My first real offline marketing venture...

Alright guys I'll try to keep this short. I'm going to make a local business directory for a city in the west coast of the United States (with a population of about half a million). It will use wordpress as the backend and use the geo places template because people love big maps.

I will be offering free listings to all of my prospects (how can they say no?). Then after awhile, maybe a week layer, I will call them up again and offer a subscription to my premium package (which will be $49.99 a month) which will include: a video testimony for their business, submission of their business listing to 30+ social bookmarking sites, and a front page listing.

Do you think this will work?

Video testimony sounds good. But who is going to do it? There is a significant outlay of time and cost involved in making videos. What if they cancel after one or two months? Will you have even recouped the costs of the video? If you're going to be making short little animato videos, that obviously makes it much less of a cost - but still, you need to somehow produce or get the actual raw video testimony on there.

So with the video thing, good idea - but there is a lot involved for you on the work end.

With the front page listing idea, that's a good solid selling point (only if you have traffic going to the site). To be honest, I am not sure how you will be able to send traffic to the site so quickly though? No one is going to make money out of advertising that people are not seeing, except for you. Are you getting traffic to the directory?

With the social bookmarking thing, I wouldn't even mention it. Sure, you can do it to provide more value to them but dont even mention it. They will have no idea what it is, you'll just confuse them if anything. You want to avoid doing that.

In the end, they care about how much they will make from your advertising. They probably don't even care how the customers get there, as long as they are making a return. So if you try and get them on things like social bookmarks etc, you're going to be met with a lot of resistance to them, that doesn't mean anything about making more money.

Hope I helped a bit.

krzysiekz said:

Video testimony sounds good. But who is going to do it? There is a significant outlay of time and cost involved in making videos.
Hope I helped a bit.

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You my friend have not heard of Fiverr

People are willing to say that whatever you want on video for $5 cheap and fast too.

49.99 sounds like a lot, just saying

Hey man, thanks for the reply.

krzysiekz said:

Video testimony sounds good. But who is going to do it? There is a significant outlay of time and cost involved in making videos. What if they cancel after one or two months? Will you have even recouped the costs of the video? If you're going to be making short little animato videos, that obviously makes it much less of a cost - but still, you need to somehow produce or get the actual raw video testimony on there.

So with the video thing, good idea - but there is a lot involved for you on the work end.

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There are numerous gigs on fiverr with people who are willing to make video testimonies for your products or services for a mere $5. The beautiful thing about this is that the business owners will think that video production is expensive and will perceive the "$49.99 a month" as a modest price tag.

krzysiekz said:

With the front page listing idea, that's a good solid selling point (only if you have traffic going to the site). To be honest, I am not sure how you will be able to send traffic to the site so quickly though? No one is going to make money out of advertising that people are not seeing, except for you. Are you getting traffic to the directory?

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That's why the $49.99 premium service is needed. I will use the funds to outsource seo (buy traffic, article marketing, edu/gov backlinks, contextual backlinks, authority backlinks, etc.) to not only the front page but to an individual business's listing too. Plus the video testimony will be posted on youtube with a link to the website so there goes a valuable backlink.

krzysiekz said:

With the social bookmarking thing, I wouldn't even mention it. Sure, you can do it to provide more value to them but dont even mention it. They will have no idea what it is, you'll just confuse them if anything. You want to avoid doing that.

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I could repackage 'social bookmarking' as simply 'seo'. My telemarketers can explain to them over the phone how increasing their google rank would bring them more customers, and in turn, more profit..

krzysiekz said:

In the end, they care about how much they will make from your advertising. They probably don't even care how the customers get there, as long as they are making a return. So if you try and get them on things like social bookmarks etc, you're going to be met with a lot of resistance to them, that doesn't mean anything about making more money.

Hope I helped a bit.

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True.

micc said:

49.99 sounds like a lot, just saying

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People charge several hundred dollars for seo alone. And businesses pay hundreds just to get a listing on yellow pages. I think $49.99 a month is a very modest price point.

fuzzy_corleone said:

I will be offering free listings to all of my prospects (how can they say no?).

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Hah don't be so sure .

Business owners are: naive, cynical, resistant & skeptical. If you say "free" they will immediately either perceive it as lesser quality, or something sketchy.

I had the same mentality a while back when I was running an initial free service and then potential upsells. It was essentially the same thing as Groupon where instead of having to pay us to make deals, it was free and they kept all the $$ from sales. We would also help them with email-marketing (building their lists up), creating a giveaway for them to generate word-of-mouth marketing in the town & SMS marketing ... all of which we now sell for $1500 a month, but offered for free. Business owners don't see the value in free things, they WANT to pay .

Just saying, I think you might see more resistance than you think. But, tell us how it goes.

Dannn said:

Hah don't be so sure .

Business owners are: naive, cynical, resistant & skeptical. If you say "free" they will immediately either perceive it as lesser quality, or something sketchy.

