Is local marketing worth it?

I been reviewing Warriorforum for some time now and getting amazed by amount of brainpower collected here. So thought to ask you this. - My background is working in corporate software as consultant for last 17 years but the online MMO stuff is completely new to me. I have created a small offshore team over the years which I been using for many small/large corporate software projects like building interfaces, writing bolt-ons, EDI etc . Done fair amount of manual SEO work for corporate clients with great results. Now looking at what many other people doing here, I like to let the team lose on few processes and products which I see here and setup a lead gen shop. Specially for local marketing which I feel is a lucrative business. But do not have clear idea if it would give us similar returns what we used to ($20-40K per month). So want to get an idea as how much local marketing in niche is profitable? What is the learning curve? Would you recommend me to jump into this full time heads down? Any feedback is most appreciated. Thanks.