Learn To Be Rich » Handyman/Contractors

Pay-Per-Impression for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:56:51 +0000

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.

Recommended Outsourcing Providers for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:55:38 +0000

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.

Outsourcing and Delegating for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:53:02 +0000

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.

Three Ways To Get Paid For Lead Generation for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:52:12 +0000

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.

Commit To Lifelong Learning for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:51:36 +0000

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.

Geographic Expansion for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:47:39 +0000

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.

Multiple Niches for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:43:59 +0000

I talked a lot about this today and that is, you as a handyman business owner should use multiple niches. You can focus on serving a variety of different niches, you can niche up if you’re you used to just doing more Honeydew-type list stuff, you can niche up and offer a much wider range of services. You can niche down and offer very specific ones in there, break that down into different segments. You can also do related niches. An example I used on a call we did on Tuesday was as a handyman, you might not think that you do home inspections or things like for people buying new houses. Well, it may take you getting a slight test done or getting a license in your area in order to do that, check with your local laws if you need to be licensed, but then you can get licensed. Now you can offer that as an additional service, so it’s sort of like a related niche to your handyman niche, that you can offer as well.

So if you’re already targeting real estate agents in order to get houses prepped and ready for sale, another thing you can do is say, “Hey look real estate agents, you know I’ve been offering this service where I’ve been helping you get houses ready for sale. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but I also can help your buyers, once they’ve already negotiated the contract, to come in, have an inspection done with me, and I’ll give them a full report. And I will guarantee them that I will find more in repairs on the property than the cost of my thing.” Or, “I’ll reduce my fee by a certain amount,” or whatever it is that you want to do. You create a unique selling proposition to yourself, a unique, irresistible offer that they would use, and go ahead and do that. So it’s a great way for you to actually use your existing network if you want to go find related niches to go into.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Want to learn how multiple niches can help your handyman business generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.

Niches for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:42:15 +0000

You know, I realized a little earlier today that I probably should have started with niches a little bit earlier, but I’m going to close out strong and cover niches again. We’ve covered a lot of the topics related to niches as we’ve gone along, but I will go through and talk about some different niches you can focus on in your marketing.

So, why niche? Well, the first reason why you would want to focus on serving a particular niche, whether that’s real estate investors, or first-time home buyers, or real estate agents, or people looking to upgrade their kitchen, or people looking to upgrade their bathroom, or people looking to upgrade their flooring, I mean there’s all these different types of niches. But why would you want to go and do that? Well, when you market to a specific niche, first of all you can charge more. If you come out and you are the landlord-house-preparation specialist, you can often times charge more because you are specializing, you’re talking to that particular crowd, and you have a very particular, specific product you’re offering to them.

Number two is that you can get more effective results in your marketing by targeting specific niches. Any number of handymen can probably offer the same service you do, when you talk about preparing houses for rental. They can go in there and touch up paint, they can make sure all the appliances are working, do safety checks on things, coordinate other contractors that you may not be providing that service for. They can do all that if they decided to, or if somebody asked them to. But since you’re going in there and you’re packaging it together, you can then go target your particular marketing toward that group, and have a very particular package that you’re offering, so your results in that marketing of that specific package to that specific targeted niche, is going to be much more effective than just generalized, “I offer handyman services.” “Oh and do you do anything with rental properties?” “Oh yeah, I can do that.” No, you’re saying “I do that” upfront, and “this is what I can do for you and here’s how I package it.”

Now you can have more than one niche, which we’ll talk about here in a moment, but that could be one niche for you. Usually your offers are more compelling when marketing to that specific niche. So offering that particular package to a list of real estate investors is going to be much more compelling than a handyman just coming in and saying, “Hey look, I can do anything you need me to do. You let me know.” Versus someone that says, “Look, I’ve got this 15-point checklist I go through at every rental property, to get your property in shape at the lowest possible cost to you in the quickest possible time, for your tenant to be in there as soon as possible. So when do want me to actually go do it all? I’ll run through my checklists, I’ll get it done for you, it’s going to be a relatively hands-off, turn-key opportunity for you to get your property ready. You don’t have to worry about it. ” For a busy landlord, that is what they want to hear. So you need to kind of take that in mind and use that idea to expand out into additional niches. Create those types of products and opportunities in the areas you’re already servicing or the areas you want to move towards servicing.

The last benefit of why you should niche is that you get cheaper advertising rates in niche publications to smaller, more targeted groups. When you’re trying to advertise in a small, local real estate investor group publication, maybe it’s their newsletter to their in-house, do you think it’s going to be more expensive or less expensive than advertising in the general population newspaper to your entire area? Yeah, it’s going to be less expensive because they’re a small publication, but it’s a very highly-targeted niche of people that are much more likely to need that product or service from you. And if you combine that with a very specific offer to them then that becomes a highly powerful, very profitable and effective marketing model to use.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Want to learn how to leverage your marketing dollars to get the most out of your handyman business with niches? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.

Leads Groups for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:41:41 +0000

And then beyond the Chamber of Commerce leads groups, there are formal, separate-than-the-chamber leads groups that often meet once a week, and they have a system in place for exchanging leads. A lot of them are paid membership type organizations. You pay a certain yearly fee or something like that in order to be there, and they only allow one business from each kind of segment. And their formal job out there is during the week they’re out looking for opportunities for you and other people in their leads groups. And they come together once a week and they formally exchange referrals, and talk about clients that would be a good fit for them. Once a week you have someone give a presentation about what an ideal client would be for them, and they can come in and stand up in front of the group and talk about that, or they teach a little lesson on something that’s specific to their niche.

It’s a really great way to meet a lot of really good business owners that are serious about building their business, serious about exchanging leads, and serious about networking and marketing and things of that nature. So I highly recommend you check out some of those groups. If you need a recommendation of some of the main brand ones that I’ve known about and used over the years, definitely contact meet and I’ll let you know about that. But I would just look around in your local business, ask your chamber, when you go meet those guys, if they are involved in any other leads groups, and what they use, and things of that nature. So I would recommend that as well.

Those are the major areas for business networking. Remember, a lot of business networking is meeting new people, creating great friends, and if you’re a really social, outgoing type of a guy or girl, doing business networking like this is a lot of fun. If you’re kind of not into that scene, this might not be the area for you to focus on. You might want to more lead generation marketing, and then you know deal with people one-on-one on the telephone or face-to-face. It really depends on your personality. But realize that if this is up your alley, this is a great way for you to generate more business, build your internal database, and develop that ongoing relationship with people over a period of time.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Want to find the unique networking strategy that fits perfectly with your handyman business to generate more contacts? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.

Meetup for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:41:14 +0000

Now another one is this web-based Meetup.com thing. Meetup.com is going to allow to go and find and create groups that you’re interested in serving, so if you’re interested in serving the real estate group because you want to do preparation for houses that are for sale, or if you want to go service the real estate investor community because you know that they’ve got multiple houses and they’d be good candidates for you as clients, you may want to go focus on them, you might want to focus on first-time home buyers, you might want to do inspections on properties for them. You could definitely talk to different groups and start joining those groups or forming groups, using Meetup.com, and then people can attend your meetings on a regular basis, they’ll know, like, and trust you, and you can work them in a variety of capacities when you do that.

Another type of group you can form is just hobbies you have. So if you have a hobby and you’re interested in anything: remote control planes, or golf, or board games, or any of those types of hobby things, you can find Meetup groups that are interested in discussing those things, attend the Meetup groups – by the way, there’s marketing Meetup groups too, if you want to learn more about marketing. But you can go and attend those that you have a hobby in, that you have an interest in, meet new people, exchange contact information, add those guys to your newsletter, keep in touch with them and establish new relationships and friendships with them over a period of time, and it’s a great way to expand your network and continue to grow your business. So I definitely recommend using Meetup.com.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Want to learn how to hook up with key players to develop business contacts for your handyman business? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.

Business Networking and Chamber of Commerce for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:07:34 +0000

In this section let’s talk about business networking for your handyman business… so let’s get right into it and talk about the Chamber of Commerce.