I had the same mentality a while back when I was running an initial free service and then potential upsells. It was essentially the same thing as Groupon where instead of having to pay us to make deals, it was free and they kept all the $$ from sales. We would also help them with email-marketing (building their lists up), creating a giveaway for them to generate word-of-mouth marketing in the town & SMS marketing ... all of which we now sell for $1500 a month, but offered for free. Business owners don't see the value in free things, they WANT to pay .

Just saying, I think you might see more resistance than you think. But, tell us how it goes.

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I think my success rate would be alot lower if I asked them to pay $49.99 first.

No problems for the reply, hope I gave some ideas. I still am of the opinion that you shouldn't mention SEO or anything like that. Maybe you can say something like "first page" but go no further. Firstly, business owners don't know what SEO is so if anything, you will confuse them. Secondly, they don't know how to translate SEO or "first page" into "potential revenue". You would be better off quoting numbers, such as how many visitors you are getting, etc.

That is something they can easily relate to. At least from my experience, when trying to sell online services, I need to sell the benefits not the actual SEO itself (backlinks, bookmarks etc).

Now lastly, to the guy who said I've never heard of Fiverr. While I appreciate it was a joke, I would like to just say "goodluck" to an approach that entails fake video reviews. It just isn't going to work. This is the real world, and making fake video testimonials will not get you far. Videos based on real content is fine, but you specifically insinuated that the Fiverr people will say anything you want, so that's where I assume it was fake video reviews. (this last paragraph is not aimed at OP)

krzysiekz said:

No problems for the reply, hope I gave some ideas. I still am of the opinion that you shouldn't mention SEO or anything like that. Maybe you can say something like "first page" but go no further. Firstly, business owners don't know what SEO is so if anything, you will confuse them. Secondly, they don't know how to translate SEO or "first page" into "potential revenue". You would be better off quoting numbers, such as how many visitors you are getting, etc.

That is something they can easily relate to. At least from my experience, when trying to sell online services, I need to sell the benefits not the actual SEO itself (backlinks, bookmarks etc).

Now lastly, to the guy who said I've never heard of Fiverr. While I appreciate it was a joke, I would like to just say "goodluck" to an approach that entails fake video reviews. It just isn't going to work. This is the real world, and making fake video testimonials will not get you far. Videos based on real content is fine, but you specifically insinuated that the Fiverr people will say anything you want, so that's where I assume it was fake video reviews. (this last paragraph is not aimed at OP)

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On the warrior forum you mentioned that you were paying $3k for a programmer to code a directory site from the ground up. What happened to that project? And will you continue to pursue making an online directory?

I'm kinda anxious and a little nervous about this project failing. I don't really have anything else going for me (no job, dropped out of college, etc.). So I'm using the little money I have left into this. I want to make sure my plan is reasonably sound. I plan on outsourcing the cold calling to an experience telemarketer and have him contact prospects. Of course I'll thoroughly outline what my business is about so that s/he can form a script from that.

The directory I had coded is about 80 or 90% done. Most of what I wanted is in there, but unfortunately the coders were not really performing up to the standard I wanted. I got them to stop off at a reasonable level and have left the project dormant for now.

There are some already existing themes though, such as the geoplaces that you mentioned. There are a few new ones due out soon that might be pretty good too.

In my opinion though, since you've admitted that you don't have too much of an income, thus I would do the cold calling myself. I've made the mistake of hiring before trying to do something myself, and it doesn't give you realistic expectations for your telemarketers. Do it yourself first, see what the objections are, overcome them and then teach your telemarketers. They're only as good as you let them be, but if you have no experience in helping them, then their results might not be as good in reality as what you might be imagining In your mind.

By all means, the idea is good but don't complicate it just yet. Make a directory, add free listings and get traffic going there. Once you've done this and It is relatively established, try and sell paid listings. At least that is how I would do it. I would Personally eliminate any overheads for the time being, such as making videos and so on. $49.99 per month is nothing if your directory is providing relevant traffic and leads to your advertisers.

Also, before jumping right into the directory, why don't you try and get your feet wet, while at the same time building up some funds (that could fund the directory idea). Something like selling a Wordpress website can make you around $500 per site (plus you can charge for hosting and just open a reseller account). This should get your feet wet and make you some good money. With the directory idea, I think having a bit more of a cash reserve will come in handy when it comes times to doing SEO for the directory, etc.

Thats just my take on it. I am wanting to get into directories too, just not yet. Waiting for one of the new themes to come out, or perhaps finish off the one I've already got. In hindsight, should not have jumped in that quickly because I put a lot of money down, that's just sitting there for a while now. Oh well, the Indian economy benefited at least!

Why don't you just install joomla and the sobi2 component and boom instant businesses directory, no coding involved.

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i say get a site up with like 30 free video testimoniails, then when the new clients come to the site, they will be like WOAH! lookit this!

use fiver to get some created! 5$ each, just use it as an investment, then after clients start coming, u can charge them 20$ for a video testimonial, plus your fee, give them first 2 videos free or somthing

If you need some testimonials done let me know

Get a refund from templatic nd go over to Geotheme.com and get the version they created its geoplaces but with all the security flaws and bugs sorted.

Good luck buddy.

hello,
theme is posted here: downloaded and testing...
thank you for your help.