Approaching other businesses to offer your services

I think the thread is actually talking about other avenues of generating business, but it's an interesting point. But lets be honest, unless you have brand and/or a viral social media presence, the chances are the majority of your traffic, and therefore your online customers will come from Google.

So it's not surprising us lessor mortals will look at SEO or at least elements of it and consider it one of the most important aspects of online marketing.

If you want to try and game or manipulate the results, then you may come a cropper, and the SEO industry is having a good clean out courtesy of Panda and Penguin, but thats not necessarily a bad thing

Yes, I can see that OP is originally mentioning cold calling, however, lots of you suggested SEO as the way to go forward. That's why my comment was about SEO and not cold calling...

The bottom line is, if I had to choose between cold calling and Google, I'd pick cold calling anytime of the day. It's just that I don't like my business to (fully) depend on multi-billion dollar company that earns (the majority of it's) money by providing pay-per-click services and wants me (small/local business owner) to start using these services as well.

As far as manipulating the search engines goes, I think everything (except from publishing quality, user-friendly content) is considered manipulation and could get you burried sooner or later. Even if I build links from relevant, quality sites like this one, one day, I could end up being a collateral damage to one of the famous Google's animals.

These are just my thoughts of course, you guys are obviously free to keep putting all your eggs into the Google's SEO basket. : )

EDIT: Read this story and you'll know how (over)dependancy on Google's free traffic can hurt your business: webmasterworld.com/google/3281124.htm (cant post links yet so you'll need to copy/paste the link into the browser) And this happened back in 2007...

Personally, I will continue to sacrifice goats, appease the Google god, and even run round the room naked rather than have to rely on cold calling

But on a serious note, it depends on your business type. If you are specifically an online business, then like it or loathe it, Google is the number 1 organic traffic generator, so will more than likely generate a decent share of your business. There's no reason why you can't combine multiple marketing approaches though, but few companies will turn down organic gained leads.

But if you are a bricks and mortar business, tradesman, or a social type of business such as events etc, then even more options, from social media to good old fashioned footfall and a sandwich board.

If you are product or service based, then the outbound sales call model may work well for you, but this is a very high overhead approach that won't suit a lot of businesses.

Google may be shaking the indexing tree backwards and forwards, but the online world changes at a breakneck speed, and if you are willing to stay at the front, adapt, take a few knocks but pocket the gains, then it can be an interesting space to work

The internet is awash with stories about businesses that have gone pop from the evil Google, and we lost a revenue earning site as well. But you lick your wounds, and count the cost. Revenue far outweighed overhead, so it was a winner. Learn some lessons and move on.

In spite of continual shouts of innocence, if you look hard enough, 90% of the time there's a reason, and 90% of the time it's down to taking shortcuts, gaming the system or someone doing something dodgy somewhere along the line, imho...

You can always hire someone to do the cold-calling for you, but at the end of the day its all about the ROI, and the means (time, money) available to you.

And why do business owners run a business? Of course, to profit, right? That's why I do understand what you are trying to say. Business is not just about SEO. What if you're on the #1 rank in Google and yet, your business is not getting a valuable return? I think it's way better if your business is earning, despite of not being on the top rank.