The Twitter Local Lead Gen Machine

This is a guest post by Adhustler. If you are not following his blog, you should be! His posts always contain EPIC internet marketing related information... sorta like this post below.

Lately you hear a lot of buzz about local online marketing (example). Most of it's because people think it's a simple and quick way to make a buck. I don't agree. I've been in the local online marketing space well over 5 years and it can be quite a daunting task working with local clients. I always like to preface any local online marketing post with that disclaimer.

Most of what you hear affiliates doing is your typical traffic arbitrage. They are buying local ppc, setting up a landing page and trying to sell leads for more then they are paying for them. We all know the concept. I have another concept to propose to you that you can in addition to ppc arbitrage or on it's own and it can make you a lot of money. It's highly profitable since it doesn't have much expense attached to it. At this point your probably yelling at the screen, "Tell me Ad Hustler, What Is It?" I like to call the concept "The Twitter Local Lead Gen Machine."

The concept is that you use Twitter in an intelligent and calculated way to generate local leads for local businesses. Let's use a fictitious NYC based computer repair service to serve as an example of how this concept works.

1) Get a twitter account and name it something like "nycPC" or whatever works with your niche. I would include a location and keyword related to the local business. I would not name the twitter account using the businesses name. The reason for this is that if your deal falls through with the original client you can always sell your services to a new client in the same niche/area.

2) Set up the info box on Twitter with a tracking phone number and link to a landing page. You can also make a custom twitter background with this information.

3) Get an account at TwitterFeed and set it up to feed the twitter account on a regular basis with PC repair, virus, spyware etc related news. If you can find articles that have tips for protecting your PC that would be even better. - Also throw some tweets up of your own so it doesn't seem like it's all automated.

4) Start finding followers. There are several marketing tools that will allow you to follow people based on different factors. You want software that can do 2 things. 1) Follow a tweeters followers &
2) follow geographically targeted tweets containing a particular keyword.

To find LOCAL followers you are going to need a tool that can handle both of those functions. I find that the best way to find local followers is to either follow a local tweeters followers (think a local newspaper) or search for related keywords in a local area.

When your following based on keyword be smart about the keywords you choose. For instance with this account searching for keywords like "computer broken" is going to yield much more targeted followers then just "pc".

5) Use a service that offers recurring or scheduled tweets. Schedule tweets to go off at least once per day with some sort of promotional message containing the tracking phone number and a link to the landing page.

Over time you may find that these Twitter accounts develop a rather large following. Best of all this whole concept can be put onto autopilot. You just created your own local source of targeted traffic. Leverage that traffic into lead generation & profit.

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Check out the entire Local Online Advertising Series