Some reasons to join your local Chamber of Commerce include credibility, because you can then list that you’re a member of your local Chamber of Commerce, but then also there is a lot of opportunity for you to go and meet other business owners as part of your chamber membership. And you want to go and do that to let them know who you are, exchange contact information, get them on your newsletter, and start building and an ongoing relationship with them over a period of time; both to get them as existing clients, learn about them as people, become close to them and then become referral sources to them, and get referrals from them as well.

What you can do as a member – you can include it on your marketing for credibility, you can attend the before hours, the after hours, the mixers. And of course in most Chamber of Commerce organizations they have lead groups, which allow you to go and form up with groups of people in businesses that are non-competing, in order to directly refer potential leads and exchange potential clients that way. And that’s a great way for you to expand your rolodex. Be on the lookout for other people that you can help out them with, and they can be on the lookout for people they can help you with, in a very formal environment that is supported by the Chamber of Commerce. So I definitely recommend doing that for your local business as a handyman.

You’ll find that you’ll meet a lot of great business owners who can help you with a variety of things beyond just lead generation and marketing. They’ll be able to turn you on to resources for banking and financing and insurance. A lot of great resources for business owners are exchanged at Chamber of Commerce meetings and lead groups and things of that nature, so you definitely want to do that.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. To learn how to expand your handyman business opportunities through networking, I strongly suggest you check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.

Types of Newspaper Marketing for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:03:23 +0000

Alright let’s talk about some types of newspaper marketing that you can use in your handyman business. First I’m going to talk about classified ads. Usually pretty inexpensive to run, but they are expensive on a size basis. So they’re probably one of the most expensive types of marketing you can get, as far as the amount of space you get but overall they’re relatively cheap.

Display ads, those are the ads that have – you’re buying a certain measurement of space in the paper in order to have your ad appear there, and give you a little bit more room to work with. Again, these types of ads you want to have a unique selling proposition, be using the headline in a very specific offer and call to action, especially in display ads. Please don’t get drawn in to the fact that the newspaper is going to want you to do something with lot of white space, and something with pretty pictures, and all sorts of other stuff. If you want to test, go ahead and test that first as a primarily text-based ad that has headlines, and I’ll think you’ll find that the headline’s going to out-perform the graphical one by a significant margin. But go and test it yourself and find out.

Flyer inserts, you can use flyers to insert into newspaper, similar to when we talked about flyers before. Sticky notes are great. They can actually stick them right on the front of the newspaper as a separate ad, so that when the papers get delivered, they’re right on there for people and they really get noticed. So, a highly effective type of marketing. Not a lot of people know that it exist. But you can get sticky notes for your ads and it’s pretty cost effective. I was doing a sticky notes campaign, let’s see, must have been about five or six months ago, and really cheap. I got $1,400 or something like that to have the entire circulation for a sticky note on the front cover.

Press releases and articles about you and your business – you can do press releases to your newspaper, and try to encourage them to write articles about you and your business, to get free press and free publicity. You can include that in your newsletter, you can put that on your websites, you can include it in your credibility pack, you can use it over and over again once it’s done about you. Plus you get that initial boost of getting some advertising in the papers. So it’s worth pursuing, trying to make some contacts in doing that. It’s something I would definitely check out.

And now we are going to take a break before we get into business networking. After this particular break we’ve got the last section we’ll quickly run through, business networking, which is an advanced concept. So take a five minute break and I will see you back here shortly.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. To find out exactly which type of newspaper marketing can be tailored to your handyman business needs, I highly recommend “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.

Newspaper Marketing for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:04:51 +0000

Now let’s talk about newspaper marketing for your effectively marketing your handyman business. Newspaper marketing is marketing through the newspaper, any type of display ad, classified ad, those types of things, we’re going to talk about that the next slide here.

They are usually going to be two-step marketing because it’s very expensive to get your entire message out in the newspaper cost-effectively, especially classified ads. Although you can do inserts with flyers and stuff like that and get it done, but a lot of times it’s going two-step.

How to get it done? You call your newspaper up and they’ll walk you through the process. Sometimes they’ll do the printing of the insert for you. Most of the time they’re going to do the printing because it’s going to be a classified ad or display ad.

Cost to get it done depends on your paper. My local paper – I’ve done a lot of testing in my local paper with classified ads and with display ads – and I have had a hard time making the numbers work to be competitive with a lot of the other marketing methods I was using. I mean it worked, but the cost per lead generated was a bit on the high side, and so that did not make my cut-off, usually, to continue with it for a long period of time. But I have done quite a bit of newspaper marketing. A lot of classified ads and a lot of throw-away newspapers like the Weekly, Thrifty Nickel, and American Classifieds, those type of things, that worked really well for me. Your business, a handyman business, it will probably work very well for as well. I would look in there and do some testing. It’s dirt-cheap in order to do testing in the classifieds. So I would use that as part of my marketing mix to get some ads out.

As far as your local daily newspaper, test and see what’s going to work for you and try to do that. There are some more creative ways to do some newspaper marketing and I’ll talk about that in the next page, about press releases and getting article written about you, which can be highly effective especially if your newspaper is looking for human-interest, local-business-support, community type of articles.

So newspapers can be relatively scalable if you want to do additional ads. I mean they’re limited to a certain degree, but they can be relatively scalable. And they have not been super-effective for me except in those weekly throw-away papers, and I think I mentioned that before.

Things and concerns to be aware of – I’ve realized that newspaper circulation and advertising is now in decline. More and more people are moving online to both get their news and also to search classifieds and see classified ad things. So just be aware that, this is a declining type of media. It doesn’t mean you can’t use it, but it is declining.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Want to know how newspaper marketing can generate clients for your handyman business? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.

Door-to-Door Marketing for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:04:08 +0000

Alright let’s talk about door-to-door marketing and using it to market your handyman business. Door-to-door marketing is when you have flyers, post-it notes which are sticky notes, door hangers, anything that like that you’re trying to get out door to door.

They can be one-step or two-step, depending on the actual piece you’re putting out. They’re usually two-step if you’re using something that’s small like the post-it note. Some door hangers are probably going to be two-step. Flyers are going to usually be one step unless you can’t get your entire message out on there. But basically you can use those things in order to get your additional marketing message from a telephone or website if you need to.

How to get it done? We talked about this before. Hire someone to do your flyers, have the things printed up. A printer can do door hangers. Printers can do sticky notes. And the printer can also print up flyers, although flyers you can probably get printed up at most office supply stores, stationery stores, Kinko’s, Office Max, Office Depot, Staples, any of those guys.

Cost to get it done – flyers are relatively cheep to print, and they are relatively cheap to get out, a bit cheaper than direct mail. Although there are some issues with no-soliciting areas, and signs, and people thinking that it’s a little bit invasive to have a flyer on their door than to have a piece of mail in their mailbox. So just be concerned about that.

As far as scalability, I like door-to-door marketing for scalability. I think that you can scale it to a certain degree. It’s easier to scale direct mail, in my opinion, but it’s still pretty scalable and it is pretty effective. You do get response from door-to-door marketing, especially marketing specific parts of your handyman business. If you are trying to market certain types of things for certain neighborhoods or certain times of year, it could be a very effective means for you to get that message out very quickly. And if you don’t have business one day, if you happen to get caught in a situation where the last paying client has ended, and you’ve got some time to do some marketing, it’s a great way to get out on an afternoon or morning and get some marketing out, and be able to generate business within a few days. So, something to think about doing if you get to that point where there’s not enough business for you anymore, to do some hands-on, really low cost marketing. So all you have to do is print out the cost of the flyers and if you’re doing it yourself, there’s no cost for delivery.

Types of door-to-door marketing, we’ve talked about this. Door knocking, which I didn’t mentioned on the other page, door hangers, flyers, sticky notes, and again that cooperative advertising which is the free flyer method where you have multiple people contributing to a flyer and then you do door-to-door delivery of it.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Want to know which specific marketing strategies will help your handyman business generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.

