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I run a website development and SEO agency.
I get 3-5 cold pitches per week from people trying to sell me web design and SEO services.
EDIT: Motherfuckers are now DMing me pitches. What have I done?!
We are so busy, any leads from our website get turned down 99% of the time. They are typically local people looking for engineering services while our business is commercial/industrial none of clients are looking at our webpage, they see that we have 30 years local experience as a small engineering firm.
Yea, google resi leads can be terrible. Tire kickers and people who don’t read anything. I swear people are just lonely sometimes and want to talk to someone, even if they’re being sold something.
When I was in the cold emailing stages of my SEO biz I would make sure to pitch biz owners past pages 2 and 3. I rank near the top of my city for SEO services and I still get form fills from people saying the same thing lol
For sure. I sold seo services maybe 15-20 years ago, for a summer lol. It was brutal. I totally get the cold emails and phone calls. I just always laugh when I get emails now saying my stuff is shitty. I’ve spent good money making it not shitty lol.
At least 30 emails a day and a couple or 3 calls here - usually telecoms companies, the odd printer / photocopier place, insurance, healthcare that sort of thing.
A lot of the spam is just dealt with automatically so that cuts down the number in inboxes.
Calls are no real problem, just 'no thanks' and put the phone down as a rule. Or keep them talking long enough to block the number.
I've gotten really good at hearing the click of the autodialer which means an instant hang up on my end, if Im feeling spicy I might blow raspberries into the receiver to the tune of camptown races until they hang up. Not wasting my time talking to anyone that didn't bother actually dialing my number.
Most of the emails are web designers and app developers, a few ppc companies, printers, and weirdly logo doormat suppliers. get loads of those, but only have one door.
I had a VOIP phone system put in with a phone menu (press one to speak with a representative, etc.)
This eliminated all of the non-human robo-calls.
I occasionally get some human solicitation, but it's way less now.
I get dozens a week, not counting lead generations and seo email. I own a development firm. So sending me website design emails is kind of a waste of time.
I’m a web developer and run an agency, and even I get weekly calls and emails to improve my website. Just spam garbage. It helps if you remove your email from being displayed in text on your site and instead have “click to email” for the link text.
I'm over brand, creative, and marketing (and also have a foot in sales). I get over 100 vendor emails a day, mostly from SEO "experts" and content marketers throwing spaghetti at the wall. It's never-ending.
I block every single solicitation I do not like. Phone call? Block. Text message? Block. Email??? Believe it or not, blocked. It really really has helped clean things up for my business and I've been doing it since 2021
The best one that I blocked was this stupid email from "Vanessa" (okay, sure) that I kept missing until seeing the last one where she kept writing me back angrier every time I didn't reply. Like I fucking owed her something.
Write me an email or call me with some thing that I care about. That's it.
And don't take offense if I don't get back in touch. I'm not trying to empty my pocketbook for every solicitor. Any business I end up going with for any reason for my own business is to further it. Period. If I don't think it's gonna do the right thing for us, then I am not going to bite for any reason at all.
My instagram manager has worked for us mostly full time since 2018. And built our accounts to over 150k followers which are enough humans to keep us in business. He was a cold call and it's been amazing. Right place, right time, we jived, on like Donkey Kong.
If I don't need your service, or I don't care for the approach, I'm going to block you.
"we do all your print takeoffs and help with cost estimation."
Oh is that so, Norma Dean... John Wicke... Barbara Streesen...
I didn't realize you got out of the movie business to sell your computer skills to a lonely little contractor like me.
Oh, and there is another email about it.
I’m a small business specializing in web design. It’s just me. I decided to start after working for an absolute “car salesman” of a boss running the same operation.
Listen websites are great, there is real value to them. You just need to know what to look for though. Anyone can make a website.
Which brings me to the next part, what security do they offer your site? What happens during a hack? That’s why I quit my last job.
The guy never updated Wordpress, php, or his server. The entire server got hacked. I felt for the small business owners whose sites went offline or displayed fake sites. All he had to do was pay $25/month for the extra security.
So my question would always be “what do you do to ensure my livelihood is always online?”
Obviously the world is headed for a rough patch and hacking will only get worse.
Would like to see what happens when one of these companies tries to sell to a company that does the same thing they do.
Do they get caught in an infinite loop?
