Alright, pay-per-impression. With pay-per-click, remember you’re paying every time someone clicks on an ad and actually comes to your website. With pay-per-impression, you’re paying a certain amount of money per a certain number of times your ad is shown on the website. With pay-per-click, you can have your ad shown a very large number of times and if no one clicks on it, you don’t pay anything. And so these pay-per-click companies wants you to have very effective ads that get people to click on them. With pay-per-impression, it doesn’t matter. They can have people viewing the page hundreds of times, never even actually seeing your ad, but since it was impressed on the page it actually showed up there and there’s a possibility they could have seen it, then you’re paying a certain amount of money for that. And that’s what pay-per-impression is.
It’s almost always two-step because you’re hardly ever to get your entire marketing message out in that one ad. It can be done on some sites like Facebook. It’s not nearly as popular as it was a decade ago. A decade ago, that was actually the dominance type of internet advertising. You’d pay a certain amount of money for a thousand page views. And that was the primary marketing method until Overture and Google came along and started doing more of a pay-per-click model, and that has definitely caught on and has been much more embraced by the internet marketing community, because they’re paying for a performance-type activity. And in fact there is another one, which is a pay-per-action. You’ll probably have a hard time getting something to work for your handyman business, but pay-per-action is you’re willing to pay $10 if someone comes to your website and requests information about a home remodel or something like that. And there are business models out there where they do that. I’m not aware of any specifically for handyman but if you search hard enough, you may be able to find one. And that’s a different model altogether, not pay-per-impression, not pay-per-click, it’s called pay-per-action, or it’s also called pay-per-acquisition.
So basically pay-per-impression I described what it is, usually two-step. Facebook is the one of the places that I know of that still does it. Cost to get it done – from what I understand, it’s a competitive bidding process but go ahead and see what they’re offering for prices. I don’t have a good feel for pay-per-impression anymore. I know that when we were running websites 10 years ago, I kind of got a feel for those numbers but it’s relatively rare now, so I don’t have a good feel for numbers. I think of the time 10 years ago, people are paying like $17 per thousand impressions to be on our websites. That’s kind of a number that sticks in my head, but for all I know, now it could be $3 per thousand, it could be $50 per thousand, I really don’t have a feel.
Scalability, not very scalable and very few people are offering it anymore than I’m aware of. And even if they were offering it, I don’t think that it’s a good place to compete in.
As far as effectiveness goes, it’s not effective which is one of the reasons why they went to the other model. It would probably much more effective for you to just pay every time someone clicks, rather that have your ad impressed and building brand on that site, which I do not recommend, by the way. Brand building should be a by-product of doing direct response marketing. You should be putting out your ads, not ever to build brand, but put out your ads in order to get someone to respond and request either information, quotes, sign-up for your service, whatever it is, some type of direct response and not to just say “here’s my business name, remember, remember, remember it.” You’re not trying to do brand building with your marketing. So that’s pay-per-impression.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. To learn more about finding the best internet marketing strategies tailored to your handyman business, I highly recommend “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
So let’s talk about a couple of different places I recommend for outsourcing. These are the three big ones. And the first one I recommend is oDesk. ODesk.com, you go there, you register for an account, you can post up whatever you want to outsource. Just be descriptive about what it is you want to outsource. People are going to apply and bid to do your job. You can do an hourly type of a bid project, you can also do a fixed rate. So you could either say, “I’m willing to have you write articles for me on an hourly basis,” and I would recommend that, by the way. But you can have them write articles for you on an hourly basis, or you could say, “I want someone to bid on writing 10 articles between 300 and 500 words that are going to be put on my website. Here are the topics that I’m interested in having you write about. Go ahead and bid on that.” And people will come back and bid. They’ll say, “I’ll charge you $40 to do that,” or, “I’ll charge you $50 dollars,” or, “I’ll charge you $100 to do that.” Some people will say “I’ll charge you $20 dollars to do that.” Some people will say, “I’ll charge you $10 to do that.” What you need to do after that is, using their interface, you go through and you ask them some clarifying questions to make sure they understand the assignment. Make sure that they are going to provide good quality, look at some of the reviews other people have given them, look at their experience records, see how long it would take them to return the product back to you. And then you interview them and then you hire them, and what oDesk does is oDesk acts as a middle-man. And you basically say, “Here’s the project. You do the project and once you deliver me the work, I’ll confirm it’s done, I’ll pay oDesk.” ODesk then pays the worker and they actually do all the tax forms and everything for you, so you don’t have to worry about all that stuff, and it’s a really good system.
