If you are a handyman business owner and you are looking to take advantage of Pareto’s principle (often referred to as the 80/20 rule or the law of the vital few), you might want to know the top 4 marketing tips for effectively promoting your handyman business. By focusing on the small, but important, marketing concepts that are going to give you the biggest result for the time and money invested you can gain significant ground and then double back later to add additional streams of prospects for your business.
Here are the 4 top marketing strategies that I recommend to consulting clients that will have the biggest impact:
First, articles and content for your website. Writing unique, fresh content for your website is what is going to attract potential prospects and significantly improve your chances of having pages show up in organic search engine results. When you look at the amount of traffic you can get from taking the time to write a series of articles for your handyman business and compare that to paying for traffic from a pay per click search engine, the true value of article marketing becomes apparent.
Second, place up classified ads for your service on CraigsList. With CraigsList getting over 8 million unique visitors to its website every month, why not go to where the traffic is already? Place up an ad with an irresistible offer and a strong call to action on CraigsList and, following their terms of service, keep the ad posted toward the top of the category that best suits the nature of your ad. Doing this will not produce a flood of inquiries, but should generate a slow, steady stream over the month.
Third, I am a huge fan of direct mail and recommend that you start using it in your handyman business. If you don’t know where to start with direct mail, consider using direct mail with your existing client base. If you don’t have an existing client base, consider using direct mail to target people that are centers of influence like real estate agents to find home owners that need work done and need a handyman recommendation.
Fourth, for an instant influx of business at an extremely low cost, try using flyers. Whether you use flyers to target real estate agents, real estate investors or offer an irresistible offer with a very powerful call to action door to door to homeowners, you will find the there are few things with a faster response time than flyers to market your handyman business.
So, to jump start your marketing for your handyman business, try all four of these. Of course, there are lots of other marketing strategies you should employ as well, but these four are the ones I would personally suggest you start with.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more great handyman marketing tips.
There are 3 factors that make up your total yearly revenue in your handyman business. Let’s take a look at all three and then go over a couple ways to improve each one.
The first factor that affects your total income is the number of clients that you provide your handyman service to during the year. To increase the number of clients that you can provide your core service to you might do more marketing or work on improving your marketing or both. Another way to increase the number of clients that you work with is to improve your ability to convert prospects to clients. Finally the last way to increase the number of clients is to focus on stimulating and asking for more referrals.
The second factor that affects your total income as a handyman business owner is the transaction value per client. If you direct your marketing toward prospects that are worth more money per transaction like kitchen remodels versus “honey do” work, you can easily and significantly increase the transaction size per client and improve your overall revenue. A commonly overlooked method of improving your transaction size per client is to consider raising your rates. Often handyman business owners that meet with me for consulting need help working on the inner game or justification in their mind for raising their prices. Usually you can overcome that challenge by using more marketing to increase demand for you service enough to raise your price without the fear of losing clients.
The third factor that affects your total yearly income as a handyman is to increase the number of transactions per client per year. To accomplish this, we must presume that you are already properly caring for and nurturing your existing client base. You must be doing work that is worthy of both repeat business and referrals. Having said that, there are things we can do to increase the number of transactions per year per client including systematic follow up to your “in house” database like with a newsletter. It also helps to be able to properly diagnose and prescribe additional work for clients that are you doing work for.
In conclusion, the three factors that determine your total yearly revenue in your handyman business are: number of clients, transaction value per client and number of transactions per client. Increase one or all three. Since they are factors, any improvement in one (or more) multiplies out to have a compound effect on your total revenue.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” to learn more.
Alright, let’s talk about cooperative marketing.
An example of the cooperative marketing is the free flyer method and I’ll explain to you kind of what it’s you need a feel for it. Let’s say you find three other business owners that are in non-competing businesses, but are also doing marketing and they want to get the word out about their business and their name. And you go to them and you say, “Look, what I’d like to do is I’d like to do a co-op marketing campaign with you guys, where we all get together and we do four ads on one piece of marketing. And I’ll coordinate it all, and I’ll collect all the money from everyone, and I’ll make sure it all gets done.” And so what you decide to do is you get a single sheet of paper that you’re going to do like, let’s say, a flyer. And maybe you’re going to do door-to-door flyer marketing, where you’re actually going to pay someone walk door to door, and hand out a thousand or two thousand or five thousand of these. And so you get an eight-and-a-half piece of paper, and you have it sectioned off into four equal sections—top and bottom of one side, top and bottom of another side. And each person gets a quarter of it. When you do your payment, you’re going to divide the payment amount of the printing and the delivery—the door-to-door delivery—into thirds. And each of the other guys are going to pay a third of the marketing cost in order to do the co-op, and your share, instead of paying cash, is you’re the guy that’s going to coordinate and make sure that it gets done. It’s called the “free flyer” method because it’s free to you, you are actually coordinating it. And you are able to get out virtually an unlimited number of flyers, or unlimited number of marketing materials, basically for doing your organization.
