same. I’m just immoral and decided to charge more so I can enjoy 4x times the profit. I’m also not as good as your competitor, because I can’t garantee you #1 spot.
WHAT?!
Selling Internet Marketing to a Local Business owner is tough and easy at the same time. They really don’t know know better. The Internet is scary, unknown, different, uncomfortable and simply unchartered territory. Some will take opinion at face value. The next challenging aspect is that there is no magic formula. Us Internet Marketers can make stuff up.
The point is here it’s up to us in the know, those who are properly educated, to properly educate our buyers. Those who follow me know that I’m as white hat as it comes. We don’t chase the Google algorithm. We are simply marketers. This is confusing to many, many potential buyers.
Here’s what do to sell SEO
We invest significant time and effort into each prospect. We take the time to show the business owner that there is in fact business on the Internet, using a trusted source, Google. We show them their competitors and provide basic education on key points that our prospect need to know, in order to properly manage their campaign.
See, they know they need to invest this money. The questions now is, with who.
See, if I could garantee you 100% return on investment in one week, why wouldn’t you invest every single penny your owned? Why would you invest only $10? The point is….
Smart Business Owners buy on VALUE, not PRICE — period.
People don’t buy a product or service, they buy a state and a state is an anticipated feeling received from that product or service. Perceived value. Therefore, demonstrate value!!!
This process is fantastic for us. We provide great value to the prospect through education and solid research, enabling them to better decide their next step. Our goal is to close 33% of our assessments.
1/3 goes to the competition
1/3 decides now is not the right time
1/3 buy
We achieve a higher closing rate
We have had months where our closing rate is as high as 58%. Most of those who don’t buy don’t end up buying for over a year, and I’m sure several of those ended up buying from us or will buy from us. At that point, it’s about strengthening the relationship, that’s a whole different post.
Permanent link to this article: http://www.scott-gallagher.net/local-business-owners-arent-yet-educated-on-internet-marketing-for-a-small-local-business/
This is not a post related to Internet Marketing. I felt this post was necessary since we’ve seen this a few times recently. A search on Google for [malicious iframe attack] brings up 38,000 results. Please take the 2 minutes to check your site and below we describe the steps to identify the problem and steps to correct the problem. I would like thank Meena Rao, my senior project manager, for compiling the report below.
Recently, a number of websites were attacked by malicious code. Several reputable and legitimate sites have been compromised by this attack.
The attack is done in 2 steps. The first step in the attack is for an intruder to gain access to the FTP login credentials (username and password) for a site. This is easy to do for sites for which FTP passwords can be easily guessed, something like “site123” and easy to decipher. The FTP login is then used to get into the site and append malicious code to the index files on the site. Any file that has the name “index” as part of its name will be attacked. The code that is appended is contained in an <iframe> tag.
The first step that you, as a website owner, need to take is to immediately change the FTP password for the site and make it very strong by using a combination of numbers, upper case and lower case letters, and special characters and make it at least 8 characters long.
Some other points to remember are, never send FTP username and password via email or Instant Messaging. If you have to do it, make sure you send it in some encrypted form, or send it in 2 separate emails. Also, talk to your web host and make sure that they have installed the necessary security fixes to improve internal security and prevent further attacks.
http://www.brookscourier.com and http://www.easterncourier.net were among the sites affected by this hacking program. In the screenshot above, you can see that Google has put a warning message for the site that reads “This site may harm your computer”.
This goes to show that this issue can be harmful and needs to be fixed as soon as possible.
NOTE: Since writting this post, I have joined the faculty of an elite Local Internet Marketing Education portal and we have since created an extremely valuable package to help teach to sell SEO services to businesses. We know there is a need for this and this report is step-by-step with a video that follows. Please read the updated post on How to Sell SEO Services.
This is a post on how to sell SEO using my website assessment. There is a video for your reference below and tools.
When I started witting MLBO my first target audience was the local business owner and their employees. I visioned a step-by-step process that practically anyone could use to begin marketing their business. I learned quickly there is no 101 level, either you dive right in or you stand on the side of the pool, there is no getting your feet wet.
I begun starting to attract other Internet Marketer who wanted a business similar to my agency, providing Internet Marketing services to the local businesses. It dawned on me, not only have I developed the processes to deliver such services, I have tried and tested processes in place to manage 100′s of accounts, employees and contractors. I have well documented processes for operations, finance and most importantly sales.
Challenges in Selling SEO to a Local Business
Where do I start? You are trying to sell something that someone can’t touch, or see results for six months. You can not provide a single guarantee, you need a contract and generally, the buyer is uneducated on SEO. You are selling a service that has a lot of spammers, unscrupulous people and generally, the SEO market place is not well trusted. This is not a service to sell for $100 a month and you are asking for an investment in range of $5000 minimum over six months. It’s a tough sell!
When you do close and SEO account though it’s pay off. Our typical SEO client’s life is around 10 months. They get their ROI by month five. My margins are better than most companies. If I were working for myself, I would only need 15 new accounts per year to make a decent income.
Selling is about Discovering the Prospect’s Unique Value
In my Internet Marketing Book, I discuss processes to achieve results for a local business. I discuss how to research and discover how much business lies on the Internet for a local business. I teach you the right tools to discover that ‘opportunity’. The challenge is, does your prospect tie those into value for their business? Most don’t.
I have this process I call a Website Assessment. It’s a ‘free’ assessment of a prospect’s website, however we place a value of $200 on it because it takes us an hour to prepare and an hour to deliver.
I have created a FREE video for you! Folks, this is gold, I promise. The process described in the video has helped me sell $100′s of thousands of dollars worth of SEO services to local businesses. My closing rate in my sales funnel is a whooping 58%!
Before watching the video, you need to understand your objectives.
Educate your prospects on what white SEO is
Educate your prospects on what a keyword is, how important keywords are and what we use them for.
Show your prospects exactly where traffic is coming from and how many searches are really happening on the Google network.
Show your prospects who their competition is and their estimated click through.
Show them if they are not in the top 6 spots for their ‘money’ keyword(s), they are NOT in the game.
Instill fear with them and scarcity, indicating that their competitors are receiving traffic, traffic is only increasing and they are losing market share daily by not being on the Internet.
Click on the image to the left to watch the video. This is a training video that I created with a bad ass website for the purposes of setting up a website assessment. You’ll note that I use WEB CEO to do this. Web CEO is a great SEO application, however I only use it to genenerate rankings reports for my prospects and clients and use it for our Website Assessment. There is a free version which is pretty good, however they lock you out of features required to run a business selling SEO. Fork over the couple hundred for this tool, it’s the best selling tool you’ll use.
Also reference the chapter in MLBO (Chapter 5) that addresses the use of Web CEO. I provide a step by step analysis of this product.
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