Are you ready to take your home inspection business to the next level? Tonight, we are holding a free webinar called “How To Market Your Home Inspector Business”.
The webinar is one in a series of marketing webinars that we have held for a variety of business industries based on the marketing strategies that I have used to generate leads in over 1,200 different industries over the last decade.
This home inspection business marketing webinar will include:
- Two Major Marketing Focuses For Marketing Your Home Inspection Business
- Using Niches To Market Your Home Inspection Business More Effectively
- 4 Ways To Build Your Home Inspection Business Offline With Business Networking
- 7 Ways To Build Your Home Inspection Business Online Without Spending A Fortune
- 3 Ways To Get Paid Doing Lead Generation For Your Home Inspection Business
- Marketing Your Home Inspection Business Using Special Reports
- 5 Ways To Outsource Marketing Your Home Inspection Business
- Joint Venture Opportunities For Growing Your Home Inspection Business
- 4 Ways To Cultivate New and Repeat Business From Your Client and Prospect List For Home Inspectors
- Using Meetup To Market and Grow Your Home Inspection Business
- Plus a whole lot more marketing info…
If you can make the live webinar tonight I strongly recommend it. If you can’t I hope to be able to record it make it available afterwards (technology willing). To register for the live event or, after the live event, to download a copy of the webinar in easy to listen to MP3 format go to the Home Inspector Downloads page. From the downloads page for home inspectors you will be able to select “How To Market Your Home Inspector Business” and download it. Right now, we are still offering it for free, but I may start charging for it at a later date and it will likely be sold for about $25.
Packed with tons of practical marketing information from the guy that made a nice living from lead generation, you will find it a valuable investment of your time.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Also, you are not going to want to miss “The World’s Greatest Home Inspector Marketing Course”.
Next Tuesday night we will be presenting the “How To Market Your Landscaper Business” webinar as a free webinar.
If you are a landscaper then this webinar is a great resource for you especially if you are looking for real world, implementable marketing and business strategies for getting more business.
I estimate the webinar to go between an hour and two hours depending on how many tangents we get on (which has been known to happen on other webinars of this type that we’ve done).
The landscaper webinar will include:
- Two Major Marketing Focuses For Marketing Your Landscaper Business
- Using Niches To Market Your Landscaper Business More Effectively
- 4 Ways To Build Your Landscaper Business Offline With Business Networking
- 7 Ways To Build Your Landscaper Business Online Without Spending A Fortune
- 3 Ways To Get Paid Doing Lead Generation For Your Landscaper Business
- Marketing Your Landscaper Business Using Special Reports
- 5 Ways To Outsource Marketing Your Landscaper Business
- Joint Venture Opportunities For Growing Your Landscaper Business
- 4 Ways To Cultivate New and Repeat Business From Your Client and Prospect List For Landscapers
- Using Meetup To Market and Grow Your Landscaper Business
- Plus much more…
I strongly recommend that you try to attend the live version of this webinar or, if you miss the live event, download and listen to this powerful marketing webinar. To register for the live event or, after the live event, to download a copy of the webinar in easy to listen to MP3 format go to the Landscaper Downloads page. From there you will be able to select “How To Market Your Landscaper Business” and download it (currently for free). I think you will find it to be of amazing value to you as you learn to more effectively market your landscaping business.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Coming up in next week we also have, for the first time, the live presentation of “The World’s Greatest Landscaper Marketing Course”. To take your landscaping business to the next level, I strongly encourage you to either attend that live and/or get the recorded version of that.
If you’ve done any type of professional sales you probably are intimately familiar with some of the pros and cons of the relationship between the commission amount per sale and the number of sales you might expect to make. If you are considering sales, this could be a very important concept for you to understand and could significantly affect your criteria in selecting your next sales position.
First, I will tell you that I am making an important assumption. The assumption that I am making is that the lower the commission is per sale, the more sales you are likely to make. Another way to put it is that the larger the commission the more time you will, on average, need to invest in making the sale.
I make this assumption because the commission a business owner is willing to pay is often based on the amount of time and work that the business owner estimates it will take to make the sale. Paying a $1,000 commission (like we do) for making a sale that you might expect to make 10 times a day is usually not required to retain sales professionals in the job. Demand for that job would exceed the supply of spaces for the job and the business owner would reduce the commission to have a more balanced number of applicants to job positions.