Social Media for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:03:22 +0000

Alright let’s talk about social media on how you might use it market your handyman business. Social media is a big buzzword now. Lots and lots of people talking about it, you see it on the news all the time, you hear people talking about using Twitter and Facebook and Linked In and things like that. Really in a lot of ways, social media is forming a social connection with your clients, and then occasionally throwing in a marketing message. That’s how it’s supposed to be used. Some business, like me, do not do any of the social aspect at all. They only do the business aspect, and so it is not nearly as effective the way that I’m doing it. It was a conscious decision, I do know how to use social media correctly, I have done it before correctly. I am choosing in my current business model not to do it for very specific reasons right now. That may change in the future, but right now I’m opting not to do the social side of social media.

It’s usually two-step marketing, because you’re usually just doing little bits of information and then you’re sending people to your website or to an audio download or having them call you for additional information. Basically the idea is you join social media websites like Twitter and Facebook. You connect with your clients, your prospects, people who know you, people who like you, people who trust you. You share personal information about what you’ve got going on during that. In every 9 to 10, 9 to 20 pieces of personal information you give out, occasionally you talk about something you’re doing in business, so it’s kind of a ratio of personal-to-business that you want to kind of keep a balance there.

It’s almost free to do. I mean you could buy some tools in order to help automate some of this stuff and make the process easier. But to get a Twitter account is free, to get a Facebook account is free, in order to sign up for Linked In is free. So you can use all those things in order to get on there and start building your network. It’s a big time-sucker, so unless you really like doing that, realize you’re going to probably invest considerable time just trying to keep up with what people are saying and be on there. It’s not something I’m focusing on right now, although it can highly be effective. It can be a great way for you to continue to have top-of-mind awareness for your client base. Another way for you to stay in contact with them between newsletters, between emails and those types of things. So it can be a great way for you to become connected to your client base and then build up know, like, and trust, so that you can then, when they have a need for your product or service, they can then sign up for that and get that from you. So in that way it can become effective, there is a time investment to it.

As far as scalability goes, yeah, there’s some scaling involved. The more people that are on your list following you, the more scalable it is. Sometimes they’ll have – the people looking at their stuff will see your stuff and there’s kind of like a viral component to it. So, just something to think about. If you want to use social media, you definitely can just sign up some of those websites that I mentioned, and you should be able to do it.

One of the concerns, again, is it tends to be less overtly commercial, it tends to be much more of a social aspect. And these are the major social media websites: Facebook, Twitter, and Linked In. Twitter is not nearly as popular with the younger crowd. Facebook is gaining popularity very rapidly, especially with the older crowd. And Linked In tends to be a business-networking type of website, where you find people that you’ve done business with before and it’s much more about making new connections, and business-oriented. So of the three, Linked In is more business-oriented, and Facebook and Twitter are much more social. of all of them, Twitter is the one I like least as far as a marketing tool, although it’s pretty popular. So just consider those.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. To find out how to incorporate cutting-edge social media into your handyman business marketing strategy, check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.

Bandit Signs for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:02:51 +0000

Alright let’s talk about bandit signs. Bandit signs are those signs you see on the street corners, driving down the street, like “need handyman work?” or “need something repaired?” Or there’s a lot of them for multi-level marketing companies that are trying to recruit. A lot of times there are “we buy houses” type ads. They can be extremely effective. I will tell you what to think to be considering about from the very beginning is, and that is local laws. There are lots of local ordinances against those types of signs in many markets. Some of them are enforced, some of them are not. If you tend to see a lot of sings up in your market already, you’re probably more likely to be able to do it than in some markets where you don’t see any. Don’t think you’re the first person to think about it if you’re in a market. They probably tried it before and either had the signs taken down, and/or been fined for doing it. So definitely check your local ordinances about doing it, they can be very effective.

They are usually two-step marketing. Usually you go buy a bunch online, have them put up by someone else, you don’t want to go put them up yourself. And they are relatively expensive. I think they’re like a couple of bucks each in order to have printed up. But they are effective, I mean they’ll generate phone calls for you. They’re not very scalable, there’s only so many you can do, but they will get calls. I would just watch out for some of the local laws. There are much more, there are better things you could do if you haven’t done other things before, before you go to bandit signs. So, just something to think about.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. To learn whether bandit signs are right for your handyman business marketing strategy, check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.

Yellow Pages for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:01:47 +0000

Yellow pages – I will let you know that I know a little bit about Yellow Pages, but I have never done a yellow page ad. Handyman businesses will probably want to do a yellow page ad. I have not done them because of the time commitment; usually you need to sign up for a year at a time, and I wasn’t ever sure that I wanted to test at that rate for that period of time. I’ve always used other marketing campaigns that were effective for doing that. So Yellow Pages is not a strong area of experience for me. However, most handyman businesses are going to want to do it. They want to be listed in their Yellow Pages. Although, it’s my understanding that the effectiveness of yellow page advertising is on the decline. More people are using on the Internet, less people are using Yellow Pages in order to find telephone numbers, with mobile phones having Internet access and access to Google search engines, in order to find all these listings. Fewer and fewer people are using them. So, something consider.

Look in your local Yellow Pages to find out if other handyman businesses are actually using Yellow Pages in order to advertise their business and start there. One thing I will tell you is, definitely use a headline instead of your business name in the Yellow Pages ad. You want it to be a benefits-laden type of marketing, unique-selling-proposition type stuff, where you’re making a very specific offer. And always use some type of measuring device to find out if it is effective. So you don’t want to commit to a $300-per-month Yellow Pages ad, only to find out that you don’t know how many calls you generated in second year when your about to do your renewal. You want to be able to say, “Oh, I’m going to look back at my statistics on my telephone or my website,” whatever it is, or both, and then determine exactly how many calls, and determine if that number of calls for the cost you paid is going to be a good cost-per-inquiry or cost-per-client for you to do. So I would definitely look at those things.

Most of the time, Yellow Pages are going to be a two-step marketing campaign so you’re not going to be able to get your full marketing message out in the Yellow Pages, and you’d have your Yellow Pages rep work with you on that. Most Yellow Pages reps are not marketing experts, just so you know. They are sales people. So just be aware that. If they give you a recommendation, analyze for yourself whether that’s a sales position, that they’re trying to increase their commission or increase something for themselves, or if it is really trying to be helpful to you. And some of them will use data like, “Bold gets you X response increase,” or whatever it is, be wary.

Cost to get it done – Yellow Pages, when I price it out, it was expensive compared to what I expected to get from it, compared to the other types of marketing that I was doing. I’m very sensitive to my cost per inquiry and cost per client and thanks of that nature, because we are doing this on such a large scale. So for me, Yellow Pages didn’t made a lot of sense when I looked at how much it would cost me to do it. Even for some local businesses I’ve run, I still didn’t do Yellow Pages ads. So, just take that into account.
As far as scalability goes, yeah, sure you can do Yellow Pages, you could do Yellow Pages in lots of different areas if you were trying to scale up, but otherwise there’s only a few Yellow Pages in most major areas that are competing. So it’s not like you can do five or six. You could do a larger ads, you know there’s a question as to how much more effective a half-page ad is, compared to a quarter-page ad or something like that. You need to test those in order to find out. It’s really hard to test effectively doing that. So, just some things to think about.

As far as effectiveness goes, from what I understand its on the decline. But from what I do understand too, is that it is effective for people that are listed in there, they do get calls. There are a certain number of people, and a certain demographic of people that tend to use the Yellow Pages more. That happens to be the population or the target market you’re after. It may be worthwhile to put your ad in there. So, something to consider. One of things I wanted to point out too, is the commitment. A lot of people don’t realize that they are committed for the year when they do Yellow Pages advertising. And that monthly price you’re paying is, if you find out it doesn’t work after for five months, you’re really annoyed to continue paying that for eight more months. So, something to think about.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. To find out whether Yellow Pages marketing can help your handyman business generate more clients, check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.

