Just Had A Meeting With The Market Leader In My Local Town, Here's His Advice

I met with the leading web designer in my town (roughly 350k people) today to discuss a joint venture.

I thought I'd explain what the joint venture was (since he was very interested and basically accepted the offer and it could work out great for both of us) and also some great little tips he gave me in our brief meeting.

The Joint Venture

If you know anything about Internet Marketing, you know affiliates are a big, big deal. The leverage can be amazing and that's exactly what I offered this guy.

The deal was essentially this : If he would send me any and all leads his business received that never ended up converting, in addition to recommending my company to future leads that don't buy from him, I would split the profit of any sale that resulted from his leads, 50/50 with him.

He was all too happy to oblige, since he was extremely busy and couldn't fulfil all the requests for websites he was getting.

Now, I knew going in that even if he didn't want to do the deal (and hey, he still hasn't sent me a reply after I emailed the deal in writing, so it might turn into nothing) that I could get some great tips from him in our brief meeting.

Here were the nuggets he shared with me :

- His response to 'how did he get the business started?' COLD CALLING. To give you some perspective, his business has done work for over 500 clients in 4 years since he started it. He said at the start, he would just cold call all day for a week straight, then block out the next week for appointments.

And guess what? He hated it! He said it made him depressed! He would get the same excuses we ALL get, straight from his mouth. "Yellow Pages do my website" "I don't need a website" "My brother/cousin/aunty/dog can do websites" "Too much work as it is" etc etc

But he soldiered on, UNTIL....

- He started getting referrals. "Oh great, the magical, elusive, referral" you might think...Which I did, until he told me where he got 12 referrals from the ONE CLIENT...

I immediately asked what that client's business was...

"Financial Advisor"

PFT!! It seemed so obvious, it's amazing I didn't think of it. Why not leverage your efforts by specifically cold calling business owners you KNOW will be in contact with a load of other business owners?

Business coaches, financial advisors, accountants, graphic designers. You know what's absolutely stupid? I have never targeted this niches in my year and a half in business!!

The leverage is RIGHT THERE! I am starting on these niches next week.

- Finally, his last nugget...Now this might be a bit controversial, and I really didn't believe it fully to be honest...So who knows...But when I asked him what he believed was his big reason for success was that most of his clients raved about the results.

Now, when I say results, I don't mean the actual design and look of the website. His websites actually look REALLY templated. I mean, they all look exactly the same, only some of them are really customized.

But he told me (controversy warning) that virtually all his clients were on the first page of Google for their keywords in our town, and ALL that was from on-page SEO. No backlinking. Ever.

Of course, this means his clients would be getting tons of traffic FOR FREE, and this will of course cause them to rant and rave about his service (and explains why he's so busy). But I think the point stands...

The key point here, I believe, is that he OVER DELIVERED. He gave them a website AND first page of Google FREE. No big monthly fees. I'd be interested to here what you SEO guys think of this, but I am still skeptical.

Anyway, his business is booming, and maybe its just because he put in the hours with cold calling, or because of this and that. No matter which way you slice it, he did the HARD YARDS. He hated calling, did it anyway, and succeeded. THIS is what they talk about when they say 'HARD WORK'.

Thanks for reading, hope you guys got something out of this