And so basically, they pay a third of the printing cost each, and they pay a third of the distribution cost, whether that’s inserting into a newspaper, or doing a direct mail campaign, or doing door-to-door flyers. Any of those three things is one way to get it done. So you collect the third of the payment from each of them when they give their marketing; don’t do it after the fact, I’ve learned that lesson. But you want to go collect the third of it when they give you the marketing piece. And then you get it out for them, and show them the effect of it by doing calls and measuring it. And then, one of the things you can offer is you can offer to run the numbers through your 24-hour recorded information line and show them the response rate. And then you can also see which one of the ads was most effective, and you can have some of that data and use it to improve your ads as well.
So are free flyers usually one-step or two-step marketing? Usually they are two-step, except in cases where you can get your full marketing message out in whatever one-fourth of marketing is, or the co-op is. So a lot of times they end up being two steps—the headline, a couple of bullet points, and then the call the action where they can request for additional information via at your website or your telephone. So how do you get it done? Well, you’re the one that’s coordinating it, so you’d want to go find three business owners who want to advertise. And then you want to talk to them about getting their marketing, how you’re going to do the distribution; whether it’s going to be an insert in the newspaper, whether you’re going to do direct mail, whether you’re going to do door to door—those are usually the three that get done. And then you’re going to go coordinate it. You’re going to have figure out the cost for printing. By the way, if you’re doing an insert into the newspaper, a lot of times they’re going to include the cost of printing in what they quote you, because they want to do the printing and the insert at the same time (or very closely same time) in house. But if you’re going to do direct mail, you’ll probably want to the printing yourself or use the U.S. Postal Service click-to-mail feature. You can upload the flyer directly there, upload the addresses directly there and have it all printed and mailed out right from click-to-mail, so that’s a great way to do it. The only one you’re probably going to need to do printing on your own is door-to-door.
Cost to get it done: figure out the cost of printing, figure out the cost of distribution, whether it’s paying a guy $8 or $10 per hour in order to do door-to-door flyer delivery, or $8 or $10 per hundred, whatever way you want, you figure it out. Or if you’re going to do direct mail, or you’re going to have the newspaper charge you in order to have a flyer in there. I have heard some feedback from people saying that their particular newspaper doesn’t want to do cooperative inserts in the newspaper. They’ll do an insert from one person, but if you have more than a couple of businesses on there, they get concerned and don’t want to do that. They’d want to charge separate rates for it to do it, so just some feedback there. It depends on your paper, some smaller papers probably won’t have a problem, some larger papers may. So if you’re going to do newspaper inserts, just be concerned about that.
As far as scalability goes, it’s pre-scalable to a point. You could scale up until you’re doing a lot of door-to-door marketing. You can do a lot of newspaper inserts, and you can do it repeatedly with several businesses. So one month you could do it with three guys, the next month you could pick three different guys and do the same insert with three different people, and then alternate. And then the month after that they can do it again, and you’ll be in every month, which will be highly effective for you. Or if they all want to do it every month, you could do it that way too. So, just different ways to kind of do scalability. It’s pretty scalable, up to a point. I don’t know if it’s as scalable as some other things we’re going to do.
As far as effectiveness goes, a lot of it depends on your offer and how you’re targeting it. If a normal insert in the paper has worked well for you, getting it in free is going to be more effective, right? So you don’t have to worry about paying for any of the cost if everyone else is paying for it. Same idea if you’re doing door-to-door. If you know that door-to-door marketing flyers has worked well for you, then I would definitely try to test this one to see if you can do a lot more for no cost, just the coordination in, order to get your marketing out. You will see a slight drop in response typically, when you are doing one-fourth of a flyer versus doing a solo flyer. I just wanted to point that out too. So that’s cooperative marketing.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for using cooperative marketing to leverage your ad dollars and generate more clients for your handyman business? I highly recommend “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
I was recently asked by our new Sales Manager about tips for posting employment ads on CraigsList to hire a Sales Professional for our business. Having run a national real estate investing business that was constantly looking for real estate agents, mortgage brokers and other professionals to work with and having posted quite a few ads on CraigsList looking for those professionals, I thought I would share with you some of what my experience has been.
What about posting frequency?
First of all, to share with folks that are new to CraigsList and to remind those that are already familiar: it is extremely important to be listed near the top of the results page so you need to relist your ad as frequently as allowed by CraigsList’s terms of service.
What to include in the ad?
Next, here are some tips about what to post in the ad: first of all, having ads that have website addresses, in my experience, will tend to decrease your response rate. Exceptions abound with that generalization though as having a link to a large, publicly traded company could actually improve response rates. For most small business owners running ads to hire for a sales professional will likely be better served by running their ad with minimal information about the company name.
There was a time when I included my telephone number in employment ads, but I have since stopped doing that for a number of reasons including people calling without actually reading about the job and I’d spend time repeating what we included in the description. Removing my telephone number, actually increased response by email.
Once you get in touch via email, immediately try to get them on the phone (especially if they are going to be doing telephone sales). Build your relationship on the phone at that point.
How about the compensation?