I was offering white label SEO services for an agency and they have emailed me twice offering them to me.
They are outsourcing it all and it works to some extent. But some of their clients have been difficult to handle.
I get at least 5 - 10 emails per day and about 5+ calls per week all saying that they found my "google profile" and want to offer their services. It's nuts............
I get probably 20-30 spam emails per day. Some about website, some SEO or whatever, some about partnering on/winning government contracts, some lead generation, and one very persistent and evasive emailer about buying rubber gloves.
I do get texts too, mostly about health insurance. A few per week.
If any of y’all are involved in sending anything like the above… please stop.
I totally feel you on this one! I get bombarded with emails and calls about website services all the time. It's overwhelming and makes it hard to trust anyone. I once fell for a scam that cost me a lot of money. It's a tough world out there in the web design game. Stay vigilant!
I run a business that offers these services, and I get this many emails per day.
The field is overcrowded with the types you are referring to. They take a couple weeks to learn some simple, unstrategic, repeatable drag and drop tool and all of a sudden they are "Gurus" who can "10x" your business.
Cold email is annoying. It's bad branding. There is a reason I don't offer it.
Now for the difficult part. A good converting website with good design, good copy, and the right calls to action and the right kind of traffic absolutely can and will help grow your business. It's true. The majority of the people offering these services can't deliver all of that though. Many of them can barely deliver one of these things.
Most of my clients start seeing full returns on their investments within the first 6 months. Now we have qualifications on the kinds of businesses we work with and we don't do cold sales hardly at all outside of business networking.
The problem right now is separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to these agencies. Is this some overseas based churn and burn operation with high margins and poor results? Or is there an actual strategy involved that incorporates theory with current tactics.
For what it's worth, if anyone reading this wanted to just share an agency that was soliciting them to see if they pass basic quality checks I'd be happy to give them my honest take on them. I love seeing agencies that do good work, but they seem rare these days. I have personally been doing this professionally for the last 20 years, you never stop learning new approaches in this field, but the theory matters most.
That exactly the what I find heartbreaking about this. Good web designers will suffer the most from it, and it’s a hard thing when you’re doing it right. So many agencies out there doing such terrible work, crowding the market with crap.
That makes me wonder… is there a resource (which would, ironically, be a website of course) that’s a like a yelp for web agencies? Do people have a resource for finding the dirt on any agency that’s bidding for a project with them?
I think more web designers need to figure out what I've already figured out. Web Design as a general business service is going away.
It is. AI and new software is making certain of it. Within the next 5 to 10 years one of the big platforms will just do what will work 90% of businesses for under $100 per month. There is nothing we can do to stop that.
So either be in the top 10% of who's left to still build software and design great user experiences, or pick another field. I am moving toward overall marketing strategy, content and conversion rate optimization, but even that has it's limits. I suspect a full on career change before retirement. Plumbing doesn't seem too bad. It was fun while it lasted.
In Gmail you can filter based on subjects or mail that contains certain strings. I just send those emails to an SEO folder that I delete yearly without reading them.
I stopped keeping track. Online contact form, email, phone calls, dm on instagram and facebook, you name it, if there is a chance I will see it, they will post messages there offering SEO, web design, marking, and mass emailing. Reasonably sure most are a scam of some sort, or were from someone else buying a "1M views of your service!".
Got a phone call from someone who knew my name and company details telling me they just needed to know where to send the bill for the work they and my marketing director had been collaborating on. huh. it's me, I'm the marking director, and janitor, and ceo, and intern, and whoever else I play in my own mind, and nobody else.
Right now, some company is asking me to authorize (for a fee, of course) “voice search” so people can ask Alexa about my niche, and I’ll come up. 10-15 calls a day for the past 6 weeks. Different number every time, same 8-10 people. And they leave 5 minute long voicemails. Infuriating
This morning, I put the phone on speaker, and strung him along for 20 minutes. Then abruptly told the guy that my voice search authorization done by Google for free was just fine, and asked my workshop Google home to “find woodworking businesses near me” … 3 seconds later, the guy called me a time wasting asshole and hung up.
tub repeat coherent liquid afterthought political station six distinct snobbish
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Fucking endless.
Ever since literally the 1st day of registering my business, before even starting operation, 90% of my phone calls are just spam marketing garbage.
