Alright, we talked a little about pay-per-click before, but I want to go into some detail about a couple of different companies that we’re going to use here in a minute. So let’s talk about what pay-per-click is. If you have an ad that appears on a website, and whenever someone clicks on that ad you agree to pay that website a certain amount of money in exchange for them sending the visitor to a certain page on your website, that’s pay-per-click. It’s almost always two steps. You’re never going to get, well I shouldn’t say never, but you’re hardly ever going to be all to have an opportunity to have your full page ad if you’re there and you’re doing pay-per-click. Usually they’re little like classified-ad type ads on there, where someone clicks on it and then they go to your website to get more information. And on that website page, they’ve got the full message so it’s almost always two steps.
How to get it done? You usually go to the website that’s offering the service. They’ll have an interface, you log in, you put up your ad, they tell you how much you need to pay, you put it in your credit card information or debit card information and they’re going to bill you as it comes out in a certain payment period. Some will ask you to pay in advance, some will ask you to pay in arrears, it really depends on how it’s set up.
How much does it cost to get done? It varies usually based on supply and demand. So if you a very competitive keyword, and you’ve got a lot of other people bidding on that, you can expect to pay more per click; if you’ve got a relatively under-served market, low competition, you can expect to get your clicks for very inexpensive, what’s inexpensive? I think the low end of most pay-per-click models now is about $.10 per click. A decent amount in the medium price range is probably $.50 to $1.50 per click. And some of the more expensive ones can be upwards of $15, $30 per click for some very highly competitive, highly lucrative markets where a lead is worth a lot of money. So just think about that. Handyman stuff is probably going to be in the $.50 to $1.50 range for most markets. Some markets may have a couple of aggressive guys that are bidding pretty heavy, but I would imagine most of those guys are going to be in that range.
Scalability — it scales to certain point. There’s only a finite number of people searching for a very particular keyword. So there’s only so many people searching for “kitchen remodel Denver,” in a given month, so it’s not scalable in terms of that. But you can have lots of different niches, each one going to its own specialized landing page where you’ve got a very specific ad on there. So in that way, it’s nice and scalable and nice and segmented, so you can focus on a variety of niches and have it be a very good, very tight market-to-message match. So that the ad you’re running in order to find “Denver kitchen remodeling” is very specific for that, versus “Denver prepare your house for sale” type of stuff, or “looking for Denver real estate investors that need a handyman.” So you can really tailor it down and do very effective things like that, but there really is only a limited number that you can do.
So I think that’s going to be it as far as pay-per-click. Let me give some example of some pay-per-click companies. There’s one thing that’s kind of nagging at me here and I’m trying to remember what it was. There was something I was thinking about telling you about pay-per-click. One thing that I could tell you about pay-per-click, I’m not sure if this is it or not, one thing is that in a lot of areas, you could do geographical targeting. So you can have your ad show up and have it only show up for people that are looking in Denver, or people looking in Miami, or people looking in New York, or on Long Island, or somewhere in Texas, or you can actually go and focus in on very tight geographical areas which makes it very effective for doing targeted marketing for localized businesses. So, something to consider with that.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. For more tips on how to incorporate pay-per-click marketing into a growth strategy for your handyman business, I strongly recommend that you check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright let’s talk about flyers and using them in your handyman business. Flyers basically have a one-page flyer that’s got information about a particular product or service or widget that you’re marketing, special report, whatever it is that you’re trying to get out there in your marketing message. You can use direct mail in order to send flyers. You can do them door to door. So let say you’re working on painting or finishing basements, and you find a neighborhood that’s relatively new, probably has a lot of basement that need to be finished. You could do door-to-door marketing, offering that particular service. Let’s say you’re offering sprinkler blowouts or some other service like that, definitely do that, at a certain time of year, door-to-door marketing. You can do inserts in newspapers with flyers as well.
Flyers tend to be one-step marketing although they definitely could be two-step marketing if you can’t get your entire message out on the front back of a 8 ½ X 11 flyer. So a lot of times, they’ll be one-step. But you could do two-step, put your telephone number with the specific extension for those flyers on there. You can also use flyers to put your website on there as a second step as well, and you can put a specific address for the flyer. So if it’s a special offer you can put in your domain name-slash-spring blowouts for these spring — although it wouldn’t be in the spring, fall blowout for your fall sprinkler blowout, if you’re offering that service, or home prep, or home sold, or whatever it’s you’re trying to do. Then you can have a specific marketing message on that page, and then you know if people go to that page on your website, it’s probably because they found this flyer and they were going to that page. And then you can measure the response on your website and use a separate extension on the phone as well.
