If you’re a stay-at-home parent, your job options are typically quite limited. There is a range of multi-level marketing opportunities, get-rich-quick schemes, insourced call centers, and general selling of questionable products. But a few major trends have converged:
- In the last year, we’ve seen stay-at-home moms become addicted online gamers, playing daily for hours a day.
- Mobile has become huge– look at Google’s acquisition of AdMob and the rise of FourSquare and Gowalla.
- Social networks such as Facebook comprise up to 25% of pageviews in the United States.
- Small businesses are fleeing the yellow pages and moving ad budgets online.
Thus, the confluence of local, social, and mobile is a “perfect storm” for stay-at-home parents to service this flood of small businesses. The tightened economy has accelerated this shift, as businesses are scrutinizing their dollars more carefully. The lower cost of getting online and tools that provide more effective advertising further the trend.
And moms are going to be there to benefit from this. To serve local businesses, you need local resellers. And those folks– the hidden army of local entrepreneurs— are already in their communities. They will be more effective at selling and servicing the people they already know and trust. Would you rather buy from a hard-pressure sales guy calling from an NYC boiler room or from the person your kids have known for years and who lives next door?
Add to that the fact that small businesses are starting to demand transparency, and you have stay-at-home moms that can show how much business their online marketing efforts are driving. If you’re a business owner and your analyst can show you what you spent (down to the keyword and click), as well as how many calls it drove (down to the actual recording of the call), how can you argue the ROI versus another form of advertising?
In a few weeks, the folks at Content Factory will be unveiling the new Content Factory platform. Yes, it slices, dices, and chops– but more importantly, it’s a user-friendly interface that nearly anyone can use. If you can play Farmville, you can play ContentFactoryVille– the game is slightly different, plus you earn real dollars instead of virtual ones.
If you are a stay-at-home mom, stay-at-home dad, or someone who is looking for a bit of extra income, shoot me an email at dennis@blitzlocal.com and you can get on the waiting list.
In the last couple of months, we’ve been testing with some alpha users of our system and I’m quite impressed with the results. A lot of people said that having an external analyst force was not as reliable as having an internal sales force that bangs on the phones. Others said that it was impossible to find folks who could both sell and service clients– that the operational efficiency of having one contact was a cost-saving not possible. And most folks said that our model of being transparent with our pricing and actual spending (we spend 70% of every dollar we collect) was suicide since the other guys spend half that and are able to maintain a healthy margin.
Well, it’s good to know that we have some early success here– that you can find those eager, dedicated moms out there that might not initially know much about SEO, PPC, or any of those acronyms. They have kids to take care of and other responsibilities, so they’ll put forth great effort. If you believe in them and also give them the right systems, they can succeed and place the high-dollar consultants to shame. What a way to root for the little guy (or girl)! Our experience so far has affirmed my belief in the goodness of humanity– that success is possible for anyone given the right attitude and effort.