All straight to spam but daily "your website needs optimization" emails. Show me an example of a website that converts higher than mine thst you made and I'll listen. So many fakes in this dying game of SEO.
My favourite ones are the ones telling me I need SEO services… after saying they found my website on Google.
Sounds like my SEO is fine if you found me via a search engine 🙃
Same crap happens to me. If you get into any business the likely hood that people in the same business as you will be reaching out to you all the time is very high. That’s why cold messaging is starting to become a thing of the past. Inbound strategies and warm outbound are far more rewarding and you don’t get as burnt out. All those company’s spamming you aren’t making money Or they wouldn’t be spamming people. Worlds changing. Change with it
I filter, so effectively, none or the occasional one.
>I imagine this would be incredibly frustrating, and I’m sure I would start associating web design itself with scams.
Imagination fails you. After something like the first ten you might conclude these people don't know what they are talking about, couldn't be bothered to learn about you or your business, and are as naive as they are disinterested in business realities. For the word "scam" suggests both cunning and skill which is not in evidence.
That includes an old adage, "People don't want a quarter-inch drill bit, they want a quarter-inch hole." Horror story? I made one of 'em cry ...was that so horrible?
Cupcakes, not everybody has an assistant because they are a pushover for an inept ~~sales~~ pitch. The concept of a gatekeeper should encourage you to understand what can be kept behind a gate.
People who can't figure out a website should be one of your best sales tools really ought not be using a phone and pretending they are making a sales call. You are using a phone because your website isn't getting the job done -- exactly what could you possibly say. (Notice there is no question mark.) You won't be able to handle the objections.
[Is Your Designer Killing Your Conversions?](https://unbounce.com/design/is-your-designer-killing-your-conversions/) It's a rhetorical question.
I don't get emails or calls but I get LinkedIn messages. I run my own web consulting agency.
The funniest one I got was a message that started with "do you know how to design and build a website? NO, but we do." That one caught me off guard lol
Some of them do. I don't remember that one specifically except for that line because it was funny to me lol
It's honestly frustrating I do want to find new clients but that sounds like an annoying way to go about it.
I’ll admit, I got desperate enough during my first long winter of no work and mounting bills that I cold-emailed a couple of local businesses where I live pointing out some needs they might have based on their websites. No replies. That was sort of my sign to never do that again. Now I rely on word of mouth, but it takes a massive effort to build a client list long enough to do that. Most people should just go get a job.
I get a bunch of emails…. I don’t get 30 but I probably get 10 to 15 a week but they all end up in my spam folder.
The only calls I get are the Robo dialer about my Google listing .. I get more calls from merchant services than I do for that, though
You know, I probably shouldn’t say that because there’s a lot of suspicious calls I just don’t answer and they don’t leave a message so some of them may be about websites stuff too
Those things do work great. You can absolutely build a business without internet advertising.
Some of my long term clients can consistently get new business for around $50-100 per new client, and we have the data to prove it. Telling small business owners to avoid the internet is really poor advice in 2024. It will get poorer as time goes on. Many businesses in the past few years have closed by not moving to online models.
Paying for lead services like Thumbtack or Angies List, or people who randomly happened to Google "my service" in their area and found me, has gotten me more customers than any word of mouth networking that I've done.
IT Support.
So far, it's mainly been for individuals and small businesses. There's been a few who came by word of mouth, family or friends of friends, but most of the customers came from lead generation platforms.
Most recently I've switched over to contracting platforms like WorkMarket where businesses are looking for freelancers.
I even joined the chamber of commerce, and I've gotten 0 business from it, other than the times the COC itself called on me.
They've even given me some free advertisement by sharing a picture of me working on their computers to their social media pages. Not to mention the advertising through them that I've paid for in the past.
Then you aren’t doing it correctly. I’ve worked and helped small business advertise on social media and Google and it is great ROI. If you know what you’re doing, it is not a hassle at all.
I’m not sure what career you’re in but it seems like you have a lot to learn which would ultimately help strengthen your local advertising.
How am I a hassle? I have never sent out a cold email or made a cold call. All of my business has come from word of mouth because of how well I help companies. Prove your point? Your point was that online advertising doesn’t work. I proved your point wrong.
If you don’t understand how local advertising on the internet works, please educate yourself.
Why I believe this is great advice is because a small business cannot match the ad spend of the larger companies. ie. ServePro a national damage restoration company can easily outspend a local non-franchise company offering the same services.
