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”.
Alright let’s talk about classified ad websites and how you might use them to better market your handyman business. We’re kind of going to go through some of the other ones here. But most of classified ad websites, when you kind of hear that term out on the internet, most of them, except for the top three, are going to generate very little or no traffic to you whatsoever. So I wouldn’t waste my time, and I’m going to tell you what three are the top three here in the moment, but I wouldn’t bother with any of the other ones, just focus on the top three. Some local ones may be able to provide you with some good link bonuses. For example, I’ve heard some success lately of people going to their local newspaper website, and one of new article is posted in the morning, they go on there and they comment on the article about the local news, about something going on in the community. And a lot of times, they’ll post there, their name and their business name, or their website address and their business name, as part of just them commenting on it. And a lot of the local newspaper websites, and local television websites as well, will allow the complete follow links and things that are going to give you a good link bonus, because a lot of these sites are relatively popular. They’ve got a lot of great content that they have coming out, and they do allow follow links on there, so it’s something to look at. But those aren’t really the classified ad websites. But some of them even have classified ad sections on them, which is why I listed them here.
Alright, so here are the biggest three classified ad websites. And what I wanted to do is show you a graph of the relative traffic of the three of them. All the other classified ad websites that I’m aware of have super-insignificant traffic compared to these three. And you could see that the first one is, by a large margin, the biggest one. And it’s not even close. So the two at the bottom – the orange one is a website that’s owned by eBay, Kajiji, and I’ll talk to you about that in a minute. The green one at the very bottom is Backpage, that’s the smallest of the three. The second-biggest one is Kajiji, which is orange on there, just a little bit above Backpage. But then the one that’s really big, and has by far the largest amount of traffic, on a scale of like, three times or four times the amount of traffic, is Craigslist. And so you’re going to want to kind of prioritize. If you’re only going to post ads for your service or product on one website, which one would it be? Craigslist. So want to go and focus on that.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Use “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” to learn how to effectively market your handyman business using free and low cost online classified ad websites.
Alright, the first type of media I’m going to talk about is one of these standards that we have when we have two-step marketing. The two standards usually are, when we have a two-step marketing plan, is you have the first step which is something where you can’t get your whole marketing message out, for instance classified ads. And then we have, from the classified ad people can go to the 24-hour recorded information line, or the second one we talk about a lot is websites. And we talked a lot about websites earlier in the webinar. But right now, we’re going to talk about the 24-hour recorded information line. And what this really is, it’s basically a basically a phone system you purchase. It’s not hardware, although you can do hardware, but what I’m going to recommend is you actually subscribe to a service. You pay a monthly fee and a lot of times you pay a permanent fee, and basically it’s a phone system that you have a telephone number for. You use different extensions in your marketing with that same telephone number, in order to track which calls are coming in from which marketing. So it allows you to save money on your marketing, and usually the savings you can have, by finding out what’s working for you and what’s not working for you, is going to be more significant than the cost of the phone system altogether. Basically, you use that phone system in order to track which marketing is working best. You can also use it to give people information.
What is great about this system is its effectiveness. Imagine for a minute that you had the perfect salesperson. Perfect salesperson, he works, she works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and that they give the exact perfect presentation you want them to give every single time someone calls. And they’re willing to do it no matter what time of day anyone calls, day or night, and they can deal with more than one person at a time, if you have five people all coming at the same time and inquire. They can give the exact same presentation, one-on-one to each one of them. That’s what a 24-hour recorded information line is. Somebody wants information about what you can do for them, as far as refinishing their basement. And you normally have a five-minute schpeil about how you look at these different things, you handle these certain things, and you deal with all these different issues in different ways. Well guess what? If you sat down and wrote out what exactly you wanted to say, maybe you can make bullet points, and you call up and you record your perfect presentation on your 24-hour recorded information line, that thing is set to go. Now, anytime someone calls in on any marketing that you have set up, where you want to have them talk about basement remodeling, or basement finishing, or whatever it is that you want to do, they can listen to that five-minute message. And then at the end of the message, you tell them, “So if you want more information, go ahead and press zero now.” Or you could say, “Leave your name after the tone and we will have someone to get back to you as soon as we can.” Either way, you could have the zero then transfer live, directly to your cell phone, or directly to your office phone, or directly to your cell and office phone simultaneously. It’ll ring on both so if you’re at home, you can have it ring there, you can have a ring in your office, you could have it ring to your mobile phone, you could have it ring to two or three different salespeople if you’ve got a sales staff. It is an extremely powerful, flexible tool, if you get a 24-hour recorded information line, and they’re dirt-cheap. I don’t remember exactly what I pay. I have one of the top-end plans, and I’m pretty sure they’re like $25 per month, to $20 per month, or something like that. You get a certain number of minutes with that, and if you go over the minutes, I don’t know, it’s like $.05 or $.06 per minute, or something ridiculously low. But it is a really great system for you to use in your business, and highly recommend it.
