Submitted client to local directories. Now he wants eyes on those listings.

I think very few people search on these sites for businesses with the exception of maybe Yelp and Foursquare.

The primary benefit you're getting is the citation itself which will help him get better rankings in the city his business is located in.

Get enough of these and you will get a 7-box ranking in the SERPs, which is currently the holy grail of local ranking.

What did you sell?
You went in an presented something... what was it?

You have to understand that even though you've submitted the citation listings for him, many of those websites will not be crawled and indexed for up to 90 days. After the citations are indexed, he still won't get much traffic to the citations or from the citations. Most of the value will be to SEO (backlinks). and it makes him look more credible when someone does look him up online.

As a new chiropractor, he has to realize he is in an ultra competitive field, and he is going to have to invest in good marketing to get new patients.

The last thing I would ever do is work with a new business owner that basically refuses to invest to get customers. Kind of ridiculous in the grand scheme of things.

I do have to ask that he must be advertising somewhere? Could be print, whatever. What you do is you or the client measure that form of marketing. Really easy to beat that with local SEO.

If you're really daring, offer your client a money back guarantee if there's no results. Don't play the "I'll pay you later once I get clients" game. If the client will not work with you at this fundamental level then move on and go find another customer.

Good luck with your client!

If he's in your town, talk to him about leveraging video. Namely Youtube.

he's going to be a pain in the a**

First off congrats on selling the first service.

Now that the first job is finished and you have been paid there are not many options if you are selling a service and he has no money. Your time will be much better spent finding clients that have money to spend and just need someone they can trust.

The other thing I will tell you is that "I have no money" is ALWAYS an excuse.
When I first started out I use to get that song and dance and would wait and wait to get paid. Then I would see their new BMW, hear about their 2 week vacation down south or the bigger house they just bought.

Now when I hear "I have no money to advertise" I just chalk that up to the person not having a clue on how to run a succesful business. It is no coincidence that new start ups have huge failure rates. I sat across the table from someone a few weeks ago that has invested 600k in a bricks and mortar restaurant and is bleeding money daily but thinks a suitable budget is $500 on flyers to get er goin! He will of course have sold or be out of business in 6 months.

I would just quote him a price and service that would actually get him clients. If you think that's $200, $500 or 1k per month then that is what you quote and leave him with it. Tell him that when he has a budget you would be happy to chat and that you recommend he talk to his colleagues about what a reasonable budget is in the first two years for a chiropractic practice and how they structured to put that in place. The ones I know are dropping 2 to 5k monthly without blinking. Good Luck!

This..."Now he wants more eyes on those listings"

Welcome to the "wall of limitations" inherent in all SEO based marketing.

There isn't any amount of SEO related activities you can do to force more people to go look at the listings. You still have to wait for the customer to move at his own pace and actually decide to do something....before you can proceed with the salesmanship.

To accomplish what you want to accomplish, you have to move to a different medium to support the listings.

Something that doesn't restrict you to waiting for them to come to you, rather You going to them.

Direct Mail
TV
Emails

Are a good place to start.

Business owners really don't want "SEO" or directory listings, they just want people to call them with interest in what they have to offer.

Figure out how to generate calls for them and your client's attitude may change very quickly.

Let's face it....SEO related services are very intangible to business owners and almost impossible to justify early on...but a phone call from a real person is something any business owner can understand.

Spend a few bucks to generate phone calls, track and record those calls, and then go back to the biz owner after a week or so and ask if they'd like to keep the calls coming. If they hesitate, then say "next".