Voice Broadcast for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:00:59 +0000

Alright let’s take a look at voice broadcasts and how you might want to consider using them to market your handyman business. Voice broadcast is when you upload a list of telephone numbers and you upload an audio recording of what you want to say when someone answers the phone, or what you want to say when somebody’s answering machine answers the phone, and you can have two different messages. The systems can tell if it’s a live person answering of if it’s an answering machine. And then you have those messages blasted out to the people usually a matter of minutes. You can have thousands of people contacted in an hour or something like that, with your message basically talking about what you’ve got going on. So if you wanted to go and contact your list of contacts and personally invite them to your holiday party, or invite them to an event you’re having, or something like that, voice broadcasts might be an effective way to get that message out. It’s dirt-cheap to do, really inexpensive, I think it’s like $.04 or something like that per minute of outgoing calls. So like $.04 or $.05, somewhere in that ballpark.

It’s usually two-step marketing, because you usually can’t get the full message out, so you usually have to have them call or go to the website, or something like that if they’re interested. Basically you upload your list to a company on the web. You either call in and record your audio, using your telephone, to their company. Or you upload an audio file from your computer to their website, and then they’ll actually do the broadcast for you.

It’s pretty scalable, although there are concerns about doing it like the do-not-call laws. So you want to make sure you watch that, you want to make sure that you know the people, they know you, that it would not be an intrusion for them to receive your phone call. It could be very effective, especially if it’s the answering machine one. If they get it live, some people going to be turned off because it’s a recording. But if it’s on your answering machine, if you do it right, it sounds just like you called up and talked to them specifically and left a message just on their machine. So it can be very effective in that way and it’s really inexpensive to do. So if you’ve got a need for voice broadcast, it can be done. Not that it’s the best outbound marketing campaign, but it’s good to relay messages to existing client bases, especially if they know, like, and trust you already. And it’s a very quick way to do that.

One way you could easily use it is if you were following up on another thing, like an event you were trying to get people to come to. You could say, “Hey listen, I sent out this letter to you the other day but I want to remind you that the meeting is tomorrow night, and hope to see you there. Thanks so much.” And then you just let it go. So it could be an effective way use voice broadcast inexpensively.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information on how to effectively communicate and engage more clients for your handyman business.

Types of Direct Mail for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:00:25 +0000

So let’s talk about some types of direct mail that you might want to consider using to market your handyman business. Newsletter, we want to definitely emphasize that. The thing that we’ve talked about a lot today is putting out your newsletter, and we definitely do that using direct mail. Another thing is postcards. The small post cards I mentioned from the U.S. Postal Service, like I told you, it’s low-end, about $.30 in order to get those mailed out. You can also do bigger postcards, including oversized postcards, to get your message out that way too. I’ve used those as well.

Cooperative mailings, we’ve talked a little bit about the free flyer method. Well one of the ways to get that flyer out is to use direct mail. So you find three other business owners, you get them all to come together, put all their marketing pieces on your one share piece, each getting one-fourth of it. And they’re paying a third of the printing costs and a third of the mailing costs in order to get that out, it becomes free for you. So that’s cooperative mailing. Another example of cooperative mailing is like those “Val-packs” or money mailers or things of that nature, where you’ve got a box of coupons, 50, 100, all those different things on there. And you can go ahead and use those things in order to get those mailings out. I have not had good luck with those, some businesses do, you could definitely test them and see. But I’d be more tempted to do direct mail to my own list than I would to use cooperative mailings in order to do that. So you could go ahead and do a test with that, so definitely something to consider.

Another things is flyers would be another type of direct mail. You could use a flyer in order to get that out and instead of doing door-to-door delivery, you could use direct mail. You could have it be a single fold-over or a tri-fold and get those done, and that would be a great additional way to do direct mail.
Here’s another type of direct mail and that is letters. So you could use handwritten letters, and I can go through an entire strategy on how to use a handwritten yellow letter that looks like it’s on a legal pad. It’s highly effective, one of the most responsive marketing pieces I’ve ever done for using direct mail. But you can also regular letters. You could use a letter just relaying social information or information of a personal nature, as a reminder of business, and of course a call to action at the end. But you can also letters as, like we’re going to talk about here, an event invitation. You can write a letter inviting people to a holiday party or a barbeque, or some type of volunteer or charitable event. So you could do that.

I will take just a moment here to talk about this handwritten yellow letter, and share with you how you could use this in your own business. So first I’ll explain exactly what it is and briefly how to do it, and then I’ll give you one or two ideas on how you may be able to implement it. One of the most effective direct mail marketing campaigns we’ve ever done were handwritten yellow letters. And they were not all handwritten, but I’ll tell you how they were made. So imagine a yellow legal pad, and you rip out a sheet of paper and then on that you hand-write out a message in script to somebody about a particular product or service. And so we would actually do this. We would take out a white sheet of paper, put the yellow legal paper behind it so that you could see the lines through your white piece of paper. Then on the white piece of paper, you write out your message, but you leave up some key blank pieces of information. So you do “Dear” and then you leave a blank space. And when we were doing these, we where actually using them on a real state investing business. And we were targeting a very select group of houses that we were interested in buying. And so the message was something like, “I’m interested in buying your property located at,” and then you’d leave a blank spot to fill it in later, “if you’re interested in selling you’re property, please give me a call at blah blah blah,” and you have the entire message written out on a white sheet of paper that would match up to the lines if you photocopied that white sheet of paper onto the yellow sheet of paper. Then we’d take the white sheet of paper with the original and we would photocopy off 100 copies onto the yellow legal pad, so that it looked like it was printed right onto the yellow legal pad in our own handwriting. Then we would go through and one by one, hand-write in just the name of the person and the address of the person. So it looked like it was a personal letter on yellow paper, in our own handwriting, with their mail merge name and address, so you’re only writing the name and address on each one. Fold that up and put it into a hand-addressed envelope with a live stamp and with some cheesy address label. And that actually got an extremely high response for us.

Now could you go and do that instead of doing flyers to a particular neighborhood, on houses that you think would have a good basements to finish, or are particularly good candidates for a particular project? Sure. You can go do a hand-addressed, handwritten yellow letter out to those guys, talking about the projects of what you do, and that your team has done several on the area, or whatever is true for you, and then send those out. They tend to get a much higher response than something that’s typed and looks mass produced. So, just something to consider when you’re looking at direct mail.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Want to learn more about choosing the right direct mail strategy to boost your handyman business clients? Take a look at “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.

Direct Mail for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:58:50 +0000

Now I’ll talk about direct mail for your handyman business. Direct mail is anything you put into the U.S. Postal Service in order to have delivered door to door. It is almost always going to be – well I shouldn’t say that. It is a lot of times going to be one-step marketing to get your message out completely in the direct mail piece. There are some exceptions. For example postcards, postcards are very cost-effective to send out and they are usually two-step marketing, where you have a telephone number and or a website on there where they can get additional information.

How to get it done? I am a huge advocate of either using the U.S. Postal service, click-to-mail where you upload your mailing list, you upload your marketing piece, they’ll do all the printing, they’ll do all the addressing if you want to do mail merge, which is putting the name and address or name and some other piece of data into the mailing piece where it reads like, “Hi Joey, I’ve noticed that you have a house at 1234 Main Street. If you’re interested in having us do repairs on it, let me know.” You can actually do those with the click-to-mail service. They’ll do full mail merge with that, so you can actually use the U.S. Postal Service to get it done. You can also use a mailing house to get it done. I personally tend to use the click-to-mail service, I’m very comfortable with it, it’s very easy for me to use, it’s very cost-effective. But if you’re not comfortable doing that yourself, mailing house is probably next step, have it done for you. I’m not a big fan of having you do direct mail yourself. I don’t think that most business owners have the patience to do it consistently enough, where it’s going to be effective. You’re going to want to have someone else do it, or have it easily done, so that you’re not licking stamps, folding envelopes and all that other stuff which can really drag on you. I’ve done it enough times to know you don’t want to do it.