How to get it done? To print up flyers is easy, you go down to your local copy shop and have them printed. Some people will suggest you go to a printer to have a certain amount printed. Experience has shown that, print up only what you need even if you’re going to get a discount a discount on the next number. Because more often than not, you’ll never get the next ones out, at least that’s what my experience shows. So I’ll save you some money and some shelf space by telling you, only print what you know what you’re going to get out that time, and you can always go back down to the printer and have more printed up.
You can have it actually put out by people, I hire people to do flyer delivery. So I’ll go post an ad on Craigslist and hire someone to do flyer delivery for me, have them fill out a very simple independent contractor agreement. Tell them what they’re going to pay, give them the flyers to give them a map, I print up a map of where I wanted to do it. And I highlight the map with a highlighter in the streets I want them to cover. I tell them to call me when they’re about to start, call me when they’re done. And then I usually drive by the area they were supposed to put out the flyers and make sure that I see flyers on most of the doors on the streets I told them to do. When I was a kid, my father used to hire people to do flyers to buy and sell houses. And you hire kids a lot of times, and the kids would literally go and dump the flyers in the trash can in front the 7-Eleven, wait three hours, and then go to the pick-up spot and the flyers would never be delivered. So the reason I actually have them call me when they’re done and then we drive through the neighborhoods is based on experience on having people throw away flyers we printed up for them, and then expect to be paid for the work. So you definitely want to go drive those streets to make sure they’re getting done. I usually pay, in case you’re wondering, between $8 and $10 per hundred flyers or per hour, depending on how I feel. A lot of it depends on how far apart the houses are. But you should be able to get, if your houses are pretty close together, about a hundred flyers done in an hour. That’s at a good pace. That’s not walking for leisure. It’s walking for work. So that’s about the cost.
Scalability: yeah, flyers are great and they are scalable to a certain degree. They are cheaper than direct mail to get out. A lot of people find them more intrusive than direct mail, but they also get more attention than direct mail. The nice thing about direct mail is the post office is usually not going to scream if you decide to do them major mailing. They’ll just accept your money and they’ll actually deliver every single message in the mailbox. There’s a lot of overhead in managing delivering flyers, and there’s a little bit of feedback you’re going to get, flack from people who – and by the way, you’re not suppose to put flyers on people who have “No soliciting” signs on their door, I wouldn’t bother – and make sure that you’re not going to neighborhoods that are “No Soliciting at all.” There are entire neighborhoods and subdivisions in some areas where there’s no soliciting at all, including flyers. And in those areas, just go and do direct mail. Direct mail is highly effective, if you’re going to do saturation mailing for there anyway. It is more expensive; in order to get a flyer out, you’re talking about a relatively nominal rate, $.10 per flyer, something like that, $.07 per flyer for paying $7 per hour, or $7 per thousand. I’m sorry, per hundred. Plus the cost of the printing which could be a nickel or something like that. So you’re talking about $.12 per, with direct mail it’s going to cost a little bit more with the postage in order to get that out. But it might be worth a little bit to not have those headaches when you’re doing saturation mailings, which is saturating entire neighborhood with marketing.
As far as effectiveness, I’ve had really good luck with flyers in a lot of businesses, by the way. So when I’ve actually had lots of flyers come for a variety of businesses myself, and business owners I’ve talked to that have done it, have had good luck with it as well. So I would recommend flyers. They’re cheap and they generate some good media business and some good prospects at your list.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn more about how to increase the visibility of your handyman business with flyers? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright, let’s talk about fax broadcasts. Fax broadcast is when you upload a list of faxes, hopefully from people that you know and have requested information from you via fax, although some people are getting pretty risky uploading numbers from faxes that they purchase and then doing broadcast to those guys. I do not recommend that. But you can upload a list of faxes to the people that you already have a pre-existing business relationship with, and have requested to receive information by fax from you, and do that. So let’s say you’re working with a bunch of real estate agents, and they have given you their fax numbers, and occasionally you send out an update to them about something that’s going on that’s urgent and important, and you want them to receive it via fax, you can use a fax broadcast in order to get that out to them. It’s usually big enough where you can do it in one step, although you can put a telephone number on there and the website.
How to get it done? You just go online and use the fax broadcast service. I don’t do a lot of fax broadcasts, so you can go find one that you’re willing to work with. You upload your list, you upload the fax you want to send out, and they actually do it for you. And it’s cheap. I think it’s like $.05, $.10 per fax, to get it out there, it’s very inexpensive. So you can go ahead and do that.