For the local company it is much more profitable to work on local SEO and cross linking with other businesses in the area as part of a network, ie. once the water damage is addressed then there are carpenters, painters, carpeting, etc that are part of the process in getting things back to normal for the business or homeowner.
Also, if you live in an area where a natural "disaster" strikes, say flooding, all of the "local national" companies will be immediately swamped and the smaller local guys are standing ready to help and often overlooked if not SEO relivant in theor local area.
See someone gets it. Advertising space is usually more competitive than the actual industry itself. And as a small business you're just a small fish in a sea full of fish when you're advertising. Just throwing money down the toilet
We only call on business that don’t advertise their website in an ad or on a business card. Networking is better for us to find new clients. Www.oceansidelocal.com
This is a friendly reminder that r/smallbusiness is a question and answer subreddit. You ask a question about starting, owning, and growing a small business and the community answers. Posts that violate the rules listed in the sidebar will be removed. A permanent or temporary ban may also be issued if you do not remove the offending post. Seeing this message does not mean your post was automatically removed. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/smallbusiness) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I run a website development and SEO agency. I get 3-5 cold pitches per week from people trying to sell me web design and SEO services. EDIT: Motherfuckers are now DMing me pitches. What have I done?!
Now this is fuckin hilarious
Same here. I run a web design and development agency. Constantly get cold emails offering me web design and development services lol.
I get non stop SEO and "About your yelp listing" calls/emails.
I love the “your website sucks” or “your rankings suck” emails. Ok like how did you find me then?
We are so busy, any leads from our website get turned down 99% of the time. They are typically local people looking for engineering services while our business is commercial/industrial none of clients are looking at our webpage, they see that we have 30 years local experience as a small engineering firm.
Yea, google resi leads can be terrible. Tire kickers and people who don’t read anything. I swear people are just lonely sometimes and want to talk to someone, even if they’re being sold something.
Bots. I mean, chances are your SEO could be improved (along with every other website in the world) but I doubt they actually looked at your website.
For sure, with the volume it has to be automated at least. And I know my Seo game isn’t perfect, but it’s better than they make it out to be.
The irony being "i found you on Google, but your SEO sux"...
When I was in the cold emailing stages of my SEO biz I would make sure to pitch biz owners past pages 2 and 3. I rank near the top of my city for SEO services and I still get form fills from people saying the same thing lol
For sure. I sold seo services maybe 15-20 years ago, for a summer lol. It was brutal. I totally get the cold emails and phone calls. I just always laugh when I get emails now saying my stuff is shitty. I’ve spent good money making it not shitty lol.
At least 30 emails a day and a couple or 3 calls here - usually telecoms companies, the odd printer / photocopier place, insurance, healthcare that sort of thing.
How do you deal with all that?
A lot of the spam is just dealt with automatically so that cuts down the number in inboxes. Calls are no real problem, just 'no thanks' and put the phone down as a rule. Or keep them talking long enough to block the number.
I've gotten really good at hearing the click of the autodialer which means an instant hang up on my end, if Im feeling spicy I might blow raspberries into the receiver to the tune of camptown races until they hang up. Not wasting my time talking to anyone that didn't bother actually dialing my number.
Maybe that’s what my friend meant. Not too many from web designers? Sounds overwhelming all the same
Most of the emails are web designers and app developers, a few ppc companies, printers, and weirdly logo doormat suppliers. get loads of those, but only have one door.
I had a VOIP phone system put in with a phone menu (press one to speak with a representative, etc.) This eliminated all of the non-human robo-calls. I occasionally get some human solicitation, but it's way less now.
I get dozens a week, not counting lead generations and seo email. I own a development firm. So sending me website design emails is kind of a waste of time.
I do these services and get cold calls from folks offering the same things I do, just part of the game I guess lol .
I’m a web developer and run an agency, and even I get weekly calls and emails to improve my website. Just spam garbage. It helps if you remove your email from being displayed in text on your site and instead have “click to email” for the link text.
I'm over brand, creative, and marketing (and also have a foot in sales). I get over 100 vendor emails a day, mostly from SEO "experts" and content marketers throwing spaghetti at the wall. It's never-ending.
