denisklicic - Profile“Hope you don't think I mean Qype  Our site is My Local Services. ”
That's exactly what I thought. Sorry, my bad.
“Don't get me wrong, me personally I hate making coldcalls, and I'm not a fan of receiving them either, but if it grows the business...
We used to make a lot of outbound sales calls, and had an inhouse sales team. I didn't like, and tried to make it less aggressive, but the overhead of a sales team wasn't worth the associated hassle. We then went down a professional call centre route, but hearing the aggressive sales pitches from professionally trained staff didn't sit well with us, and decided to scrap all outbound sales calls, and concentrate on converting inbound enquires. Done that ever since, and works well for us 
But horses for courses and different things work for different companies. I'm not against cold selling as a business concept, but in hindsight, I'm glad we no longer do it. ”
In that case, my suggestion above is not really relevant anymore as you've done it before, but its still interesting to hear about your experience with this marketing method...
I used it before and plan to use it again as soon as my start-up is open for business simply because it works for me. All I need to do is pick up the phone and voila, I now have direct connection with my target audience. : )
However, this time I'm going to (try to) take the "cold" out of "calling" as much as possible by warming up my prospects in advance with direct mail. “Steps into the lions den....
As a 3rd party local business review site, we will certainly mention once or twice <ahem> about an upgraded listing  But only via email and never by coldcalling. Personally I don't think it's unreasonable if someone's taking out one of our free listings, and they can unsubscribe easily from any mail at any time. If they get the hump, we simply delete their free listing, so no skin off our nose.
Likewise to other providers like Qype. I'm personally not a fan of the full on sales pitch, or cold calling, but if you take up one of their free listings, then I don't think it's that unreasonable to get a sales call. If it's not for you, just simply say "no thanks". If you are really anti getting any upsells, via mail or phone, then don't sign up for any free listings.
Obviously if you decide to take out a paid listing with any directory, don't agree from a cold call and go and do some research. If you perceive some value, go for it, if you don't, then.. don't ”
Didn't realize that's your website, Steve. I agree, there's nothing wrong with upselling, especially when the upsell provides great value to the client / customer in terms of positive ROI.
I know you hate coldcalling, but what if this follow-up method could double or triple the results you're currently getting from just sending out follow-up emails? If you've never tried it before, then at least take it for a test ride. See whether its worth doing on a regular basis, or not. Just a suggestion, of course... : ) I'm not really familiar with Qype, however, if they are anything like the rest of 3rd party local business review sites (and I bet they are), they will most definitely follow up with you to upsell you one of their (payable) advertising packages.
I was wondering, how come you decided to sign up with them? Is there a specific benefit/result you are looking to get out of their (free) listing? 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. “By content marketing, you mean on site, blogs, articles forums etc? ”
Here's what I have in mind with content marketing:
For content marketing to work for you, and be one of your best long-term (forgot to add the "long-term" in my post above) marketing/advertising strategy, you first need to identify a "hungry" audience and then have a product/service that will "feed" them, meaning give your customers/clients what they want/need...
Then you use content marketing to gain trust with your clients/customers, and educate them how your product/service can help them solve their problems/make their life or business easier.
So, the main reason why I believe content marketing is one of the best (core) marketing strategy out there is because it adds tremendous value to your business in the long term. You gain trust, reputation, branding, etc...And the best part about is: Your (potential) customers/clients gain as well!
Then the rest is just a vehicle that will get your (marketing) message across to your target audience. A couple of examples of such vehicles would be:
- Google,
- Direct mail,
- Webinars,
- Seminars,
- Industry events,
- Catalogs,
- Kindle ebooks,
- Press releases,
- Podcasts,
- PDF reports,
- Whatever
As you can see, there is no need to limit yourself just to search engines (like google) to explore the power of this strategy...
