What do you charge and offer for Google Place?

I am just starting out with local businesses and offering GP as a form of monthly revenue for my web design business. I have read a lot on GP and ways to increase the rank of them, but have no idea what to charge.

What do you guys charge and what do you actually do for the customer each month to earn that and keep them as a client?

Any help is appreciated.

Nobody has any insight? I see that numerous people on here off this service. I would just like to know what you charge you customers.

Hi Powerteam,

It all depends on the traffic you would potentially be bringing them and how much extra revenue would you be making them with that traffic. If you do this for a dentist and estimate you'll bring them a minimum of 5 more customers per month, you're able to charge more and justify it compared to getting a cake shop 5 extra customers per month.

Hope this makes sense. The warrior forum has a lot of stuff like this in detail in their offline marketing section. Might want to give it a look! (But don't go buying WSO's haha)

It's not so important how much you charge them upfront for the service. The real money is getting them to sign an ongoing monthly maintenance contract to monitor their GP position, once you have done the local seo work for them.

Here is one game plan I have in mind...

Offer to do gp on a 6 month contract at some price with 1st month free so they are only paying for 5 month. Thinking of offering the 1st month free since it takes about 2 weeks to sign them up then verify the pin via postcard.
-OR-
If they are not interested in a contact to start off with but do want to test the water, offer to do the same work but at a higher monthly charge.

Then after I set up the GP listing, I was actually going to outsource some of the work on fiverr. Probably do it myself at first but once I get a few customers, then start outsourcing it all.

I understand what you are saying with depending on the clients business type and projected number of new clients to figure out a cost. Right now some of the people I am talking with are just starting up or lower paid industries so I was thinking like $30-50 a month. Even if I outsourced say 3 citation gigs on fiverr, that's 15 reviews a month and $15-35 a month in profit, but then again I don't want to under sell my service and time. While many people that do this may not think this is much, I am just starting out an really try to build a great client base that can offer many future referrals.

I think it may be harder than expected with GP, considering they themselves have labeled this service as a content farm....

http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/31/go...a-content-farm-and-removes-from-search-index/

If you want to keep them paying every-month be prepared to do a lot of hand holding,
I have set up thousands, and charge anywhere from $49 TO $500. The maps area has changed the last few months and its not as easy as it used to be. The biggest problem you will have is most guys what their listing to come up in multiple cities. So you have to do SEO for those clients. Start at $99, and try to get approval for ACH for payment. Customers usually win charge backs if the say the canceled recurring payment, even when they really don't! Contracts are tough, because most small guys don't want them, and companies like mine don't require them. If you have any questions PM me.

Myself personally, I have been charging $150 up front for local small businesses. I live in a very small area. All I offer is verification, filling out the main information like description and hours, adding a few additional information subjects, and taking up to 5 pictures to upload. There is no reoccurring payments right now, but most of the clients I have had do not need anything more than this. The population here is only 20k, and half or more of that is college students. I'm screwin myself over on the residual income, but building up a portfolio and reference list before going to metro areas and charging more.

Before anyone says anythin about me charging so low, there are many businesses in the area who can't even justify $100 for advertisement. Most advertisement around here is word of mouth or personal signs in front of their business. While yes, the services are worth more than this low amount, for someone just starting its worth the easy income. Local lawyers and used dealerships have worked out well for me. Specially with explaining the importance of smartphones and that 40% of users viewing GP is from phones. If the business has a website, upsell the smartphone usage and that their site will load slower on a phone. If they have no website at all, GP and Bing Local gives two websites for their business.

For GP we always do at least a 6 month contract, depending on the competition and what it will take to get them in the 7box charges usually go from a min 150.00 up to 500.00 per month. Most of the time clients of mine who who do work on GP for are seo clients, and that is an added upsell we offer monthly.