Should you include how much the job pays? How much about the job compensation should you include? Well, here are some generalizations: for sales positions, if it includes a base salary (which our jobs typically do not), you will tend to increase response by including that. You may find that you get a larger number and a different type of person replying to those ads: someone looking for any job that has a salary and not serious sales professionals. If your sales job has some type of variable pay schedule like a commission only position, I would prefer being careful not to over-promise. Over-promising on pay will boost response, but at a huge cost in reputation and very likely a huge cost in keeping great people around long term.
What type of response might you expect?
In a mid-sized city (approximately 100K population like my city of Fort Collins) from posting a single ad in the sales section you might get one response each time you post the ad. Sometimes you won’t get any responses. In very rare cases you might get two responses. You will not be overwhelmed with responses posting an ad for that type of ad.
With a smaller response, we can and should really focus on really connecting with candidates that you’d actually want to work with to show them they are part of a small team that really is committed to helping them succeed.
Conclusion
To summarize, when posting ads for hiring a sales professional on CraigsList, I recommend shying toward the side of under-promising to keep a reasonable chance of keeping people after they inquire. I would not include a website address or a phone number in my ad for most cases. I’d be more likely to include a phone number than a website address though. However, I would want to get on the phone with a candidate that looks promising as soon as possible to start building a relationship. I’d also keep reminding myself to have patience… getting one or two responses per post is reasonable in most cases.
Until my next post,
James
I have some more great news for our affiliates: I just added two new links to your affiliate media section of your affiliate account that you can use to promote the newest recordings and course that we have scheduled for home inspection business owners.
If you login to your affiliate control panel (which you can find the link to that on the Learn To Be Rich Affiliate Program page) you will be able to click on the “Links & Tools” link. Using links from there will automatically include your affiliate code in the links so that you get credit for sales and can get paid.
Here’s a little more information about the two links we’ve added and how I’d personally use them and how you might use them as well.
New “How To Market Your Home Inspector” Link
First, we have a new link for the “How To Market Your Home Inspector” business webinar that we are holding live tonight. I expect this recording to be somewhere between and hour and two hours packed full of amazingly valuable information for home inspection business owners. After the live version tonight, we will post up the recorded version on the website and the downloadable recorded version is primarily what you will be promoting as an affiliate.
Here’s how I would market it… I’d use some traditional websites that would allow me to post an ad and market it as a free download. Realize that you won’t be paid a commission for the free download, but you will receive commissions on sales made if they download the free recording and then do decide to upgrade to the full paid course (the link I will talk about next). The nice thing about promoting the free download is that you will tend to get a better response offering the free download and the great information we share in the free download is a pretty compelling reason for many people to upgrade to the full 10 hour paid course.
New Link For “The World’s Greatest Home Inspector Marketing Course”
The second link that I’ve added to your affiliate control panel is the direct link to the sales page for “The World’s Greatest Home Inspector Marketing Course”. This is the link to use if you are planning to sell the full paid course directly (which I encourage you to do that as well).
For any direct sales of this course that you make you will earn a 40% commission. So, if the price remains at the currently set price of $197 you would earn a commission of $78.80.
Marketing Tips For Our Affiliates
First, while I would market both the free download and the paid course simultaneously, I would probably lean more toward the marketing of the free course because response tends to be better if you show them value first with the free download and then let our automatic follow up and the free presentation itself encourage the home inspector to upgrade to the full paid course.
Second, don’t forget that this is just ONE of many courses that we have. Add this to your daily marketing plan to cast a wider net of possible sales you can make.
Third, if you realize the true power of doing marketing yourself AND working with other affiliates to help them make sales of their own you’ll do far better financial than just focusing on sales yourself. Just like I can only promote the free download and paid course in my own local city on websites like CraigsList because they limit the number of ads one person can post, you can only post a very small handful of ads yourself on websites.
However, we do pay a commission on direct sales and also on sales that affiliates you directly refer to us make. So, if you make a direct sale of a course you earn a 40% commission on that sale. If you refer an affiliate using your referral link that you can get in the affiliate control panel and they make a sale they earn 40%, but you also earn 15% of the sale as well.
If you can with a committed effort to your marketing reasonably expect to make a single sale a week and earn $78.80 that’s great. But what if you decided to find 20 other affiliates to work with and help them make 1 sale per week each. They’d each earn $78.80 and you’d earn an additional $591 per week (15% of $197 times 20 sales). With 300 major US cities to market to, 20 people is just a fraction of how big you could grow your affiliate team.
I hope that helps, but if you need more help, please let me know.
Sincerely,
James
In anticipation of the first ever live recording of “The World’s Greatest Home Inspector Marketing Course” that I will be recording from Monday, March 29th, 2010 through Friday, April 2nd, 2010 (from 8 AM to 10 AM in the morning for each of those days), I created The World’s Greatest Home Inspector Marketing Course Fan
Page on FaceBook to share resources, tips and socialize with home inspectors interested in the course.
And, in addition to just creating the fan page, I also added a link to it to the webinar that we are doing tonight.
I hope to be putting up some additional resources to the fan page as we continue to promote and market the course and the number of owners of the course increases.
Sincerely,
James
