Chapter 1

Why 95 Percent of Local Businesses Are Failing Miserably with Their Marketing

by Talor Zamir

I recently spoke with a lawyer who used to do over a million dollars a year in business. But my conversation began when he said:

You have to help me. These young lawyers out of law school who know how to do this internet marketing thing are taking all my business, and my business has been almost cut in half.

He went on to tell me how he went from over a million dollars a year to around $600,000. That’s no small drop in revenue, and he still had the same overhead, so it pretty much wiped out his profits.

This lawyer had advertised in Yellow Pages for the past ten years or so and had been running the same ad the whole time. The only difference was that he recently started taking out bigger ads (and paying a lot more) than he used to, but the leads have not been rolling in anymore. As a result of the big drop in leads, revenue, and profits, he got to the point where he could barely afford to do any type of marketing. Death Spiral.

Do you feel like you’ve heard this story before? Have you experienced something similar with your local business? It’s not uncommon for established local businesses to find themselves in a similar situation.

Alternatively, there are many local businesses opening their doors for the first time. Opening a local business is no small undertaking, and most people don’t realize all that goes into it. It means signing a long-term commercial lease, furnishing the place, hiring and training employees, registering the business, getting insurance, and on and on. Depending on what kind of business you’re in, you could easily sink $100,000 before you even open your doors!

WHAT THEY DON’T TEACH YOU IN LAW (OR ANY PROFESSIONAL) SCHOOL

After you open your doors, you may ask, “Where are the clients? Why aren’t new clients coming in my door?”

The cold, hard truth is you can be the best lawyer/dentist/plumber/chiropractor/etc. in the world, but if you don’t have new leads coming in, then you’ll be the best broke lawyer/dentist/plumber/chiropractor/etc. nobody ever heard of.

Unfortunately, they probably didn’t teach you any marketing in school, and that’s a shame, because it is the most important part of your business. Our goal with this book is to show you the most effective strategies for marketing your local business.

WHAT YOU WILL NOT LEARN IN THIS BOOK

This book is not about branding. We’re not interested in any form of marketing where there is no way to measure your ROI (return on investment) and how effective your marketing efforts are.

Not to say that branding does not have its place and does not work. But branding typically costs millions of dollars, so you better have a really big budget if you plan on doing a branding campaign that actually gets you an ROI.

We’re assuming you don’t have millions of dollars to spend on advertising that may or may not get a return for your local business. And we’re not here to throw a bunch of random ideas at you that may or may not work.

“REAL” MARKETING

This book is about direct response marketing. That means that you have real, measurable results and are able to track your ROI down to the penny. That is what we call “real” marketing.

We’re here to show you a system that has worked for thousands of other local businesses, and we’re extremely confident that, if you follow our instructions, it will work for you, too. This system has huge upside potential and could double or triple your business in less than a year.

HIGH POTENTIAL—LOW RISK

One of the biggest benefits of the system you are about to learn is that it has a very high potential upside with very little risk. Again, you have the potential to double or triple your business, however, your risk is only two or three thousand dollars to test out this method. That’s a pretty good risk/reward ratio! While we can’t guarantee that what we teach in this book is going to work 100 percent of the time, we will say that we have got it down to a science where it works a large majority of the time. And because this system is completely transparent and trackable, if for some reason it’s not working for you, you’ll be able to see very quickly that it’s not, and you will be able to cut your losses.

This is about getting real measurable results and scaling a business. It is not about how to increase your business by 10 percent per year. Our goal is to arm you with tools that can potentially double or triple your business and give you a consistent flow of new leads coming in the door.

LIMITED BUDGET? NO PROBLEM!

This book is designed to help you grow your small to midsize local business on a limited budget with very low risk and a very high potential upside. The method you are about to learn does not require huge investments in branding or any other type of advertising. You don’t have to do billboards or TV. Of course, if you are doing any of those things (and if they are working!), that’s great. If your prospects are already familiar with your name, it can only help.

However, none of that is necessary, and the goal of this book is to show you how. Whether you have zero employees or a thousand, you can use this system and test it on a very low budget, see real and measurable results, and scale up massively from there.

There are countless businesses whose number-one source of leads, income, and business are the exact strategies we’re going to share with you. And we are confident that if you follow our step-by-step instructions and implement these strategies, there is a very high likelihood they will work for you, too.

SEO LAST, NOT FIRST

One of the first mistakes local businesses make is focusing on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) early. This is backwards, because Paid Search generates nearly instantaneous results. So unless you want to wait around for six months, start with Chapter 1 and get pay per click right. SEO comes in Chapter 27 and it’s a powerful chapter.

Sound good? Great! Let’s dive in.