So, this is often – I’ll kind of run through the list here, I kind of told you what it is. It could be its own one step, but it’s usually used as a common second step. So you can actually give at the telephone number directly, and then you can have your telephone number just available for people to call in, and use that directly as one step. But a lot of times, you’re going to use it as the second step when you have a two-step marketing piece out, like classified ad with this telephone number attached and an extension. How to get you it done? If you want to know what particular telephone system I’m currently using, definitely go to LearnToBeRich.com, and again on the right-hand side there’s a downloads link where you can go to LearnToBeRich.com/downloads, and I will have a special report up there about my 24-hour recorded information line. And I believe I get the ability to offer – basically they encourage people to refer, just like I would encourage handyman proprietors to encourage people to refer, they allow me to refer people and give them a discounted rate. So I will give you a special code if you go to that website, download that report to get a discounted rate. And I may even get, like a couple of bucks if you sign up, or something like that. I’m not sure exactly what the payment is, but go ahead and go there and I’ll tell you about the one I’m using, and you can go ahead and decide if they’re for you.
Highly scalable, you can have multiple people calling in at the same time. You can have it calling out on multiple lines at the same time, if someone’s trying to reach you. Like I told you, you can spread it out to your mobile phone, or your home phone, or your office phone, or all three at the same time. Personally, I’ll tell you one way that I use it. One of the things we do, we put out marketing in order to find people that are interested in selling their house, because I invest in real estate as well, and then when someone calls in on that, they don’t actually call me. It calls my acquisitions manager, who actually buys houses for me. It’ll call simultaneously, and I can have it call multiple numbers for each of us. So that if he’s on the phone with someone else, or he’s already given a presentation, I can also take those calls. But he can primarily be the one taking those calls as well. And so you can have it set up for multiple salespeople, all on this one phone system. If you have a staff person in your office that helps you with scheduling appointments, or scheduling sales, you can temporarily set it up to go there. And the one that I use right now also will do a call announcement. It’ll say, “You have an incoming call from Suzie (and she actually will put her name there). To accept the call press one, to not accept the call press two.” So you could literally have it go to a part-time assistant, who’s working out of their house, even if they’ve got kids and family, answering the phone. Because then they’ll know, just press two if they can’t answer it and they’ll go to voicemail. They can answer it though, if they are they are working they can take the call, press one. And they’ll be connected live as if they’re in your office. It’s a really great system, and highly scalable. I highly encourage people to get them. Because you’ll save more than the cost of the telephone line, just in improvement in marking and just on knowing what’s working and what’s not working.
And imagine that you’re doing an ad in the newspaper, and you really weren’t sure how many calls you were getting from it, or how many inquiries you were getting from it. Well with this system, if you gave a specific extension on the classified ad or display ad in the newspaper, you could know and say, “Look, I get three calls from this. And now I know exactly who the calls are, who they were.” Because it’ll give you, like a reverse caller I.D. You can figure that all out, and do your little report, and determine whether or not that particular ad was effective. And you could save yourself hundreds of dollars in running an ad, just by using this little test here for a month or two. So highly effective, really good to use. Not many concerns on it, some people also use it – they have some really great abilities to do additional things. For instance, one of things is voice broadcast, so just be careful when you’re doing that. I’m going to talk about voice broadcast here in a few minutes. So that is 24-hour recorded information line.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” talks about how to most effectively use a 24 hour recorded information line to save yourself money on marketing your handyman business and also for leveraging your best sales presentation to get the most clients as quickly as possible.
Let me talk a little bit about lazy versus poor marketing methods for your handyman business. I’ve used this concept a lot when I talk to people about marketing, because it’s important to realize that there are a lot of marketing methods out there that cost no money, but they cost an investment in time. And then there are methods out there that cost some money, they’re highly scalable, because you can spend more money and have an increase in response without a significant increase in time. So I talk about “lazy” meaning more time than money, and I talk about “poor” meaning more time than money. I’m sorry, “lazy” means more money than time and “poor” means you have more time than money. With lazy, you’re willing to spend money in or the half prospects come to you. With poor, you’re willing to invest time to stimulate business.
So what tends to happen is, people who are just getting started in a business don’t have a cash-flow going on – tend to start off with a lot of the poor methods, because they’ve got a lot of time available. And then as they start having some cash-flow, and they reinvest their cash-flow back into growing their business and setting up automated marketing systems, they tend to move toward the lazy method. Such that they have enough methods going, where they do something each month, and lot of times it’s their newsletter and working with their core group of prospects in their in-house database, and then over time that actually generates referrals and direct business, and they could focus on that. So let’s kind of move ahead now that we know what the definitions are of those, because I’ll be discussing that when we talk about a variety of marketing methods as well.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Interested in learning about the best lazy marketing methods of handyman business owner? Or, perhaps you are interested in using the best poor marketing methods because you have more time to invest than money right now. Either way, check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information and to learn the best strategies to use for both.