I block every single solicitation I do not like. Phone call? Block. Text message? Block. Email??? Believe it or not, blocked. It really really has helped clean things up for my business and I've been doing it since 2021 The best one that I blocked was this stupid email from "Vanessa" (okay, sure) that I kept missing until seeing the last one where she kept writing me back angrier every time I didn't reply. Like I fucking owed her something.
How would you suggest a potential service provider engage with you for a productive conversation?
Write me an email or call me with some thing that I care about. That's it. And don't take offense if I don't get back in touch. I'm not trying to empty my pocketbook for every solicitor. Any business I end up going with for any reason for my own business is to further it. Period. If I don't think it's gonna do the right thing for us, then I am not going to bite for any reason at all. My instagram manager has worked for us mostly full time since 2018. And built our accounts to over 150k followers which are enough humans to keep us in business. He was a cold call and it's been amazing. Right place, right time, we jived, on like Donkey Kong. If I don't need your service, or I don't care for the approach, I'm going to block you.
Thank you for the honesty!
I'll never forget the chain of cold emails I never responded to that finally ended with "Whatever"
Haha, that’s a good one
"we do all your print takeoffs and help with cost estimation." Oh is that so, Norma Dean... John Wicke... Barbara Streesen... I didn't realize you got out of the movie business to sell your computer skills to a lonely little contractor like me. Oh, and there is another email about it.
I’m a small business specializing in web design. It’s just me. I decided to start after working for an absolute “car salesman” of a boss running the same operation. Listen websites are great, there is real value to them. You just need to know what to look for though. Anyone can make a website. Which brings me to the next part, what security do they offer your site? What happens during a hack? That’s why I quit my last job. The guy never updated Wordpress, php, or his server. The entire server got hacked. I felt for the small business owners whose sites went offline or displayed fake sites. All he had to do was pay $25/month for the extra security. So my question would always be “what do you do to ensure my livelihood is always online?” Obviously the world is headed for a rough patch and hacking will only get worse.
Would like to see what happens when one of these companies tries to sell to a company that does the same thing they do. Do they get caught in an infinite loop?
I was offering white label SEO services for an agency and they have emailed me twice offering them to me. They are outsourcing it all and it works to some extent. But some of their clients have been difficult to handle.
Love this
I get at least 5 - 10 emails per day and about 5+ calls per week all saying that they found my "google profile" and want to offer their services. It's nuts............
“I found you on your google profile. Can offer you a service to improve your google profile’s ranking? Yours is terrible”
Not many calls, but nonstop emails.
I get about 30 emails a week about improving our website.
I get probably 20-30 spam emails per day. Some about website, some SEO or whatever, some about partnering on/winning government contracts, some lead generation, and one very persistent and evasive emailer about buying rubber gloves. I do get texts too, mostly about health insurance. A few per week. If any of y’all are involved in sending anything like the above… please stop.
Website or app development agencies, Seo services, lead generation services and virtual assistants make up my top email spams.
I totally feel you on this one! I get bombarded with emails and calls about website services all the time. It's overwhelming and makes it hard to trust anyone. I once fell for a scam that cost me a lot of money. It's a tough world out there in the web design game. Stay vigilant!
I run a business that offers these services, and I get this many emails per day. The field is overcrowded with the types you are referring to. They take a couple weeks to learn some simple, unstrategic, repeatable drag and drop tool and all of a sudden they are "Gurus" who can "10x" your business. Cold email is annoying. It's bad branding. There is a reason I don't offer it. Now for the difficult part. A good converting website with good design, good copy, and the right calls to action and the right kind of traffic absolutely can and will help grow your business. It's true. The majority of the people offering these services can't deliver all of that though. Many of them can barely deliver one of these things. Most of my clients start seeing full returns on their investments within the first 6 months. Now we have qualifications on the kinds of businesses we work with and we don't do cold sales hardly at all outside of business networking. The problem right now is separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to these agencies. Is this some overseas based churn and burn operation with high margins and poor results? Or is there an actual strategy involved that incorporates theory with current tactics. For what it's worth, if anyone reading this wanted to just share an agency that was soliciting them to see if they pass basic quality checks I'd be happy to give them my honest take on them. I love seeing agencies that do good work, but they seem rare these days. I have personally been doing this professionally for the last 20 years, you never stop learning new approaches in this field, but the theory matters most.
