Alright, let’s talk about business cards. Business cards, I think you should know what they are: really tiny cards. Some people will think I’m talking about something that says, “John Smith, John Smith Handyman Service.” It’s got a telephone number, it’s got their address on there, it’s got the website address. It’s not really what I’m talking about. I’d like to use business cards more like little mini, unique selling proposition messages. You’ve got a headline on your business card, and that gives a really good benefit to your people. And it does have your contact information where they can get more information from you, but I am not using it as just a piece of contact information. I’m using it as a sales tool, almost as if it’s like a mini classified ad in many ways. So that’s what I would recommend. It’s usually a two-step because you’re usually not able to get your full marketing message out on the business card, but the two-step can be a 24-hour recorded information line with a specific extension for a business card. And then it can also have your website address on there, with maybe a specific offer for your business card, so you have your domainname.com/businesscard, or “bizcard,” or whatever you want to put on there, that’s a special offer specifically for people looking at your business card. That way you can try to track the response from both of those.
How to get them done? I use online printing services. Some of the local printers that I’ve used have been extremely expensive. I had some business cards printed up, let’s see, I think I had 1,000 printed for like $90, or something ridiculous like that, full-color business cards. And the ones I get online are usually just as good. I think I had 250 made for like $7 or $8. And if you need to have a referral on that, definitely contact me, go to the www.LearnToBeRich.com website. I’ll either put it up in the download section as a resource, or you can contact me and I’ll send you a direct link. Because I think use the guys I used, it’s free business card and the paper shipping is, oh, like $6 if you get that done. I think they actually throw me a dollar, or credit, or something like that for business cards, so if you want it I’ll send you a link. How to get it done? That’s where I’d recommend getting it done. Cost to get it done, I just covered that. The high-end when you do it locally and get full-color ones, it can be almost $100. If you decide to go online and get them done at the place I’m going to recommend, the low end is going to be like $8. The medium end of that, if you want to do some certain features like double-sided, things of that nature, they’re going to charge you a little more. But you’re talking probably in the $20, $10 to $15, $20 range, somewhere in there.
Scalability: business cars are not highly scalable on my opinion. There are only so many business cards you can get out, you can put them all over the place, bulletin boards. You can use them when you go out to eat, you can leave them with tips. By the way, the bigger tip, the better the business card the response rates going to be, if you didn’t know that. Some people will do guerrilla marketing tactics with their business card, leave them in related books, or magazines, or on counters, places that might be more inclined to do business. They do the fishbowl stuff, when they go to restaurants. There are all those different ways of doing it, but it’s not scalable. I mean it’s not like if you wanted to quadruple your business card marketing, you could easily do that and especially you couldn’t quadruple it and quadruple it again. So it becomes much harder to do. So I don’t necessary think it’s a highly scalable type of model.
They are extremely cheap, and they are not super-effective. They’re almost a disposable type of media, where a lot of people expect to get a business card, and they expect it to be almost thrown away. If you’re out there doing personal business-to-business networking, remember it’s not as much to get your business card out, although you do hand them out, as it is a quid-pro-quo exchange of business cards. I’m going to give you mine, here’s yours, and they kind of exchange them. Because once you have their business card, what are you going to do with their business card once you have in your hand? That’s right, you’re going to add it to your newsletter list. You’re going to make sure that you’re mailing those guys on a regular basis. And so, getting your business card out to them, it’s great if they keep it, it’s great if they put you on their mailing list, but you going to also put them on your mailing list so that it’s not just a one-time contact. It’s an at least once-a-month contact from you, forever and ever until they do business with you and refer business to you, or you decide that they are no longer worth putting on your mailing list and you think you should remove them. Whether you find out that they will never, ever do business with you or something like that. So you definitely want to grab business cards whenever you can, and you usually do that by exchanging them.