As far as scalability goes, yeah if you have a ton of fax numbers, it’s extremely scalable, you can do a ton. But the idea of getting a whole bunch of fax numbers just seems kind of foreign, unless you’re going to buy them from people and then you’re doing unsolicited commercial faxes which, it’s my understanding of a law – and I’m not totally up on these fax laws – it’s my understanding of a law that there are fines that, if somebody really wanted to press to take you to court and stuff like that, they could actually collect some nominal fee for each fax that they received. Not that they’d collect on everybody, unless the attorney general or whatever it is decided they were going to go after you for all of them. So I wouldn’t mess around with doing unsolicited commercial faxes. But fax into your own internal list, if you had a really important message and it was appropriate for you to send the fax to, sure you could do that. I’ve done faxes before in our business for wholesale deals. So, it’s something to consider.
Let’s see. Effectiveness – we talked about that, there are few things that get your attention more than a fax coming across, so it’s probably effective in that regard, especially when you compare it to cost. But how effective is it to think that you’re really going to consistently send out fax broadcasts to people? I’m not sure it’s going to be a big part of most people’s business model, especially in a handyman business.
Concerns and other things to be aware of – I talked to you about unsolicited faxes. I would not buy fax numbers. I’ve mentioned that like six times.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for using fax broadcast strategically to enhance the profile of your handyman business? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Let’s talk about email broadcasts. We talked about quite a bit about email and setting up your email system earlier today. Email broadcast is when you have your list of people that have subscribed to your email lists, and remember it they have to have signed themselves up. You should not be adding people on your own, and you should definitely not be buying lists of people may be interested. But if they’ve signed themselves up to receive emails from you, one of the things that you can do is go ahead and send out email broadcasts using your email broadcast system in order to generate direct sales, referrals, send out e-zines, anything like that can be done be via email broadcasts.
So is email broadcast usually one-step or two-step? Well actually it’s usually two-step. A lot of times you would think you could just put your whole marketing message in the email. But what tends to happen is, you tend to get caught in spam filters and a lot of that when you start putting a ton of content in email. And so what a lot of people are doing is they’re actually putting a little bit of information in the email, enough to get the people the click in the email to a web page that’s got the full marketing message on the webpage. Or they’ve got a telephone number in there where people can call and get the rest of the marketing message. So most email broadcast is probably going to be two-step marketing. It can be one step in some cases, but most of the time I think you’re going to find it to be two-step.
How to get it done? Definitely go sign up for a professional email broadcast service. And as I mentioned before, if you go to LearnToBeRich.com and you look for the downloads link on the right hand side, or if you got to LearnToBeRich.com/downloads (that’s plural, all lower case), then I’ll have a special report on there about the email broadcast providers that I’m recommending right now and you can use a link in there to get signed up. Once you get signed up, it’s really easy to do, you just log in, you upload whatever you’re going to mail out to them, and you pick your list of who you’re going to send it to if you’ve got more than one list, which we do. Then you go can ahead and send them out, and it’s usually out within like 15 minutes. So it’s very quick, very low cost to get it done. Well there’s two different models. There’s a free model with a lot of email providers, and there’s ones where you pay like $10, $15, $20 per month, something like that. And it may seem relatively high when you’ve only got 5, 10, 15, 20 subscribers. But usually those accounts allow you to have 5,000, 10,000 subscribers at that price. And so you’ll be able to do a decent of emails, a decent amount of people on your list, for the amount you’re paying, and then the price goes way down. So the price gets better as you get up to certain thresholds.
Whether it’s scalable or not — it is scalable, for the overwhelming majority of businesses that are not really pushing the limits as to trying to do tons of email. When you get to doing 300+ new prospects per day, you start running into some issues with scalability. But as far as a normal handyman business doing some marketing, you’re talking about something that’s extremely scalable. You can add 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 50 people a day and it’s not going to be an issue. For us, we are consistently pounding hundreds of people a day onto our email list. There are some scalability issues that you need to overcome.
The effectiveness – the effectiveness is odd, because I want to tell you that it’s very effective, because it’s cost effective. It doesn’t cost much to get it done. But I’ll tell you that people are reducing the value of email. Email is becoming cheap, and people look at that as cheap message and tend not to respond to it nearly as much. You’re going to get much better response from your physical newsletter, the one you mail in the mail, U.S. Snail mail, postal mail whatever you want to call it – not email, as compared to emails. But emails are easy to do so, you could send that one a week, and even though your response is going to be a fraction of what it is. Some direct marketing guys, I remember Gary Halbert talking recently, and he said that Snail mail is 20 times more effective than email. And I have some data to back that up, although I don’t have A-to-B data comparison to be able to say specifically. But I do have data that shows that he’s probably right. And so yeah, doing email is effective but it’s not highly effective, I guess is how I would say it. You’re probably going to be better off doing your normal newsletter. However, email is so cheap and it’s easy to do, and people are used to doing it, and that may be their preferred method of contacting you. And so definitely do it, and it’s cheap to do. So it is effective, I think there are other things that are more effective like newsletters, and direct mail broadcasts, direct-mail, newsletter type stuff.