Cost to get it done – relatively cheap to do it through click-to-mail, of course you want to get a quote through your mailing house. There’s so many variables, but I will tell you that the low end of post card stuff that you’re looking to do, you’re probably looking at around $.33 per post card to get out. And that would include printing on the post card, the postage on the post card and everything to get it in the mail. The only thing it wouldn’t include which you have already would be your mailing list cost. But since you’re usually going to be mailing to your in-house list, then that would already be paid for by you when you did your marketing in order to get the name to begin with. If you were going to do a saturation mailing where you’re mailing to an entire neighborhood, you may have to pay some money in order to get that list, and you’d do some mailing list broker in order to get that. Names usually run about $.05 to $.10 each for most mailing lists unless you can highly specific, using lots of selects.

Scalability – there are few things that are as scalable as direct mail. So it’s highly scalable, it’s also very fast. You put it in the mail, six or seven days later it hits the mail, you get some new business from it, so you can take the profits you made from that business and do another mailing. So it’s really, really quick. Very quick turn-around time if you’re using direct mail. It’s also very effective, it’s becoming more effective even, because fewer people are using direct mail. People are moving to the internet because they don’t realize the power of direct mail. And so there’s an opportunity for you to be one of the few people still using direct mail effectively. I think it’s highly effective, like I told you before, that some people say it’s 20 times more effective than email. I’m not sure if it’s that high, but I do believe it’s significantly higher than email as far as effectiveness goes.

Concerns and other things to be aware of – not much like I think of. Direct mail is great and you can pretty much mail anyone. There’s not a do-not-mail list or anything like that. So it’s a really good resource for getting your information and doing sales. The U.S. Postal Service is one of the greatest salespeople in the world. For a very small fee, they’ll deliver a six-page sales letter for less than $.70 including all the printing and everything. So you can really cost-effectively get your entire marketing message out to people. When you compare it to what it cost have another salesperson doing that same job, it is very cost-effective.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Want to learn more about the best direct marketing strategies to make your handyman business successful? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.

Pay-Per-Click for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:53:27 +0000

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.

Flyers for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:52:42 +0000

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.

Fax Broadcast for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:52:04 +0000

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.

Email Broadcast for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:44:57 +0000

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.

Using eBay for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:43:10 +0000

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.

Pay-Per-Click Providers for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:42:25 +0000

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.

4 Best Marketing Tips For Handyman Business Owners

James Orr — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:51:04 +0000

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.

The 3 Factors To Boost Your Handyman Business Total Yearly Revenue

James Orr — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:29:26 +0000

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.

Cooperative Marketing for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:51:44 +0000

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.

Backpage for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:32:45 +0000

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.

Kijiji for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:31:50 +0000

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.

Craigslist for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:30:41 +0000

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”.

Classified Ad Websites for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:29:34 +0000

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.

24-hour Recorded Information Lines for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:28:03 +0000

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.

Lazy Versus Poor Marketing Methods for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:26:16 +0000

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.

Marketing Media Properties for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:24:28 +0000

Hi everybody, I’m back from break. And we are going to be starting on Marketing Media and this is “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”. Marketing media, if you remember, there are three M’s to marketing. There is market, message and media. And media, if you remember, is the “How you get your message out to a particular target market.” So let’s get started.

Marketing media properties: What I’m going to try to do in this particular part of the presentation, is go through a variety of marketing media and go over how each particular marketing media kind of compares in these categories. So I going to give you a brief description of what a marketing media is, I’m going to tell you whether or not it’s a one-step marketing which means that we can get our entire marketing message out in one step, or if it’s usually used as part of a two-step marketing campaign where we usually get part of the marketing message out in this media, and then we have people follow up – either call a telephone number, or visit our website for the second step, so whether that’s a two-step marketing message. And I’m also going to talk about how to get it done, the cost to get it done, how scalable it is. Certain things you could do, they’re highly effective to do but you’re not able to scale them well. So if you wanted to expand out and generate 100 leads a week, you could not do it. So I’ll talk about scalability a little bit. I’ll also talk about effectiveness, and specifically cost effectiveness, whether or not it’s effective to do it or time effectiveness if there’s no cost to doing it. And I’ll also go into some concerns and other things to be aware of with each piece of marketing media.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. There are a variety of marketing media that we use in our marketing when promoting a handyman business. Learn all about them in “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.

Google PageRank for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:22:57 +0000

Alright, let’s talk a little bit about this concept of Google PageRank and how it relates to your handyman business marketing. I’ve been dancing around it a lot in the webinar, only because I didn’t want to mention it by name without going into the detail. Google Page Rank is a numerical value that Google assigns to a website, and it represents a culmination of a lot of different variables that Google uses to determine how popular your site is and what kind of reputation it has. How it is specifically derived is not clear, it’s not released. It’s very proprietary to Google. They do not share that information with anyone. It is extremely important when you’re talking about linking between sites. A website with a really high page rank linking to your website is going to be an incredible boost in popularity to your website, and help your own website’s page rank. It also helps with search engine ranking. In general, websites with higher page rank tend to list higher in search engines than websites that do not have high page ranks. So you want to kind of look at those things and make sure you take them into account when you’re looking at page rank. There are a lot of other things that go into page rank that I don’t have time to go through. There’s a huge list, and it would bore a lot of you.

However, just realize that there is this concept of page rank. It is a numerical value. You can go download tools for your web browser where it will show you the page rank for the website you’re on. You can also go do a search on Google and find out how you determine page rank for your own website? You can type in your website address. So there’s lots of ways to find out what it is. Go look at the page rank for your site. The higher your page rank is, the better. Usually most new websites start off with a page rank of zero and they slowly work up page rank one, two three. Page rank four, five, six – those are pretty good sites. So there’s very few sites out there that have page ranks above six or seven. So you just definitely want to keep that in mind as you look at page rank and what it means to your business.

And I’m going to take a short break here before I go into this last session, which is on the marketing media. And then once I get done with marketing media, we’re going to take another break. So I’ll take a break here now, let’s take five minutes, come on back when you’re done and we will get right into marketing media.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” is a powerful marketing course designed specifically to help handyman business owners drastically improve their lead generation strategies.

Google YouTube for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:21:49 +0000

How can a handyman business own use Google YouTube to better market their business. Let’s take a few minutes and examine that in this section. Not sure if everyone knows this, but YouTube is actually owned by Google. YouTube is the second largest search tool on the web. It actually surpassed Yahoo recently, so that there are more people searching on YouTube than there are people searching on the Yahoo search engine completely now. So it is a major place for you to focus your energy. This is another one of Pareto’s principles. You want to go and have videos up on YouTube that are talking about very specific things for you. A video on installing tile in Denver, or finishing your basement in Denver. Or wherever you’re located, you want to make videos that kind of do how-to, share tips and tricks, that somebody considering doing it themselves would do, but then during the video you could say, “When I do this for people, a lot of people don’t realize it takes this long to do. Here’s what we do. Here’s how we do it for you. We could save you the time and frustration. You don’t have to go buy the equipment. When we do it, we get these special things.” You could talk about a lot of the things that you offer that they don’t necessarily get, and that shows them how to do it themselves if they want to, but you encourage them to contact you and have you do it for them. And so you can use video highly effectively, using stuff like YouTube, put those videos up on your site, encourage other people to share them virally, and then also have links coming to your site from the video in order to get there. So I think that creating video widgets, which is what I’m talking about, for lead generation, is an often-overlooked, underutilized but highly effective means of getting new business and adding prospects to your list. So I strongly recommend that people do it.

A couple tips about making videos. By the way, you can use a hand held video thing, some people use screen capture. For instance what we’re doing here with the webinar is a screen capture, we’re doing a PowerPoint presentation, and then I’m using a webinar-based software package in order to do the screen recording. You can use something like this in order to do it. You can also use your hand-held flip cameras in order to do it that way. Very different approaches. Some other things, when you’re making the videos: include a link in the video itself and in the description. So if you’re doing the video, make sure you’re saying where people can go, a website, telephone number, how they can contact you in order to get more information. And you want to have that in the video itself when you’re speaking, maybe even as an image, if you can do it that way. But then also when you put the video online, you want to put a link directly to your website in the description of the video, so that people can click on it and find it that way too.

