I had a one time $250 “set up fee” where I set up their campaigns. Also included a one hour phone conversation with them to identify their goals of the marketing campaign, and any special areas they wanted to go hard one.

After the setup fee, I would charge a $50/month maintenance fee where I would basically give them a consolidated report of their expenditure and where they are getting their traffic from.

The catch is, every single client eventually wanted the “SEO” package that I offered them on a case by case basis. Many of them wanted to be top 3 organic listings for extremely uncompetitive keywords that would take very minimal effort on my part. The SEO package was the money makers, as most local companies see it as a long term investment worth the money. Building relationships is key in the business. The more relationships you have, the more work will come your way.

I eventually gave it up as I realized that nothing in the world is as easy and lucrative as the standard PPC marketing promoting products from affiliate networks. The beauty of the business is that so little amount of people can be considered “experts” in PPC Marketing, that there is more than enough opportunity to make good money.

Local is what our company specializes in! And even still we find it’s tough– largely because there is a heavy client interaction portion (while affiliates are used to just running traffic and not needing to talk to people)– and because you MUST be multi-channel. In other words, use PPC, SEO, email marketing, landing page optimization, call tracking, and analytics. Not many folks have sufficient mastery over all those skills.

I’d love to collaborate with others who are managing local clients. The folks who are claiming easy success are perhaps not mentioning the significant barriers that it actually takes. Brandon is one of the rare exceptions– of folks who actually do it and are honest about it. The other folks primarily “claim” to have done local or aren’t being honest about what it takes to be successful. Time will come.