Concerns and other things to be aware of: definitely be aware of the canned spam law, do not add people to your list. Make sure that you use a professional service. Include your normal regular mailing address when you do your mailing, to make sure you include a way for them to opt out. Make sure that you acknowledge by opting people out if they request it. You don’t have to reply back to them, but if they say, “Hey please remove me from your list” or something nastier than that, which some people would do by the way, then definitely remove them from your list. You do not want to have someone on you list who doesn’t want to receive stuff. It just doesn’t make sense. So remove them from your list, you won’t email anymore and you won’t get any complains from them anymore. So those are things to be aware of with email broadcasts.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn more about how to use email broadcasts to boost profitability for your handyman business? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright, let’s talk a little about eBay. You’re probably wondering why I included eBay in a handyman marketing course. Well, the interesting thing about eBay is you can also list services on there to sell. So you can go and directly list that you do, we have projects or basements or kitchens, or whatever it is you’re doing. But then you can also create products that sell on eBay as well. One of the products that we talked about a lot are these marketing widgets, or special reports, or audio CDs, or videos, or things of that nature, that people are requesting information on how to do something. Not realize you’re probably going to have a lot people outside of your local area ordering those unless you somehow make them very geographically specific products or information products. But I have used eBay as a lead generation tool quite a bit, where I’ve taken things that would otherwise be services, and created information products that we sold information on. And when people bought the product usually at a break-even or slightly positive lead generation cost for us. So it’s a profit center in many cases. But then I also get their name, their mailing address, their email address, their telephone number, and I can add them to a marketing newsletter or database that I can market over and over and over to them with their business. So think about using eBay as a possible way to do lead generation, as another one of your many marketing streams for having prospects coming in.
Is eBay one-step or two-step marketing? It’s almost always one-step because you can almost always get your entire sales marketing message out on eBay. I can’t think of an example where I’d have a two-step, especially since eBay has some policies about having people leave their website in order to get back to your sites, or putting telephone numbers in there to kind of get them off of eBay to complete the transaction outside. So it’s almost always going to be one-step.
How to get done is pretty straightforward. You make an eBay account and you post it up there. EBay is dirt-cheap. I think the low end is like $.40 or something like that, to post a product up on there. As long as you’re under I think $9.99. You’ll want to check their pricing structure to see, but it’s pretty cheap to do that. And you can then use higher-priced items if you wanted to — the fees are going to be more for that. But my model for eBay has been break-even or even slightly negative. I was willing to do it to get the name and address, because it was a nice model for me, doing that. And I can’t remember exactly how many people we are generating, but it had to be over a hundred new inquiries per month from eBay alone. So, just to give you an idea of scale. And this is nationwide. So, you’re doing it for one local market, it’s probably going to be significantly less than that. But one or two new inquiries per month, for a local type of business, might not be that bad.
Scalability: not highly scalable, it is definitely limited. It’s got a cap on it. I think I even tested really scaling eBay up. I have tons and tons of auctions up, and I got to the point where every time I put an auction on it, it had no improvement at all in the effectiveness of the ads. I would get no additional leads. I was reaching market saturation very quickly with eBay. So that’s just something for you to consider.
As far as effectiveness goes, it’s probably not the most effective thing you could be doing with your time, especially if you’re local. If you’ve got a couple of difference areas you’re working to be focusing on, you might be able to do that a little better. But it’s relatively cheap, it can be set up to be relatively automated, so I would consider it. It might generate one or two prospects per month on a high end, I think. It’s not going to generate too many more than that, unless you’ve got a larger area. So it’s just something to think about, it’s an additional marketing tool. So that’s about all I can say about eBay for now.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn more about using eBay to generate leads in your handyman business? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright, let’s take a look at some pay-per-click providers. The biggest one by far is going to be Google Ad Words. The next biggest one, I think, is probably going to be Yahoo Search advertising. The third biggest is probably going to be Facebook, and then you’ve got probably hundreds of others – really small, boutique, niche type of pay-per-click things that are on there. So just, if you’re really looking around, you can probably do those. If you’re going for Pareto’s principle, Google Ad Words is going to give you the biggest return for your time invested, and probably your money invested. Yahoo Search probably next one, and then you can go on Facebook and start targeting things on there too. So that’s probably the order I would attack them in, if I were looking at Pareto’s principle to really maximize my return.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn how to find the best pay-per-click provider for your handyman business? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