Guru.com and Elance.com are very similar types of systems to oDesk. I personally just prefer oDesk, so I would definitely recommend you check out those guys and have them do it. You’re getting bids internationally, so there are people in India, in the Philippines, in Singapore, in the United States, in Mexico, in Canada, in Europe. Places all over the place are coming in and bidding on your jobs. So that’s what’s nice about these outsourcing things, is that you get to see an international bidding war. And, of course, you can say, “I only want people from the United States,” or, “I only want people from Canada,” or, “I only want people from India,” or wherever it is. Or, “I only want people that have passed the English proficiency test with 5 or above,” or, “I only want people that know how to do WordPress.” You can set all this criteria on some of these job sites so that you get very specific people. And that’s one of the reasons why I love outsourcing through them. It automatically pre-screens them; it gives me some feedback on interactions they’ve had with other people on the system. It’s a really good resource for you to use when you’re doing your outsourcing. So I highly recommend that you get excited, and you go out there and you do outsourcing of anything that you don’t want to do, anything that you’re not going to do well, and just get it done, especially things that are below your dollar-per-hour number.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to find more ways to maximize your time and energy to grow your handyman business? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Another thing I’m really pro about is outsourcing and delegating. Whenever possible I think it’s important to leverage your time. So here are some ideas of things you possibly could outsource. And if you’re into these things and you want to do them yourself, that’s absolutely fine; but I know that there are a lot of business owners who are good a couple of key things and they want to outsource the rest, because they don’t like it or they don’t want to do it or it’s not going to get done unless they do outsource it. So anything that you don’t like to do, outsource it so that it will get done. So if you are not going to do your newsletter and you know that you should do your newsletter, you can outsource just about every possible thing in your newsletter that we discussed today so that it will get done for you. And it can be cost effective. You can hire a high school kid to help you compile your list. You can have them set up your database. You can have them write it, format it, upload it to the U.S. Postal Service click-to-mail. You could do all that stuff and have it get done, and just outsource it, and it is worthwhile to do the outsourcing. I’m telling you now, trust me on this one.
Another thing you can do: anything that you are not good at. So if it would take you six hours in order to set up your database, or if it would take you two days to set up your website, maybe it’s a good idea for you to outsource setting up your website. If it would take you three hours in order to write an article, a one-page article when someone else could do it in an hour or two, and write it better than you can – and I’m not trying to poke fun at anybody – but they could do a better job just because they like doing that, they’re used to writing, they write professionally or they write a lot, and they’re much better at it. If you could pay someone $10, $20, $30 in order to do that for you instead of you taking all the time, six hours or whatever it’s going to take in order to write the article because you’re just not good at it and you never will be good at it because you don’t have a desire, you really don’t want to do that. Well, hire someone else so that it will be done well.
What about any marketing system that can be put in place and automated? For instance, putting ads up online for you. Couldn’t you hire somebody and outsource that? Absolutely. You don’t need to go to spend time doing two or three a week, or once a week, or five a day or whatever number you’re doing. Sure you can have some go and do that if it’s not something you want to do. So go ahead and outsource that, it’s so cheap to outsource these days. I’m going to show you some websites here where you can go and outsource and that’s going to end this particular call.
