small web design firm: merits of finding clients nationally not locally

clicker said: "s of thousands in my biz (at this point it will be life savings invested in the next couple months) and you all can't even imagine how much your impute from your experience can help. My monthly expenses are too high at this point unless the way in which I find new clients improves. I own a web design, development, and markeing firm (AKA "interactive agency") with 12 employees in the Philippines. In the US (I'm an American), where I spend most of my time, I work out of a home office and run the US office for this company with no employees. I am lucky to pull cream of the crop salespeople from the thousands that work for call centers in this offshore call center meca. Both companies were started from scratch with almost zero clients 4 months ago. My approach has been that the sales guys "find interest" and pass the hot leads on to me for in person or phone follow-ups. Our target is my regional area (Maryland). Now I'm wondering if dealing with clients nationally-- who'd I'd never meet in person-- might make more sense? This would allow me to work physically side by side with the sales team more often and take the phone once they've talked to someone and really sparked interest. It won't limit who we reach out to. I won't have to do expensive in person meetings. How many of you that do web "service" work for clients have tried to reach out with your marketing on a national level instead of just local? One big benefit is going for small niches, so for example you could be one of the web design companies/freelancers that designs sites for only downhill ski manufacturers. But I don't have a niche yet. I'm simply finding that MAYBE meeting in person is not so very important-- especially when I have such an effective phone sales group that I would like to be WITH. And what about the fact that my company is not very established yet? I'm sure companies like Agency.com or Modem Media could care less the location of a prospective client. If a salesperson from their company picks up the phone and does a pitch they can close 40K contracts without showing their face. But will people shell out 1-5 USD for web services to a fairly new company located 400 miles away from them in the US? I think so if they have enough assurances, and I'm about to try this, but it is risky for me to rock the boat in mid-stream. Thanks for sharing your experiences! Eric"

edwin said: "hi eric, are you doing much search engine marketing?"

AngelaCea said: "If you can build and host database driven sites you can get a hell of a lot more than $1,000.00-$5,000.00 per job. Next if you want large customers you have to go out and "sell" directly to them by making phone calls and sending off PDF's of your work out or a "White Paper" explaining what you can do. You could also offer "free concept" pages to try to close deals just to show folks what you can do if they are big potential clients."

clicker said: "[QUOTE=AnthonyCea] You could also offer "free concept" pages to try to close deals just to show folks what you can do if they are big potential clients.[/QUOTE] we do database driven sites. This is exactly my concern. I just don't know how many people will do business for something like a content management site when they don't have a referal and haven't met a company. Our portfolio is small but very impressive. Quote I want SEO to be 1/3 of what we do soon. For now we aren't experts enough to do the more "advanced" seo work, but since it's offshore we can be extremely afordable when it comes to writing link trading emails (costumized) or scouring the web for industry specific message boards. The Philippines has a close affiliation to the US, unlike India, so my people can deall with "cultural" issues that may come up. Again, though, I wonder about the fact that we are not coming through a referal and I can't meet in person with many of these people 'cause they're too far unless it's a huge project. Thanks for the help! Eric ClickStream Marketing [url]http://www.c-stream.net[/url]"

Darren said: "You may need to at least talk to the clients on the phone. The "trust" issue is a big one online."

AngelaCea said: "You have to build one page at a time and optimize it to the best of your ability, there are so many theories out there on SEO and Google changes how they rank sites always. Something that was working yesterday can get you booted out of the index tomorrow. What you should do is put up good content and functional pages and worry less about SEO, I would focus on "Web Standards compliant" pages and don't go over board on linking because a lot of linking is being penalized right now because of folks linking to sites that are part of "link farms". You see people everyday posting that they have thousands of backlinks, yet they were dropped out of the search index. Why are they being removed? Because they have been identified as buyers of links from known fraudulent link farms."