Concerns and other things to be aware of: make sure you don’t use a traditional, just name and telephone number on your business card. You want to have some type of marketing message, a headline, a unique selling proposition, and there’s nothing wrong with having multiple business cards, by the way. You can have a business card for one type of client. You can have a business card for another type of client, where you have a different unique selling proposition that is of benefit to that particular person that you’re marketing to, on those. So you may have one for real estate investors where you have your real estate investor package, you may have one for real estate agents where you have your real estate the agent package, and you may have one for the specific remodeling task that you’re looking to do basement refinishing, or basement finishing. And whatever it is that you’re focusing on, you can have different ones. So that’s business cards.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Learn to effectively use business cards in your handyman business. Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright, we mentioned this one before too, Google FeedBurner. Google FeedBurner is the ability for people to follow any new posting content you post in your blog, and we talked about it when we talked about the plug-ins for WordPress. There was the Google FeedBurner plug-in, which you could use in order to automate the process and connect those two.
But Google FeedBurner is the website you’d go to in order to have – you’d be able to see the number of people that are following you on your website, the number of people that are receiving updates from your website. You can also see one of the interesting things I personally use it for. You can discover which articles people are clicking on. So which ones are most excited about – which articles are most exciting to people on your list. And then you can use this data, if you find out that certain article topics are more popular, you can use this data to decide to write more of those articles, or if you’re noticing certain articles are getting very few page views, or very few views on Google FeedBurner, you could stop writing about that topic because it may not be an appropriate thing for you to write about. You may get more leverage, again Pareto’s principle, if you focus on things that have a much bigger impact. You can write the articles that people are already interested in and more likely to click on, or you can write the ones that you’re not getting much activity from. So you want to focus on the ones that give you good activity, good feedback. And then you can also use the data from which articles are being clicked on most to determine new marketing widgets that you may want to create in the future.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Hello everybody, welcome back from lunch. I hope you guys had a great lunch. We’ve got some really good information to go over this afternoon. We’re going to be covering Google Tools, some different marketing media, and we’re also going to be covering business networking, and doing some stuff on niches, and then some advanced concepts to end the day.
This is James Orr. The course is “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”. And let’s jump right into the outline because I know we’ve got a lot to go over. So let me do that. Okay. So let’s talk a little bit about why we’re even concerned about Google’s Tools, as compared to a lot of the other providers that are out there. And really the main reason is, Google is by far the largest search engine out there. And so we tend to focus on what’s going to give us our biggest rewards. Remember the Pareto’s principle we talked about before, and Google is the Pareto’s principle for your marketing efforts online in many ways. They are going to give you the largest results for focusing on working with them. They are estimated to control between 66% and 72% of all searches online, and that includes, from what I understand, YouTube’s searches, which we’ll talk about when we get to using marketing video.
But one of the things we’re going to be talking about today, are a lot of the different tools that Google offers for working online, for running a business, for promoting our websites, for analyzing data from our websites. And all those different tools combined perform, kind of allow us to have some really great resources for working with our online business as far as marketing goes, and working with documents, and networking, and sharing tools, and analyzing data, and video and audio, and all those different things. So let’s jump right into some of these different tools.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Take your handyman business to the next level: check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
The first one we’re going to talk about, and we mentioned it before when we talked about pay-per-click, is Google AdWords. What Google AdWords is, is the ability for you to buy advertising space on Google’s website for search and also as part of the AdSense or publishers network, where you can have your ads showing up on other people’s websites. So, I have an image on the screen here, and you can see on the image that the areas highlighted in yellow are where Google AdWords ads would appear. Those are the ads where you may be willing to pay Google $.50 for someone to click on your ad and be taken directly to your website on a certain page you designate. It may also be where you can have your ads show up on there for some pay-per-impression, and those are very rare circumstances, most of the stuff on AdWords is pay-per-click.
I was doing a lot of AdSense, which we’re going to talk about here in a minute, and AdSense is the other half of AdWords. AdWords is when you have a business owner come in, and they’re willing to pay Google a certain amount of money in order to have somebody give them the opportunity to click on their ad and go to their website. AdSense is when a publisher of a website has a website and they’re willing to show ads on their site, where if the person clicks on the ad, they are taken away from their website. Google makes a certain amount of money for doing that, whether it’s $.50 or $1, whatever they’re charging for their click, and the publisher of the website gets a part of what Google is collecting. So if Google is collecting $1 for its click on the website, the publisher may get a couple cents on there, $.30, $.50, somewhere around there. It’s not actually disclosed the exact percentage, but then that person actually gets that amount and Google gets the other part of it. And so there’s kind of a sharing.