But remember what you’re minimum dollar per hour is. At the beginning of the webinar we talked about that magic number, the dollar amount that you had to earn in order to achieve your goal. And realize, if you’re actually doing things that you could hire someone to do that thing for at a lower dollar per hour, you’re making a mistake. You want to get to the point where you have enough work that you can start raising that number. You don’t want to do things that are lower than that number, because it’s only going to cause you problems, it’s only going to take up time where you could be earning higher dollar amounts. So, if you could otherwise hire someone at $5 or $10 per hour to do something for you, and your magic number is $30 or $40 or $50 per hour, well guess what? You need to outsource that $5- or $10-per-hour thing and let them do what they’re good at, and you do what you’re good at, and you earn the higher dollar-per-hour amount and focus on doing tasks that are above your threshold, not below your threshold.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn how to build a virtual team to maximize your time and get the most value for your handyman business? I highly recommend “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Let’s talk about something very briefly that I could probably teach a whole day seminar just on, and that is ways to get paid for lead generation. Now I’m going to give you the top three ways of getting paid for lead generation, and I’ll talk to you very briefly about how to implement these strategies. But if you can reduce the costs of your lead generation, or completely eliminate it, or even make a profit when you’re doing lead generation, it becomes much more fun and your business grows that much faster. Because if you’re willing to spend, let’s call it $500 per month, on marketing and now you’re able to get $2,000 per month of marketing because you’re really recouping $1,500 per month of your marketing expense so that you really net $500 out, that’s a much different model than if you only have $500 out and you have no recouping of your marketing costs. So, you could be four times as effective, in that example, if you went and did that. So let’s talk about some different ways to get paid.
We talked a lot about Google Adsense during this webinar. Google Adsense is the way for you to get paid when you place ads on your website and people end up clicking on them. It’s like your way of sharing in on what Google collects on pay-per-click advertising that it sells through its Google Adwords program. So you have your ads up on your website and someone clicks on those ads. Google may pay you $.50, $1, whatever it is, in order to have those ads show up on your site when someone clicks on them. That is a way that you can make money. I have made significant amounts of money with Google Adsense on my websites. And you’re going to go out there and you’re going to find stuff on the Internet, people complaining they’re only making a couple of dollars a day with Google Adsense. There’s people that are going to tell you that putting their ads on your website is a bad idea, you’re not going to make any money with it, it’s a waste of time, it’s going to ruin your credibility, and all sorts of stuff like that, and I beg to differ. I have been there, I have actually made significant money with Adsense, six figures in multiple businesses. So just realize that you want to focus on making lead generation a part of your business, but if you decide you want to make some money while you’re doing lead generation, I encourage you to look at that as a model. And it may not be the best idea to put Google Adsense on your main website, but you can definitely create lead generation websites that are almost like a mini business inside of a business, where you’re generating leads and you’re just wholesaling them to yourself. But those lead generation websites have Adsense on them, where you’re generating revenue from the lead generation websites to compensate you for the effort and money and time you’re putting in to get people to those lead generation sites. Then any leads you generate, that’s great, it’s all bonus that goes back into your main business and you make money from that as well. So, that’s one way to do getting paid for lead generation.
The second way is selling information products as lead generation tools. So, if you go creating information products where you’re teaching somebody the five ways in order to sell your house for $10,000 more by doing some basic fix-up things, couldn’t you sell that product for $10, $15, $20, make an audio CD and sell it for $15? Wouldn’t someone by willing to pay at least $20 for a CD that can teach them how to make $10,000 more when they’re selling their home? Sure, and so if you walk through the house and you actually give them really good information about things they need to actually do in their house, in order to make their house sell for more money or maybe sell faster, then they’ll be happy to pay the $20. And then a certain percentage of those people are not going to want to do it all themselves, and if you have a couple of casual calls to action in there about how they can contact you and you’ll do it all for them, especially if you offer some type of creative financing plan where you get paid maybe a certain amount up-front or nothing up-front or only when they actually sell the house, and you put a mechanics lien on there (whatever you do to protect yourself), but that it another way to actually increase risk-reversal and make it an irresistible offer to them by doing that. And could you sell that information product as a lead generation tool and build up a nice revenue stream just be selling those, to cover the cost of any of your marketing? Absolutely.