Another tip is when you’re putting your video up, sometimes it’s helpful to reply to an existing popular video. So if you happen to find a video about something about the area you live in, some vacation, or tourist, or really good very popular video about your local area, you may also reply to that video with a video response. And in the video response you discuss that particular thing, and your business, and how you help the community, or something related to that video where you can share, and then that video gets popularity leached off of the existing video that is popular. So the people coming there who are looking at the original video, might also look down at the comments and see your video, and so you’ll get traffic that you might not otherwise get by doing stuff like that. And then I mentioned also you can embed the video into your own blog or website, and then promote it to other people as well.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. With video consumption on the rise, why not take advantage of that in your handyman marketing plan? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.

Google Website Optimizer for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:20:14 +0000

Let’s talk about Google Website Optimizer and how any handyman business can significantly improve their website marketing by using it. We talked a little bit about earlier, when we were talking about testing things. And the nice thing about Google Website Optimizer is, it allows you to test a variety of different fields on your website and Google will do all the math for you and show the results in a really nice graphical format that makes it really easy for you to understand, and see when you have a clear winner. One of the nice things about it is you can use it on almost any website – well, I should say you can use it on almost any paid website. The shared website hosting companies, a lot of the free stuff you’re going to find out there, will not allow you to use it because of the code that they use.

However, on your paid website, you could go put in – you could get a plug-in for WordPress, it’s the plug-in for website Optimizer, which allow you to test a variety of headlines, sub-headlines, offers, call to action, testimonials, photos, and images and prices. All those things we talked about before about how to improve your marketing response – those are things you can test using Google Website Optimizer, and Google Website Optimizer is completely free. So you basically just plug in, you start a new test, you plug in the number of headlines you want to test. And don’t do too many, because it would take way too long to get enough statistically significant data to find a winner, if you’re doing seven headlines. But if you do two headlines, you find a winner, you take the winner of that one, you move onto the next one, you find a winner; you move onto the next one, you find a winner. You can do stuff like that very easily and very effectively using Google Website Optimizer. You can test different sub-headlines, offers, calls to action. All those different things you should be testing with your website. And you can do that with this tool, so, great little tool from Google.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Direct response marketing for the handyman business and specifically learning how to split test and improve your marketing are just two of the things that we cover in detail in “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”. I strongly encourage you to take a few minutes to download it.

Google Groups for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:18:36 +0000

Let’s discuss how a handyman business owner might use Google Groups to market their business and get more handyman clients. Alright so, Google Groups are like online discussion forums where you can find people discussing a very large variety of topics. You can go find handyman groups, you can go find real estate agent groups, real estate investor groups, groups about tile flooring, groups about kitchen remodeling. You can find all these different groups online. Unfortunately a lot of them are nationwide or international, and so you may have some problems using them to target very specific niches, if you’re only limiting yourself to a very specific geographical area.

However, what you can do, is you can go on there, join the discussion, share information, occasionally share a link about articles and resources, and you may get a local guy who just happens to be on there or a part of that, and be like, “I didn’t realize you were in Denver,” and you can mention you’re in Denver and link to your Denver website. And then you may get clients in that way. But it’s primarily a way for you to discuss and share information and ask questions in an open environment, with its very specific niche topics. So you can use it to find those groups, you can either join groups when you find them or you can create groups on there in order to do some marketing and prospecting. It also might be a great way for you to share marketing tips with other handymen, business owners in other markets. So you can tell them what is working well for you, what’s working well for him, and you can find out and share those tips, and so that each of you can actually succeed more easily by learning from other people’s mistakes. So that is Google Groups.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Take a moment to check out the comprehensive course for handyman businesses on marketing: “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.

Google Blogger for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:17:12 +0000

Let’s take a moment to discuss ways that a handyman business owner might be interested in Google Blogger. Very similar in some ways to the Google Sites, except Blogger was acquired by Google and it’s a set of blogging tools. It has software that’s similar, in many ways, to WordPress. In my opinion, not nearly as feature-rich, doesn’t have nearly the number of themes, nor the number of plug-ins. One nice thing about this though, is it does allow you to have AdSense. A lot of the other free blogging platforms on the internet do not allow you to install AdSense on your site. In fact, a lot of them will maybe put ads on it in order to pay for your hosting. They’ll put ads on your site, and they get the revenue.

With Google Blogger, it is free, and since Google automatically gets a share of AdSense, they allow you to put AdSense on your website. So, again, just like with Google Sites, I don’t recommend you use this as your main business site. But you could use it as a lead generation website for a very specific niche, do very specific market testing to this, and you can use AdSense on it in order to recoup some of your marketing costs as you go and do it.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Can you believe a marketing course this good is now available? Check it out: “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.

Google Docs for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:15:57 +0000

Okay I’m going to very briefly cover Google Docs and how it may prove to be a good tool for using in your handyman business. Google Docs is an online word processor, spreadsheet, presentation editor, and also combined with the Google Wave, is a collaboration tool. It can be used to store files now. They recently added that. I’m going to make a quick note here. They also added the ability for you to store files. So you could also use it to store pdf files, and audio files, and video files, if you really wanted to. I don’t necessarily recommend it but I think they’re moving in that direction, so there may be some new features coming on soon to support that.

But Google Docs is a great way to collaborate. You can use it to share bids with people in your handyman business. You could use it to create an online bid spreadsheet, that you can access from almost anywhere that has an internet connection. You could use it to put your spreadsheets for your income expense for your business, share that with your accountant or your bookkeeper. You could use it in many ways like that, in order to manage your business. It’s getting better over time. It doesn’t have a full feature set. It’s not like Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint. But it’s moving in that direction and I think you’re going to see some vast improvements to it over the years, such that it does become very, very good. And that’s Google Docs.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Use the “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” to take the marketing for your handyman business to the next level.

Google Sites for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:14:51 +0000

Let’s talk about Google Sites and how it might prove to be helpful to a handyman business owner. Earlier today in the webinar, we talked a lot about setting up your website and I spent a lot of time, and I went through a lot of detail about why I think you should go and create your own web hosting account, why you should actually pay the money instead of using free services, why you should use your own blog, and Google has a service where you can go and create a free website. So why would I take all the time to have you go and build your own custom website, when you could just go on Google and make your own site and have that done? And the answer is, you get a lot more control, a lot more features, and you have a lot more flexibility when you go and create your own website. Also, people tend to – even if you – I mean there are ways in order to have your domain name work with Google sites, we won’t get into that – but people tend to think you increase your credibility when you have your own standalone business website, when you’re serious enough to do that. Some people speculate that search engine rankings are affected by whether or not you’re on a free service or whether you’re on a paid service. So trust me, go get your paid site, it’s not that expensive. You should go and grab one.

However, you can use sites like Google sites in order to do some leads generation. So if you’re – let’s say you decide to do some specific marketing to free classified websites, Kijiji, Craigslist, Backpage, one of those guys. And you’re actually going to go put an ad on there, and have it go to an ad that has a very specific offer where they can request information. Well maybe you go use Google sites to create a free site on there, with your offer, and you can do some testing and things of that nature, and then have that as being a lead generation squeeze pages site that you’re not directly integrating in with your normal site. And you can kind of use that as a way to do some very specific market testing, where you’re measuring traffic only to that site to see how it does. So that’s one way to use Google sites. It is free. It does have creation software on there for you to go make your own site. It does have free web hosting. But I do not recommend you use it as a business site. But you can use it to create a lead generation website for a very specific niche, in my opinion.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Do you need help with your marketing for your handyman business? I strongly recommend: “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.