Yes, ofcourse, you'll want to first publish all that content on your site/blog, so you can get free traffic from search engines as well (as you know, they love good, unique content as well, just like your customers/clients do), but then you can go one step (or ten steps) further and spread your useful content through other available marketing channels I've mentioned above as well, for even (much) better results!
“This is obviously holy grail stuff, ie organic targeted traffic, but there's a good place for PPC, especially if you have a well tuned campaign. As long as PPC is bringing in conversions, and you are happy with the conversion rate, then use it as a tool alongside other marketing.
The beauty of PPC is instant targeted marketing. It's also a good way to test a set of keywords against content, making sure any required effort/cost is viable before embarking on longterm organic SEO.
Jut my 5 cents worth ”
When you have an unlimited/big budget, it is necessary for you to use all the available channels available, and fine tune your (PPC) campaigns (just like you suggest), but the original poster has "a small advertising budget" which means he can easily blow his budget on PPC if he has never done it before.
And that is why I suggested to rather invest his budget into content (marketing) and add value to his business, rather than just start a PPC campaign and hope it will convert.
Nonetheless, thanks for your 5 cents though! : ) “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... I use Wordpress on ALL of my client's websites as well as on my own website (you gotta practice what you preach ) simply because it's the best web platform available out there. You can also look into Joomla which is another great platform for building CMS based websites.
I'm curious, is there a reason why you want to build your business website yourself? I don't know you (yet) and don't know how skillfull you are in web development and online marketing...
However, if you're like 99.999% of small (local) business owners, you'll manage to build your website for your business, BUT you won't be satisfied with the results you'll get from it. Atleast until you figure out the online marketing part that is... Its funny how many of you think that SEO is the holly grail of the (online) marketing...What if one day Google decides your website does not deserve the first page/position rankings anymore? What happens then?
Well, I'll tell you what happens: Your business goes out of business because you've been putting all your eggs into one (SEO) basket. Leads that you've been previously getting through the SEO aren't there any more!
Now before you start acusing me of talking garbage, you need to know that things like this happen all the time, especially when you're increasing your position artifically. Google is tweaking its algorithm on regular basis and SEO techniques that work today may harm your business tomorow.
I'm not saying you shouldn't go after free traffic from Google. All I'm saying is, don't take it for granted and start diversifying your advertising/marketing methods to prevent potential disasters.
Now ask yourself this: How many new customers are you getting thanks to SEO each month? What would happen with your company if all of a sudden your website lost rankings and you wouldn't getting any more customers from SEO? Would you still be in the business?
Think about it! One of the best ways to advertise/market your business online is through content marketing. Why? Because:
1. It helps you build trust with your prospects and positions you as the expert in your market.
2. Search engines love good content and will reward you with high(er) rankings, and obviously, high(er) rankings means more FREE targetted visitors to your website.
3. It's free provided that you do it by yourself.
The only problem with this strategy is that it can be very time-consuming to produce the quality content needed for it. Plus you need to know your prospects better than they know themselves (what are their problems, what are their wants & needs, what kind of information they need in order to make an informed buying decision, etc...).
Compare content marketing to PPC (advertising method suggested by many on this forum) and you'll see the main difference:
- With PPC, leads stop coming in the moment you stop bidding for clicks.
- With content marketing, leads keep coming in years after you've published your content on the internet.
Just my 2cents, of course, you can still go out and blow your money on PPC and you'll probably get sales from that. However, if I were you, I'd bet my money on content marketing as it's much, much better marketing strategy in the long run. This is upsetting indeed, but it doesn't really surprise me as it has happened to me several times in affiliate marketing. I've seen it happen with videos and images too...
What these *******s do is take your Youtube video and publish it on their own Youtube channel, and then they spam/report the heck out of your existing channel. The end result is, Youtube closes your channel while their channel (with your video on it) is kept alive.
The best thing you can do to protect yourself from such content hijacking is to put your URL into the video, or even better, talk about your URL/company in the video.
I can only imagine how that business owner must have felt once he found out that his new website was created. I'd be mad as hell!
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