And so maybe you put up that little tiny classified ad in the Thrifty Nickel or American Classifieds or Penny Saver, or whatever your throw-away weekly newspaper is. Go ahead and do that, maybe your cost for your ad is $7 per week, and you end up selling a couple of CDs a month from that. It more than covers the cost in order to do that lead generation for you, and gets you prospects and starts building up that for you. And you can then take the money and reinvest it in some other marketing. But you can do that several times with a variety of products and keep moving forward with that too. So that’s another way to get paid for lead generation. It’s another one I’ve used, not nearly to the scale that I’ve used Google Adsense, but I’ve definitely used it productively in order to generate leads and keep my costs down, and actually make some money.
Alright, so recommended products and services to your list: Once you have that nice big list of 100, 200, 500, 1,000 people on there of people that know, like, and trust you, occasionally from time to time you’re going to come across a product or service that you really think is of great value, and that you would otherwise recommend to people without compensation. Now if they happen to have the ability for you to get compensated for recommending that, then why not sign up for their affiliate program or their referral program and also recommend that product or service to your list? For example, we have an affiliate program. If somebody were to sign up for our affiliate program, I think we pay out 40% of the sale to the person that referred the person. So if you we have a $100 course – for instance, if you have come across guys that are real estate investors, this applies directly to you as a handyman. You come across people that are real estate investors, and they want information about how to go and market to buy houses, how to sell houses, to rent them more efficiently, how to raise money for deals, the creative finance, all of those types of things. If you have real estate investors and real estate investors are on your list, you could sign up for our affiliate program. And then in your newsletter, you could just mention that you just listened to a course about marketing your business, it was a really great course, and this guy has some information for real estate investors on how to raise money and do deals. And you could put a link in there with your affiliate code, it credits to your account whenever any of those real estate investors come through your link to our site and they end up buying a course.
Now, if we’re selling a $100 course and you make $40 by referring someone to a course that’s really good quality, that you would buy yourself, that you would recommend to your friends, then couldn’t you use that money in order to reinvest in your business and do additional lead generation? Absolutely. And so that’s a great way to for you to make money doing lead generation as well. You basically take the time to go build you list of people in your local market, like real estate investors or real estate agents, or even first-time home buyers, or things like that. You can go build your list and then recommend things that you think are good quality for them, using affiliate programs and referral links. Just send them back to your website, you have a description of what’s included and on your website is a link leading from your site, using your affiliate code, to another website where if they make a purchase, and it’s totally up to them whether they make a purchase, but if they do then you can get paid for referring them through you.
So those are three ways to do lead generation, and I’m a big believer in trying to make money up-front on lead generation, and then really make your profit on the back end once you’ve built your list up. So, that is a huge part of my business model. It has been for many years, and I’ve done it several times with relatively big numbers in businesses where I was doing lead generation. So, I strongly recommend it.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn exactly how to generate leads and make money for your handyman business at the same time? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright, let’s talk about some advanced concepts while we end up the day. One thing I want to discuss with you is the importance of committing to lifelong learning in your marketing of your handyman business. Okay, this should not be the only marketing information you buy and use. I encourage you to go and buy other marketing information by other guys selling products and services specifically for the handyman industry, but also other industries that you may not have though of. So if you could go read a book on marketing of generalized service business, or you want to go and read another marketing book on marketing of another, unrelated product or service, you may be reading that and being like, “Whoa, this guy’s talking about how to go market this particular service this way, but I can really apply that to my business by tweaking this one thing a little differently.” And now, all of a sudden, you have borrowed something creatively from another industry that many people in your industry have not used. That’s one of the advantages I think I have when I look at so many other businesses, is because I’ve had experience doing a relatively large number of businesses with an emphasis on a lot of online marketing, and very low-cost or more profitable lead generation strategies, but now I can apply that to a large number of businesses. A lot of people, when I’ve talked to them about how to actually make money doing lead generation, they’re totally surprised. They’re like “That doesn’t make sense. You know, you spend money to generate leads. How are you actually making money?” And then I’ll them. And actually, I’m going to tell you that here next. But basically, those strategies can be applied and you should be looking for opportunities to do that, as well, yourself.