On the other hand, if the job pays $10 per sale, but would require the average sales person to talk to a large number of people investing a good number of hours presenting and building value, few sales professionals would be willing to work for a commission of that size in relation to the amount of work.
There is some room for variation here. Some sales opportunities will allow you to make sales that have very high commissions with a reasonably short amount of time invested in the sales process. The sales opportunities you need to be careful with are the ones that offer you a relatively low commission with a very high amount of time required for the sales process.
Which brings us to the commission per sale versus number of sales discussion. If you are paid a small commission because you are expected to make several sales in a relatively small period of time, there are some definite advantages to that. For example, you get the benefit of quick feedback. If you are expected to make several sales a day, for example, you can see what works in your sales presentation and what doesn’t much more quickly than if you are only expected to make a sale once every few days.
Not only do you get the benefit of feedback on your presentation, but do not underestimate the importance of mini-victories in morale and motivation. Anyone in sales knows that it is easier to stay on a role once you’re on a role and making sales tends to start those positive roles. Prospects can sense the winning attitude in your voice and presentation and often respond positively to that.
So, there seems to be a decided benefit to seeking sales positions that might allow you to make smaller commissions and to make a larger number of sales, but that’s not the whole story. There are also advantages to sales professional seeking sales jobs that allow them earn very large commissions on single sales.
For example, if you were making sales that had commissions that could be an entire week’s wage you can see massive results from improving your sales skills. For example, let’s say you are calling on 10 prospects per day and are used to closing 1 out of 50 in any given week. If you can improve your sales presentation and skills so that instead of closing 2% of your prospects you now close 2 out of 50, you’ve doubled your income. Some math folks will be quick to point out that if you doubled your sales on the smaller commissions you’d double your income too. Granted that is true. However going from 1 sale a week to 2 sales a week is different than going from 20 sales a week to 40 sales a week in my opinion from a practical stand point.
With larger commission but fewer transaction sales jobs, you do miss some of the mini-victories that can really keep you motivation up, but creating mini-victories for yourself might be an acceptable alternative especially if you are able to make a much larger amount of money overall by focusing on larger transaction sales.
Until my next post,
James
As far as Backpage goes, Backpage is the third-biggest classified ad website you might consider using to market your handyman business. They tend be more integrated in with local classified ads and newspapers as well. So when you post on that on Backpage, they’ll also ask you “Would you like to place a similar or the same ad in your local newspaper for this particular site?” And you could go ahead and pay some nominal rate in order to have your ad listed in the newspaper. They also allow you to pay a certain fee in order to have your posts automatically repeat and repost on there. You can check out that, if it’s worthwhile for you to have that done, and I would consider doing it. I did not find it worthwhile for me, but everyone’s got their own numbers and what they’re willing to pay in or have that stuff done. I had tended to outsource some of this stuff, and I would have other people do it for us.
And what to post, same types of things that we were talking about on Kajiji, and also Craigslist. And as far as posting frequency goes, again read their rules to make sure that you’re not in violation by re-posting too many times. But posting frequently is important in all three of these sites. Being on top of that list is going to make a significant difference in how many people are looking at things, so don’t be surprised if you post an ad on Craigslist or Backpage, and you may get one inquiry within the first hour or two after you put it up, and then your response just goes away. If you went back on there and posted two days or three days or a week later, whatever the frequency they allow you to do, you might generate another response. So it could definitely be a situation where being timely and reposting is a highly effective strategy for you, as long as you’re following the guidelines of these sites. Make sure to read their terms of use policies.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information on how to use free and low cost online classified ad websites to more effectively market your handyman business.
Alright, so the next-biggest one is Kijiji. Kijiji is eBay’s attempt to enter the classified ad website market. It’s competing directly with Craigslist in many ways. It’s got one-third or one-fourth of the traffic I think, I forgot, it’s what we said in the chart. But it is also a place for you to be able go and promote your business. I’m not sure if they decided to start charging it. I will tell you straight-up, that I do not post on Kijiji or Backpage, it’s not worth my time. However, they are the second-biggest and third-biggest, and so you could get some traffic probably, you could get business from it. You can post on there once a month, once every week for three months, and get a client, and that could be worthwhile for you. Not with my business, because I was doing such a large area. I was posting for a while on Backpage. I did not find it to be very effective. It was significantly less effective for me than Craigslist. And so I pretty much stopped marketing on there directly. But it’s worth checking out, it’s worth testing for you and see if your particular ads are going to make a difference on there. But I would, If I only have to pick one of the three, it would be Craigslist by a long shot.