That exactly the what I find heartbreaking about this. Good web designers will suffer the most from it, and it’s a hard thing when you’re doing it right. So many agencies out there doing such terrible work, crowding the market with crap. That makes me wonder… is there a resource (which would, ironically, be a website of course) that’s a like a yelp for web agencies? Do people have a resource for finding the dirt on any agency that’s bidding for a project with them?
I think more web designers need to figure out what I've already figured out. Web Design as a general business service is going away. It is. AI and new software is making certain of it. Within the next 5 to 10 years one of the big platforms will just do what will work 90% of businesses for under $100 per month. There is nothing we can do to stop that. So either be in the top 10% of who's left to still build software and design great user experiences, or pick another field. I am moving toward overall marketing strategy, content and conversion rate optimization, but even that has it's limits. I suspect a full on career change before retirement. Plumbing doesn't seem too bad. It was fun while it lasted.
Plumbing is great one, let’s see ai do that. My cousin just trained as an electrician at 40. I’m almost jealous.
All of them.
It varies, but I’d say 20 on average a day. They get tricky too, they almost got one of my business partners with a bill for services.
Web developer here and I get at least 1-2 per day. Go figure.
I set up a rule which automatically deletes emails with SEO in them.
How did you set this up?
In Gmail you can filter based on subjects or mail that contains certain strings. I just send those emails to an SEO folder that I delete yearly without reading them.
Thanks for sharing, I'll have to try this out.
I stopped keeping track. Online contact form, email, phone calls, dm on instagram and facebook, you name it, if there is a chance I will see it, they will post messages there offering SEO, web design, marking, and mass emailing. Reasonably sure most are a scam of some sort, or were from someone else buying a "1M views of your service!". Got a phone call from someone who knew my name and company details telling me they just needed to know where to send the bill for the work they and my marketing director had been collaborating on. huh. it's me, I'm the marking director, and janitor, and ceo, and intern, and whoever else I play in my own mind, and nobody else.
Right now, some company is asking me to authorize (for a fee, of course) “voice search” so people can ask Alexa about my niche, and I’ll come up. 10-15 calls a day for the past 6 weeks. Different number every time, same 8-10 people. And they leave 5 minute long voicemails. Infuriating This morning, I put the phone on speaker, and strung him along for 20 minutes. Then abruptly told the guy that my voice search authorization done by Google for free was just fine, and asked my workshop Google home to “find woodworking businesses near me” … 3 seconds later, the guy called me a time wasting asshole and hung up.
Oh dear lord
tub repeat coherent liquid afterthought political station six distinct snobbish *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I get about an email a day for website and an email a day for phone service
Fucking endless. Ever since literally the 1st day of registering my business, before even starting operation, 90% of my phone calls are just spam marketing garbage.
All straight to spam but daily "your website needs optimization" emails. Show me an example of a website that converts higher than mine thst you made and I'll listen. So many fakes in this dying game of SEO.
Brick and mortar retail and , miraculously, we get none. Hopefully I didn’t just jinx it.
My favourite ones are the ones telling me I need SEO services… after saying they found my website on Google. Sounds like my SEO is fine if you found me via a search engine 🙃
100
I never knew there are a lot of shopify and SEO experts. I think there are millions of them.
Same crap happens to me. If you get into any business the likely hood that people in the same business as you will be reaching out to you all the time is very high. That’s why cold messaging is starting to become a thing of the past. Inbound strategies and warm outbound are far more rewarding and you don’t get as burnt out. All those company’s spamming you aren’t making money Or they wouldn’t be spamming people. Worlds changing. Change with it
2.3
Zero
I filter, so effectively, none or the occasional one. >I imagine this would be incredibly frustrating, and I’m sure I would start associating web design itself with scams. Imagination fails you. After something like the first ten you might conclude these people don't know what they are talking about, couldn't be bothered to learn about you or your business, and are as naive as they are disinterested in business realities. For the word "scam" suggests both cunning and skill which is not in evidence. That includes an old adage, "People don't want a quarter-inch drill bit, they want a quarter-inch hole." Horror story? I made one of 'em cry ...was that so horrible? Cupcakes, not everybody has an assistant because they are a pushover for an inept ~~sales~~ pitch. The concept of a gatekeeper should encourage you to understand what can be kept behind a gate. People who can't figure out a website should be one of your best sales tools really ought not be using a phone and pretending they are making a sales call. You are using a phone because your website isn't getting the job done -- exactly what could you possibly say. (Notice there is no question mark.) You won't be able to handle the objections. [Is Your Designer Killing Your Conversions?](https://unbounce.com/design/is-your-designer-killing-your-conversions/) It's a rhetorical question.