Google Trends for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:13:29 +0000

Here’s a tool you can use in your handyman business that will help you do some market research. Google Trends will help you determine how popular a particular search, phrase, or keyword is over a period of time. So let’s say you want to see, “are more people interested in granite counter tops now, or were they more interested a year ago?” You want to see how popular that search phrase has been on the web. Well, you can use Google Trends to show you a graph of how popular that search term was, and it’ll show you a chart over time of when it peaked out, when it was low, when it’s high, and you can use it to determine that. You can use it to compare which is more popular. Is it more popular to say – let’s see what would be a good one – “basement finishing” or “basement remodeling” or “basement upgrading?” Which one of those terms gets more search volume?

And so as a handyman, you may want to know that, because you may want to focus on writing articles with those keywords that focus on the one that is the most popular. Or maybe you want to write all three. But you want to write the one that is most popular first, so that if you don’t happen to get to the other two that day, you’re focusing on the biggest piece. You’re doing Pareto’s principle and focusing on the vital few. And so you can use Google Trends in order to chart those, and you can chart several terms on the same graph to see comparatively which one is better or worse.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Want to learn how to market your handyman business? Want to get more clients with less work? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.

Google Alerts for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:11:37 +0000

Oh this is a really good one for handyman business owners. Let’s talk a little about Google Alerts. Do you ever wonder if you could find out if anyone starts talking about you on the web? Want to know if people can – if anyone’s mentioning your business good or bad, or mentioning your name good or bad, or maybe even mentioning your competitor’s name good or bad, without having to manually go in and search the search engine every single day? Well, that’s what Google Alerts will do.

What you can do, is you can log into Google Alerts, and you can set up searches, or phrases of searches, that you want Google to send you an email about any time that thing appears on the web new. So basically, you can go in there and put in your name in quotes, whatever your name happens to be. Like mine is James Orr, so I could put “James Orr” in quotes, and then every time somebody writes something about James Orr, and it shows up in Google search, Google sends me an email summarizing all the new pages with a direct link to that page and a little summary showing, highlighting what was actually said. And I can go and click on it, and find out exactly what was said, when it was said, what they’re talking about regarding anything I’m interested in, including my name, my business name, any competitors I’m looking at or concerned about, they’re saying things about.

I can also pick topics of interest to me. For instance, one of the topics I pick is real estate investing. So I’m a real estate investor, and I’m interested in any time someone talks about real estate investing online. So I could set up a Google Alert, any time something new about real estate investing comes up, I get a little summary page from Google. I can go click on it and it shows me all the newest stuff that was just added that day or that week, or whatever time period you set in Google for that. So, a really powerful tool for you to keep track of what people are saying about you, your name, your family, your business, your competitors. You can set up all those different alerts, and be notified by email, whenever you want. Of course you can turn it off if it becomes too much for you. There were some words that I was searching that was just becoming an extra email in the box. I wasn’t really that interested, so I ended up turning it off, and it’s easy to do, and it’s free.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” to learn proven marketing strategies for taken your handyman business to the next level.

Google Checkout for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:10:09 +0000

Alright. You know a lot of handymen are probably not going to be accepting payment online. There probably are a few that might be selling information products, or selling packages, or pre-selling a continuity program where they didn’t want to sign up for a merchant account and get all this information. But not every single one will.

If you are though, you may want to consider checking out Google Checkout. Google Checkout is Google’s system for accepting payments and processing credit cards. It’s got some limitations. It’s not a traditional merchant account. Merchant accounts are what you use in order to process credit cards. However, it does have some interesting features, and it’s totally integrated with a lot of the Google tools and resources you have. So you may want to consider looking at that if you’re considering a way to accept payments online, especially if you don’t like the idea of going and getting an actual merchant account, and paying the monthly fee for merchant account, and things of that nature. Google Checkout might be a good solution for you. It’s what Google allows users to use to collect payments.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Collecting money is just part of a much larger set of resources available to help handyman business owners learn how to effectively market their business in “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.

Google Webmaster Tools for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:08:18 +0000

Alright, let’s talk about Google Webmaster tools for marketing your handyman business. When I was talking about the WordPress plug-ins, one of the things I mentioned to you was the tool for creating a site map to be used with Google Webmaster tools, if you remember that. And this is a great tool to see some interesting data and also to feed back some data to Google about how you want your website to appear, and what website links you want to show up in their search engine, and things of that nature. So basically you’d log into your Google Webmaster tools account, and you can go ahead and take that sitemap website address, it’s a special address that they give you in that plug-in that you can then submit to your Google Webmaster tools. And then Google will start going out and hitting that particular link regularly, in order to determine any new content that you have showing up on your site.

Another thing that Google Webmaster tools can do is, it gives you a little chart showing how responsive your particular website hosting provider is. So if you’re concerned that your website’s running a little bit slow, you don’t know if it’s necessarily your connection or their connection, or something in between, Google Webmaster tools will show you a chart over time. Every time it tries to access your website, and it’s got high-end servers so it’s able to measure the speed relatively well, it’ll be able to show you if it’s the server that you’re on, in comparison to all the other servers it tries to hit, where you rank. Are you in the top 10% as far as speed? Are you in the really slow bottom 10%? It shows you exactly how fast or how slow your website is performing, and it shows you a graph of this over time. And if you notice that your website provider is operating very slowly, then you may want to decide to move providers if it doesn’t get resolved. So it’s really good data in order for you to measure whether your website is performing well or not.

The other nice thing that Google Webmaster tools does, is it allows you to show which keywords exactly that you’re ranking for in Google. So if you ever wondered, am I even ranking for “kitchen remodel in Denver” or “bathroom remodel” or “basement remodel” or “home detailing” or whatever it is that you’re focusing on in your niches, are you even coming up for those keywords? Well of course you could go to Google, you could type in that keyword and see if you come up in the first X number of pages. Or you log into Google Webmaster tools and on a certain page. it’ll actually show you a list of all of the different keywords that you’re ranking for, what number you’re ranking at, what number in the list of items it’s ranking you for, and it shows you back history too. So if you happen to miss it for a week or two weeks or three weeks, you can log in and see if two weeks ago how you were ranking for a certain term, or how many words you were ranking for, and it gives you a lot of great data for looking at that. And then, use that data in order to do feedback loops for yourself. Should I go and work more at trying to get this one? Or should I work more at getting this? Or should I go and do a new keyword and try and do and focus on those?

All right let’s take a look at this last thing on here. You can also see, using Google Webmaster tools, what websites are actually linking back to you and a really cool feature of Google Webmaster tools is what keywords those websites are using to link to you. So if somebody is naturally – they’ve gone and found your website, and they’re really interested in what you have to say, what words are they using in order to link back to certain articles or content? Because those words can have a difference in how people index your website in search engines. Are they saying “check out this site” and “site” is the link? Or are they using “Denver handyman,” or are they using “Miami handyman,” or “Miami kitchen remodeling,” or “Los Angeles kitchen remodeling?” What are they using in order to link back to your site? Those can have an impact on how well you rank in search engines, especially if you’re trying to rank for those particular keywords. So you can actually see all that data in Google Webmaster tools and Google Webmaster tools, again, is completely free.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Take your handyman business to the next level with “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.

Google Analytics for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:07:05 +0000

Alright, so we’ve got the next one here to cover when talking about marketing your handyman business: Google Analytics. Now we’ve talked quite a bit Google Analytics throughout this particular webinar, because it’s a great tool for tracking lots of data about who is coming to your website, what they’re looking at, how much money is being made, and things of that nature. So let’s go through some of these points.

Number One: It’s great for tracking traffic to your website, including, where your visitors are coming from, we mentioned that. For example, you can figure out if they’re coming from search engines, specifically what search engines they are coming from. In many cases we can figure out what search terms they were using in order to find you. Another thing we can determine is if they’re coming from other websites that are linking to you; you can start to see how many visitors came from a particular website. So you go and exchange a link with a real estate agent, or a real estate investor who has a website, and they’re recommending you as their preferred handyman, and you can go on there and you can see how many visitors that person with that link on their site has sent you over the last year or two years or whatever time period, and you can see whether it was more popular at certain times. You can see total number they have sent you, so it’s some really interesting data for finding out if you should go and seek out more real estate investors, or seek out more real estate agents. Or maybe you want to see came from the national association you joined, how many people came from that, how many people came from you commenting on other peoples’ blogs. You can go and look at all that data.

