Local Online Marketing E-book ... Paging Claude Whitacre - Questions
I read in another thread here that you're no longer offering the 30 minute consultation you mentioned in the book and the link was dead. Therefore, I was hoping you would be kind enough to answer a few questions about the techniques described in the book so that everyone can benefit. Here goes...
I'm starting to actively promote my website development business. "Local Online Marketing" seems like an ideal fit with what I'm attempting.
To be clear, I'm not asking a meta question about selling the service of local online marketing. I mean that your book's technique seems to fit well with marketing my own local web design business.
I'm trying to determine if your technique has a high probability of creating business opportunities, or if I should focus my effort more on direct outbound marketing (cold calls, direct mail, etc.)
So here's the questions:
1) Will it work for website designers? Web design services absolutely GLUT search engines with their services. It makes sense - someone else pays them to stuff search engines, so they're good at it. I completely grok your concept of dominating local search. But I'm running across many web designers who appear in listings for MY area but are not local (IE, their landing pages lie.) I'm wondering if local online marketing in the area of web design runs into too much expertise from the competition to make it worthwhile. IE, I'm trying to compete with those who even dominate locally. Is this really the case? Or is the web biz really just like other businesses?
2) B2B vs B2C: website design is inherently B2B in most cases. Your book seems to focus exclusively on B2C sales. Any caveats in applying your methods in B2B?
3) What still works well? Do the methods you recommended in the book still seem to produce high local search standing? Especially Youtube videos and content farm (ezine) articles? (I have a strong personal bias against Ezine type sites but if they still work I'll hold my nose...)
And I had a few comments on your book.
I've seen some comments in threads here describing the effort to implement your method as very high. I just don't see it. Your method is so stripped-down, compared to almost all other online marketing advice, that at times I'm wondering if it's even for real. (but it certainly seems to produce results.)
Here's what I mean: If someone focuses on content marketing they're going to spend (or waste) a ton of effort on developing and posting articles. Nurturing a mailing list or a blog readership can be a lot of work. SEO and Adwords both take tremendous patience, a lot of study, and in the case of Adwords a lot of cash. And social media communities are a pain in the a** to promote, and to operate.
Your method requires almost no deep analysis nor preparation. Just taking action and being observant. I searched the book and you have not one mention of these topics:
landing page
Adwords
email list marketing
calls to action
copywriting
content marketing (altho the entire program is exactly that)
analytics (such as bounce rates)
Lastly, thanks for writing this book, Claude. I know it's your lead generation but it's also a public service. As a guy in another thread said, think of me when you buy off the dollar menu, I bought that for you, too.
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