So you can post the same things we talked about before for Craigslist – information that they can order from you, about special reports, or whatever it is you’re going to do. They can also do direct services or direct products. So you can make a package of, “We’ll prep your house or rental property for X number of dollars instead of an hourly rate, instead of a service.” Posting frequency – read their guidelines and make sure you’re not in violation. Just make sure you follow their rules, and everything should be fine.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn how to use classified ad websites like Kijiji and CraigsList to market your handyman business? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright, so let’s talk about Craigslist and how you might, as a handyman business owner, want to use it to market your business. What do you want to post on Craigslist? By the way I have a lot of experience with posting on Craigslist. I don’t do a lot of posting on it anymore, but it’s highly effective and I would recommend for promoting your local business. So what do you want to post on Craigslist? Well as a handyman, you definitely want to promote your particular handyman service. So there’s a section on there for promoting services. And you want to do your ad that’s very specific, a very specific offer for something, not just “Joe’s Handyman Service.” So you want to talk about the special offer for finishing a basement, or finishing a kitchen, or doing flooring, or preparing a house for rental. And you can vary up your ads, you know, you run one ad one day. And couple of days later, maybe you’ll change up your ad, run something different, and change up your ad and run something different. Find out which one’s working best for you by measuring your response, whether that’s by using a 24-hour recorded information line with a separate extension for each. And by the way, you can repeat the message, you don’t want to keep recording the message over again. You just copy the message from one extension to another, but you use a different extension just for tracking purposes. Or of course, you can record the message if you want to specifically address how they got there, and say “Hey thanks for coming, thanks for inquiring about my ad on Craigslist about refinishing your basement. We’ve got some special reports available if you’re thinking about doing it yourself. Or if you’d like, I’d be happy to give you a bid on what it would be for us to do and kind of talk to you about some of the challenges. I’ll be more happy to come out and give you a bid, and tell you some of the challenges that you’re going to have with doing your basement or anything tricky that you’d probably run into.” Then you go ahead and set up your way for them to contact you, and the call to action, and everything else. So that’s kind of what to post.
Any type of marketing where you can market your business, whether it’s a request for free report, or your service, or a free audio CD about “How to sell your house quickly by doing some minor repairs to it ahead of time.” Then those are the types of things you want to post. How frequently should you post? I’m going to tell you that you should go read the Craigslist guidelines, to find out the frequency is they are currently allowing you to post. Sometimes it changes. But then I would probably focus on letting my post up until it has left the first page. Or, if it has been on the first page for a week or two, I might consider taking down the old one and putting up a new one. So part of it’s going to depend on how quickly the categories that you’re posting in are moving. If you’re posting an ad, and there’s lot of other people posting in that category, when your ad first appears, it’s going to appear at the top and every time someone else post above you, it moves down one slot until it finally gets to bottom of the page, and falls off the bottom of the page and goes onto page two. Page two is going to get significantly less views than page one. In fact posts that are halfway down, or all the way near the bottom of the page, are going to get significantly less views than posts on the top of the page. So posting frequency actually matters. You should get a boost in response, a boost in number of people viewing your Craigslist ad, when you first put it on, and for the next period of time when it’s still really close to the top. The longer it’s been on there and moves down the page, the less people are going to be viewing it. So that should answer about posting frequency, but follow their guidelines. Don’t abuse the guidelines on Craigslist. You’ll get banned from being on there. They’ll be flagging your listings and you’ll get calls from people complaining that you’re taking advantage of the system. Most ads on Craigslist, by the way, are completely free. So there are only a couple of sections on there where they’re asking people to pay at this point.
In some categories you can use links to your website on Craigslist. I’m not a fan of doing that for the search engine bonus, but if you’re trying to lead people to more information, you can use that. That’s kind of a two-step marketing tool to go to your website. That’s a possibility too. You can also use people just to send you an email back, and then you can reply to them with additional information. I would probably lean toward doing a telephone number, a website that leads additional information, and then also an email address on there, and test to see which one gets you the highest response. It depends on what you’re offering as to what’s going to get you the best response on there. And Craigslist is big enough than it’s worth testing on, so I definitely recommend that.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn about how to market your handyman business using low and no cost strategies like CraigsList? I recommend “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
