A little over a year ago a company hired me to run their marketing. All of it, every channel.
- Google Ads and Meta Ads
- Search engine optimisation
- Google Business Profile
- Answer-engine and AI search
- Branding
- Social media
- Reporting
I got good at it, and then I got good at something more useful: making it run without me. The reporting built itself. The profile posts went out on a schedule. The parts of search that are genuinely repetitive , and most of them are, stopped needing a person.
Eventually they ran out of work to give me.
That is a strange position to be in, and it told me something. The expensive part of marketing a local business is the doing, over and over, for one client at a time. A local shop can rarely afford a department for that. So I built the department instead, and pointed it at the businesses priced out of hiring one.
Aleris is that system. One intake form generates a real website, gets it registered with Google and Bing, and then keeps the Google Business Profile alive week after week: posts, review replies, photos, reporting. Built and run for you, and still being run in month three.
Why local, and why retail
Because it is the least served and the most winnable. A corner shop, a smoke shop, a specialty grocer, a remodeler: these are businesses where being found by the people nearest to you is most of the job, and where the work is rarely done properly. The agencies that take them on charge like they are national brands and deliver a template.
I also spent years in affiliate marketing before this, which is a school that teaches you one thing very firmly: the number either moved or it stayed flat. That is the habit this company is built on, and it is why every client gets a portal showing their own figures rather than a PDF once a month.
What I will tell you honestly
I have been doing this a little over a year, and I would rather you heard that from me. What I bring is a system I built myself and can therefore change, fix and explain line by line. If you want somebody with twenty years of conference talks behind them, that is a fair thing to want, and you should go and find them.
What I promise instead: honest reporting, real work every month, and a site that is still looked after long after launch. There is a whole page about where I draw those lines.