Websites for local businesses

Don't target "local businesses", pick one type, whether that's plumbers, dentists, landscapers, salons, or roofers. One niche means you build one site template and reuse it for every business on your list, and since every owner you talk to has the same problems, your pitch gets better with every call.

Pick a niche where one new customer is worth real money to the owner. A roofer's average job is thousands of dollars, so a website that brings even one call a month pays for itself. If you're not sure, let the agent help you compare a few once it's set up.

Use a strong model, because this pipeline involves judgment calls and a weak model makes expensive mistakes with real mail.

After that, give it the keys for the job. In chat, tell the agent which accounts it's working with and paste the credentials when it asks: a Google Places API key, which you create in Google Cloud Console by enabling the places API, with a hard budget cap set on it because uncapped keys at volume are how people wake up to painful bills, and a postcard API account with Lob, PostGrid, or stannp. On Grok bot you can also log into a website once in the bot's browser and it stays logged in.

The places API returns everything you need about a business: name, address, phone, rating, review count, photos, reviews, and whether they have a website listed. That last field is the one that matters, because an empty website field on a business with real reviews means a real operating business with customers and no online presence.

The agent searches your niche across the whole city, including the areas around it, and saves everything into a spreadsheet so you can see it yourself.

Now the agent filters that list down to the businesses worth mailing. The filters that work:

• No website listed, which is your main filter
• Review count between 10 and 200, enough to be established but not so many that an agency is probably already handling them
• Rating above 4.0, because owners who care about their reputation respond better to this

You'll end up with somewhere around 50 to 150 businesses per city that fit, and that's your send list. Look through it before moving on and remove anything that looks off, like a business that's clearly closed or a listing that's actually a chain.

Before building 100 sites, build one template for the niche and get it right, because every site after this is the same template with different data in it. A good local business site is one page with the business name and what they do at the top, a big call button with their phone number, their services, their real Google reviews, their photos, the area they cover, and a simple contact form.

Have the agent build the template with the first business on your list, look at it on your phone, and keep asking for changes until you'd be happy if it were your own business. The site needs to look finished rather than like a demo, so that when the owner opens it, it feels like it already exists and belongs to them.

Once the template is approved, the agent builds a site for every business on the send list and fills each one with their real data, meaning the business name, the phone number, the services their reviews mention, their actual Google reviews, and their photos pulled from the places api. Every site gets its own preview link.

Since this is one template per niche with data filled in per business, it's fully automatable. It's also exactly the part I built unloopa for, but the agent can run it with any builder that generates sites from data. Check a handful of the finished sites before the postcards go out, especially ones where the business had few photos.

Services like Lob, PostGrid, and Stannp let you send real printed postcards with an API call. You send them the design and the address, they print and mail it, and it costs around 1 to 2 dollars per card.

The design is simple: a big screenshot of the website you built for them on the front, and on the back one line that says "we built [business name] a new website. Scan to see it live." With a QR code to their preview link and your phone number, because some owners will just call instead of scanning. Keep the back clean and let the screenshot do the work.

Once you approve the samples, the agent sends the whole batch through the postcard API and logs every send. The part that matters after that is knowing who scanned, so the agent watches every preview link and messages you the moment one gets opened, with the business name and how long they looked at it.

The QR code goes straight to their live site, so the owner is holding a card with their business on it, scans it, and sees a finished website with their own reviews and photos. You never wrote a pitch because the site does the selling, and the site itself has a clear banner at the top saying it was built for them with your number on it, so the next step is obvious.

When the agent tells you someone opened their site, call them that day. You don't need a script, just ask if they saw the site and whether they want it live on their own domain. For the ones who scanned but didn't call back, the agent can send one short follow up by text a few days later.

When an owner says yes, the agent takes their site off the preview link and puts it on their own domain. If they don't have a domain, it buys one in their business name, connects it, and sets up their Google business profile to point at the new site, so the website starts showing up when people search for them.

After that, you keep the site updated for them every month, which means adding new reviews as they come in, updating services and photos, and fixing anything they ask for. The agent does all of it from one message, so every client you add is the same small amount of work.

Once every step above works on its own, this is the whole pipeline in one message. Paste it in, fill in the brackets, and the agent saves it as one skill you can rerun on a new city with a single line.