So AdWords is the part where you go on there and buy the ads, and the AdSense part is the other side. And we’ll talk about AdSense here in a moment. However, the other nice thing that AdWords has is the ability to go do some keyword research. So if you’re considering buying some marketing on Google one of the nice features that AdWords offers is the ability for you to type in a keyword, or a website address, or a group of keywords, and then Google will come back and say, “You picked these keywords. However, realize too that these other keywords may be of interest to you as well,” which can give you different ways or thoughts about how to market your handyman business, because they may – you may go in there and type in “kitchen remodeling” and they may come back and say “upgrading your kitchen” or “redoing countertops,” and they may suggest a whole slew of other keywords that you could then write additional content, additional articles on, or buy those keywords from Google. That’s what their initial interpretation was, of providing that data. But you can also use it as a guide to see what you’d want to write about and what you’d want to provide. So it becomes a really great research tool for you when you’re trying to determine what words to use on your website, and things of that nature, and they’ve got that as a free service on their site.
Now AdWords is one of the only things that we’re going to talk about today from Google where you’re going to be paying money to use it. Almost all the other services we’re going to talk about are free, but AdWords is the only one where you pay money to have your advertising put on their site and their publisher’s website, via AdSense, in order to get some marketing out there. So let’s move onto the next one.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for using Google AdWords in your handyman business to generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Now let’s take a look at Plug-ins. Plug-ins add some functionality to your website or blog and improves your website visitor’s experience, or a lot of times, it improves your ease of use and management of the website itself. A lot of plug-ins are absolutely free. The overwhelming majority of plug-ins I know of are free. Some of them will ask you for donations to support their cause. If you really, really like a plug-in feel free to donate to them, and encourage them to continue making improvements to it. But installation of plug-ins with the newest version or WordPress is also extremely easy. All you have to do is go into the plug-in section of your admin control panel, it’s one of the tabs along the side. You click on that, and you can sort through the different plug-ins they have available, read what they do. And then, usually with one or two clicks, you click on a plug-in and click on install, it installs the plug-in for you and you can start using it immediately.
So let’s talk a little bit about some of the plug-ins that I recommend when you’re setting up your website, and kind of what they do. If you have your own site already and you’re using WordPress, these are some great ones if you have not yet installed them, if you’re brand new and you’re about to set up your website and you’re trying to get all that ready, I would strongly recommend that you do these. And of course if you have us to set up your website for you, I will install these for you.
Okay, so all-in-one SEO pack. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” And all-in-one SEO pack is a plug in for WordPress that allows you to some really cool features that make your web more likely to be found in search engines, or more likely to be optimized to come up higher in search engines, if you actually use the plug-in. And so it does some things to affect key words, meta tags and how it uses those, in order to make your pages more likely to be found in search engines. It’s just going to give you a small boost if you use it correctly. If you abuse it, it’s going to give you a big down-boost, if you don’t use it at all, you’ll kind of be neutral there. But I would recommend installing the all-in-one SEO pack, as a plug-in.
The Google XML sitemaps, XML stands for the Extensible Markup Language, and this creates a site map. A site map is nothing more than a list of all the pages in your website that you want Google to index. If you want somebody to be able to type in a search word, and find that page in the Google search engine, you can make a site map and list all those pages along with what you think the priority of that page is on your list. So if Google only indexed these four pages, then I would be good. But they indexed these other 100 pages I’d be okay with that too. So you would list the four with a much higher priority, and they’d list the other pages below that with lower priority, and then Google will tend to look through and spider the pages they list with a higher priority more. And what this Google XML sitemaps plug-in for WordPress does, is it will automatically take all the pages and the content you put into the WordPress and it will spit out a completely formatted site map for you automatically, that you can then take the address of the sitemap from, and move it into your Google webmaster tools accounts, we’re going to talk about later, and that will actually allow Google to find all of your web pages very quickly and very easily from your site. Extremely powerful plug-in, but once you get it set up its value quickly fades away. But if you’re a brand new site, it is very powerful and its really powerful for ongoing stuff, but it’s so fire-and-forget that you forget how powerful it is.