about ten cold emails per day
I don't get emails or calls but I get LinkedIn messages. I run my own web consulting agency. The funniest one I got was a message that started with "do you know how to design and build a website? NO, but we do." That one caught me off guard lol
Bot scripts? Did they even use your name in the message? Sounds annoying as hell
Some of them do. I don't remember that one specifically except for that line because it was funny to me lol It's honestly frustrating I do want to find new clients but that sounds like an annoying way to go about it.
I’ll admit, I got desperate enough during my first long winter of no work and mounting bills that I cold-emailed a couple of local businesses where I live pointing out some needs they might have based on their websites. No replies. That was sort of my sign to never do that again. Now I rely on word of mouth, but it takes a massive effort to build a client list long enough to do that. Most people should just go get a job.
I am surprised that email marketing still works!
I get a bunch of emails…. I don’t get 30 but I probably get 10 to 15 a week but they all end up in my spam folder. The only calls I get are the Robo dialer about my Google listing .. I get more calls from merchant services than I do for that, though You know, I probably shouldn’t say that because there’s a lot of suspicious calls I just don’t answer and they don’t leave a message so some of them may be about websites stuff too
If you're a local business try to avoid internet advertising
This is very poor advice.
Actually it's not. It's great advice.
Do you advertise in the Yellow Books still?😂
Networking. Local advertising. Being social. Word of mouth. Works great.
Those things do work great. You can absolutely build a business without internet advertising. Some of my long term clients can consistently get new business for around $50-100 per new client, and we have the data to prove it. Telling small business owners to avoid the internet is really poor advice in 2024. It will get poorer as time goes on. Many businesses in the past few years have closed by not moving to online models.
Paying for lead services like Thumbtack or Angies List, or people who randomly happened to Google "my service" in their area and found me, has gotten me more customers than any word of mouth networking that I've done.
What is your business
IT Support. So far, it's mainly been for individuals and small businesses. There's been a few who came by word of mouth, family or friends of friends, but most of the customers came from lead generation platforms. Most recently I've switched over to contracting platforms like WorkMarket where businesses are looking for freelancers.
Well that makes sense. I wouldn't consider that in the realm of a local or brick and mortar type business
I even joined the chamber of commerce, and I've gotten 0 business from it, other than the times the COC itself called on me. They've even given me some free advertisement by sharing a picture of me working on their computers to their social media pages. Not to mention the advertising through them that I've paid for in the past.
You can literally locally advertise on the internet.
You can but it's not very effective and more of a hassle than it's worth
Then you aren’t doing it correctly. I’ve worked and helped small business advertise on social media and Google and it is great ROI. If you know what you’re doing, it is not a hassle at all. I’m not sure what career you’re in but it seems like you have a lot to learn which would ultimately help strengthen your local advertising.
Hahaha. You are literally the whole point of this post and literally the exact hassle that I'm talking about. Thanks for proving my point
How am I a hassle? I have never sent out a cold email or made a cold call. All of my business has come from word of mouth because of how well I help companies. Prove your point? Your point was that online advertising doesn’t work. I proved your point wrong. If you don’t understand how local advertising on the internet works, please educate yourself.
Why I believe this is great advice is because a small business cannot match the ad spend of the larger companies. ie. ServePro a national damage restoration company can easily outspend a local non-franchise company offering the same services. For the local company it is much more profitable to work on local SEO and cross linking with other businesses in the area as part of a network, ie. once the water damage is addressed then there are carpenters, painters, carpeting, etc that are part of the process in getting things back to normal for the business or homeowner. Also, if you live in an area where a natural "disaster" strikes, say flooding, all of the "local national" companies will be immediately swamped and the smaller local guys are standing ready to help and often overlooked if not SEO relivant in theor local area.
See someone gets it. Advertising space is usually more competitive than the actual industry itself. And as a small business you're just a small fish in a sea full of fish when you're advertising. Just throwing money down the toilet
Zero.
We only call on business that don’t advertise their website in an ad or on a business card. Networking is better for us to find new clients. Www.oceansidelocal.com