So go ahead and commit to lifelong learning, go to your library and pick up some marketing books, go buy some other marketing books, some marketing courses, learn about additional copyrighting skills, and there’s only so much I can cover in one full-day course on this. I can’t cover, in detail, copyrighting. I can’t teach you to write compelling sales copy in one day. But you should go and learn stuff like that. You should learn and commit to learning about risk reversal strategies and using testimonials more effectively. There are lots of things you can go and learn about in detail and you should commit to doing that.
You should commit to a concept of constant and never-ending improvement. Tony Robbins talks about this concept in a lot of his books, but you should really decide right now that you’re constantly going to be improving, and that the marketing results you’re getting right now are not good enough, and that you want to improve on those through testing. Whether it’s split-testing headlines, or sub-headlines, or offers, or calls to action, or whatever it is that you’re trying to do, focus on improving your marketing all the time. And not just your marketing, focus on improving yourself. All those categories of goals that we talked about at the beginning. Focus on improving your income, your prospecting, your sales conversion in order to get more clients, your systems, your staff. Focus on improving yourself. All those different areas need to be improved all the time, and make sure you invest in your own education. And don’t go and just listen to this and not implement anything. Go take something and implement it right now. If you’re looking for something for going to implement right now, try three marketing methods for you to go implement. Go try some of the three lazy marketing methods to go implement. Do direct mail, go set up your newsletter database, go do ads on Craigslist, go do some marketing in order to market your website by writing articles, go hire someone to write articles for you.
Some of these ideas are things that are easy to implement, but they’re also easy to forget and not to do. Go ahead and make your list right now, and go ahead and implement some of those things so that you can actually take what you’ve learned here and apply it to your business so that you have some benefit from it. I don´t want to see you purchase just this particular audio program, video program or whatever it’s you’re listening on, and actually not implement what you’ve learned. So go ahead and take the opportunity to go make your short list now, and commit to doing those before tonight. Maybe you want to do it tonight before you go to bed. Go ahead and implement a couple of those things or put things in motion to do that. And we’re going to talk here about outsourcing, maybe you want to go and put up an ad in order to outsource that. Go ahead and do whatever you need to do in order to actually implement something and get something done today.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to find more tips for implementing great ideas to improve your handyman business? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
The last thing we’ll talk about with niches for your handyman business is this concept of geographical expansion. And the best way for me to explain is, let’s say you had started a restaurant on the south side of your city and it sold fast food burgers, and you decided you wanted to expand your business. Well, one way to expand your business would be to open up a very similar fast food burger place on the north side of town. So you can have a competing business in another part of your town, where you may be taking away a slight amount of your own business but you’re not cannibalizing your business enough that it wouldn’t be profitable for you to start the business.
Well, you could do similar things with geographical areas where it’s close cities. For instance, in my local area we’ve got Fort Collins, which is one of the major cities around here, we’ve got Loveland, we’ve got Greeley. And so a lot of those cities are very close and you could provide a service in all of them within a very short drive. You can go and market there that you are a Fort Collins painting man specializing in helping people sell their property in Fort Collins. But then you can also open up a “competing” business in the next city over, where you’re offering the same service, you’re just focusing on marketing in that particular city. So your ad in the Loveland paper, your ad in the Fort Collins paper, may say you focus on this, you’re part of the Loveland Chamber of Commerce, you’re part of the Fort Collins Chamber of Commerce. And depending on where you’re marketing, you slightly alter your marketing message almost as if you have two different businesses in each one of those cities, although you’re really just tailoring your marketing and geographically expanding out into new market niches. And how far out you want to go is totally up to you. So just think about that when you’re thinking about expanding, that one of the ways you can expand your marketing is by targeting new niches. And whether that’s online, on sites like Backpage or Craigslist or Kijiji, or whether it’s through various newspapers, or direct mail marketing, or whatever it is that you’re doing, just realize that geographical expansion is often one of the most commonly overlooked, but easiest ones to implement.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn how to geographically expand your marketing base to generate more business for your handyman business? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