You can also see if any people came from any paid advertising. So if you’re doing AdWords or you bought some traffic from another provider, or Facebook, or whatever it is, you can go and see how much traffic actually came from that and what those guys did, where they went, what pages they viewed, did they buy anything. You can also use it, besides seeing where visitors are coming from, you can use Google Analytics to determine what content, in particular, on your website is popular. So you can see if certain pages are more popular than others, what’s hot on your website, where people are clicking, and it has some really interesting mapping features, where you can show a picture of your page and then it will show you what percentage of traffic are going to each one of the links that’s showing on that page. It draws a little bitty bar above the actual link, showing you how much.

Another thing it can do, it can tell you about that bounce rate we were talking about before. And remember, bounce rate is important because it helps you continue to get listed high in search engines, and something you should be focusing on to keep people on your website. Both because you want them on your website, but also because of the benefits it has with search engines and being able to rank well in those guys. If you turn on e-commerce tracking and you integrate it in with any e-commerce you do, if you decide to actually accept credit cards online, or people can buy widgets online through you, you can actually track that with Google Analytics to find out where people are coming from that are actually ending up buying, which is extremely important if you’re paying for advertising and you want to find out if that really is resulting in sales, and not just traffic. Of course, if you pay $.50 every time someone clicks through to your website, you know that you’re getting a visitor for $.50. But what does that $.50 mean in terms of actual somebody buying something? And that’s what having e-commerce tracking turned on will do. It’ll be able to show you that, okay if people from your AdWords campaign are buying at a rate of X, people from search engines are buying at a rate of Y, and people coming from direct links from other sites are buying at a rate of Z. And you can go and figure out exactly what that is using Google Analytics.

If you have integrated your Google AdSense account, remember that’s the one where you earn money with, if you’ve integrated that with Google Analytics, you can also see where you’re earning money from AdSense from, based on traffic coming in. So are people coming from search engines, are they ultimately ending up clicking on AdSense ads and leaving your site? Is that happening more so than other types of visitors? And you can kind of look at all those different analytics and numbers, and determine what is it? Is it worthwhile keeping AdSense on there? Should I take it off? People coming from my e-zine, newsletter, coming in, are they going and clicking on ads? What’s actually making the profit with the AdSense revenue? And you can look at those and see it, if you decide to integrate your AdSense account and your Google Analytics account. And that pretty much covers Google Analytics.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Analytics, AdSense, AdWords… what does it all mean in relationship to marketing your own handyman business? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.

Google AdSense for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:05:35 +0000

We just talked about this in a previous section and we kind of combined AdWords and AdSense. AdWords is when you’re going and you’re paying money to Google in order to have your ads appear on their website, on their search engine results, and on the publisher network. The AdSense part of it though, is when you own a website, you can actually put those ads up on your site, and when people click on those ads, you can collect a piece.

Now this was one of the primary ways that I was generating money when we were doing lead generation nationwide. So I told you before, when I first started this particular webinar, that I had started at least two national lead generation businesses where we were doing significant money generating leads. Even before we sold the leads, even before we worked the leads, any type of prospect coming in, as we were building that list, we were generating revenue. And one of the major ways that we were generating revenue was with Google AdSense.

And so we would have these ads on our website and on the website people would come on the site, a certain percentage of them would go and sign up for our mailing list, or request information, or get a special report, or some other way of getting them into our lead funnel, and a certain percentage of them would not do that. And so what we decided to do is, we were doing some testing, and we decided to put up ads on the websites so that if they decided they were not interested in requesting information, they did have an opportunity to leave the site. And they had an opportunity to leave the site by clicking on an ad that may have been a better match for what they were looking for. And what it turned out to be, is that this turned out to be significant revenue across all the different lead generation things that we were doing. Now you could use it on a much smaller scale, if you wanted to, by placing Google AdSense ads on your website that you’re doing lead generation from. Now I’ll give you kind of some pros and cons here.

So, some people will argue, and I’m not saying that they’re wrong, because I think that they’re actually right, but some people would argue that having ads on your website kind of dilutes your credibility to a certain degree, because you’re not actually operating your business without marketing, without advertising on it. You have advertisers on your site. So if somebody sees that you’re running a handyman website, and you’re soliciting people for business, the fact that you have some ads on your website can, in a lot of peoples’ minds, limit your credibility and how serious they are about your business if you put up ads on there. So it’s something to really thing about before you put up ads on your website, as to whether or not the money you would earn from AdSense would be enough to significantly offset the marketing you’re doing in order to generate prospects and leads, or if you wanted to keep the ads off altogether and increase that credibility on your site.

What I might suggest you try, we had this discussion before about whether or not to create multiple websites, multiple domain names, and kind of multiple website hosting accounts – one of the things you could do is you could have your main site, and on your main site you have absolutely no AdSense ads at all. That really is for when somebody is already requested information, they’re already your client, you’re sending out an email to them, you’re sending out your newsletter to them. Whatever it is, you’re getting them to come back to that main site, and the main site has no advertising whatsoever.

But then in your mind, and not that you need to go form separate businesses, but in your mind, maybe you have sub-business within your main business and the sub-business is a lead generation business. And let’s say that business has two, three, four, five different lead generation websites. And the lead generation websites are basically a little bit of content with some ads on it, and you’re going to market to very specific niches to get people to come to that website, and those are lead generation. Once they become a lead generation website, you can have ads on them and you can recoup some of the marketing cost you may spend in order to get traffic there. Now it may just offset it a little bit, it may fully cover your marketing costs, or, like with our model, we were able to generate ad revenue such that it was actually a profit center for us. So it depends on how you want to structure your business. You could have like a little mini – you could almost think of yourself as having your own little lead generation company where you’re generating leads at wholesale cost for yourself. Not for everybody. Not necessarily recommended. But it is one way to do it where you don’t have to have ads on your own website and you can also get all the benefits of having some AdSense revenue coming in to offset that advertising revenue.

So we talked about AdWords versus AdSense, talked about AdSense on your website, or other lead generation websites, and Google AdSense is one of the ways that you can get paid to generate leads. So it is one of three ways, which I’ll talk about later, of getting paid when you’re doing lead generation. Which makes lead generation much more fun and profitable to do. So you may want to consider doing that.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Using Google AdSense on your handyman business website can help lower the cost of your leads. Or, if you work hard at it can completely eliminate the cost of your lead generation efforts. If you really take the time to tweak your marketing and website, it may even be able to provide you a net positive return on your marketing expense even before you convert a single prospect to a handyman client? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.

Bounce Rate of Websites for Handyman Businesses

Sarah — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:02:17 +0000

Marketing your handyman business requires you to commit to constant and never ending improvement. One of the things you’ll want to improve is your bounce rate, when you’re looking at Google Analytics. So, anything you can do to improve your bounce rate, whether it’s writing longer articles, formatting your page better, writing content that comes up with search engines for certain keyword terms, better picking of your keyword terms – all of these different things can affect your bounce rate. So you may want to kind of play with those and try to improve them over time. I would highly recommend it, because you want your bounce rate to be nice and low, so that your chance of coming up in search engines is high overall, which I think, no one can prove this, but I think that your bounce rate overall for your website has an impact on how will your site does with other keywords. So if you have a good bounce rate and you putting out new articles, you’re more likely to come up with those than if you just have no bounce rate or horrible bounce rate overall on your site.

Okay, and so that is the last slide for this morning session. We’re going to take about an hour break for lunch. And then in the afternoon, we’re going to come back and we’re going to hit Google tools. And we’ve got some other information on marketing media we are going to cover, a bunch of different marketing media, that’s a rather large section. We’re going to talk about some business networking to generate business, we are going to talk about some niches and some advanced concepts, and that should end out the day. So I’ll see you guys in about an hour and have a great lunch. I’ll talk to you soon.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Want to learn other important marketing concepts that are guaranteed to bring you more clients in your handyman business? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.