Remember I told you before that you should always backup your website? And that I get mine backed up daily? Well what I use in order to backup my website daily is this next plug-in. It’s called WPDB back-up which stands for I believe, WordPress Database Backup. And what that does, is you can setup frequency at which you want the database backup to be performed, and emailed to you. And what it will do is in the morning, between 3:00 in the morning – I guess it does it somewhere around there, it’ll go and backup your entire database of all the posts and contents, stuff you have on your website, it’ll zip it up into one file, and it will email you a copy of that zip file to your email account. How I deal with my backup files is I have a backup done on my web hosting provider, they actually do their own backup besides the this, and then this backup is also sent to my email account. My email account is Gmail. Gmail has a 8 GB worth of email storage or something like that, and so each day that I get this I just archive my backup of the entire website content, and I store it there. So I’ve got a backup both on my web server, and also on my Gmail account from all of these emails that come in. So if I had a failure, if there was a failure of the website hosting provider and they lost their backups for some odd reason, which could possibly happen, or if Gmail went down and I had a failure, I had the backup in the other place. So I have redounded backups going on with these things. Then I occasionally, once in a while, will save another backup to my local hard drive.
Okay, one-click plug-in updater. Occasionally with all the different plug-ins you have on your WordPress installation, they’re coming out the new versions. So you know they may come out with the new version of the database backup that’s more efficient, or that does another feature, or that has something else added to it. And what the one-click plug-in updater does is it’s constantly checking once a day or so, to see if any of the plug-ins you have, have been updated. And if they have, it’ll say “click here to update all of the ones that have been updated and we’ll do that for you automatically.” So you don’t really have to worry about it, once you have the one-click plug-in updater installed on your WordPress site.
The next plug-in I talk about is Google Feedburner Feedsmith. Google Feedburner, which we’re going to talk about later, is a tool for having a way for people to follow what you’re posting on your website, the RSS feed. And the Google Feedburner Feedsmith will actually take all the posts you already have and feed them right into Feedburner for you, and it makes it easy. So, I think that’s exactly what that one does, although I haven’t looked at it in a little while but I’m pretty sure that it actually takes the feed from your website and exports it to Feedburner for you automatically. So I would definitely install that plug-in for WordPress as well.
The “Thank Me Later” plug-in is actually a really cool plug-in. When people come on your blog and they make a comment on your post, which by the way is good for you, for search engine reasons, and for interactivity, you want people coming on and commenting about what you’re doing, what you’re blogging about, and so the more people that do that the better. But a good way to encourage people to do that is to have this Thank Me Later plug-in. What the Thank Me Later plug-in does is, if you had a blog and you had a blog post, and I came on there and I wrote a comment in response to your blog, like “I really like that you’re helping people with the free pumpkins on Thanksgiving. Thanks for doing that, by the way I’m looking to finish my basement next month. Give me a call and we can talk more about that.” When I post that comment on your blog, you automatically get notified that the comment’s up there, you can go read and reply. However, automatically with this plug-in, a day or two later, you get an email from the system, saying “Hey I just wanted to thank you again for posting that comment on the blog, if there’s anything I can do for you, let me know.” And it automatically does that day or two out, so that it’s staggered and you get the added benefit of a couple of days later, an automatic follow-up system. So extremely powerful, especially if you’ve got a lot of people commenting on your blog, and you need to do that work.
Okay, the next one we’re going to talk about is “CommentLuv.” And what CommentLuv will allow you to do is it’ll integrate with your blog, so that when other people are on your site leaving a comment, they can reference what they were last posting about on their blog. It’s a way to grow interactivity between several blogs that you’re running. So, what’s nice is if you were on another blog and they have CommentLuv, it’ll automatically go to your blog, and find out some of the blog posts you were recently posting about for you, and link to your blog, from their blog too. So you want to find people that have CommentLuv, and comment on their website and you want to find people that are commenting on your site that are using CommentLuv, and then both of you guys together can add links back and forth, which we’ll talk about during link building, as to why that’s a strong strategy to explore. So I would definitely look at that as well.
ShareThis, if you go to my blog and you look at the bottom of the each post, there’s a whole bunch of little icons that allow people to do some social bookmarking type sites, where if somebody wants to recommend my blog post to some friends on another social bookmarking site, they’ve got all the links they need to use right there on every blog post. And ShareThis the plug-in ShareThis for WordPress, will allow you to automatically add all of those links to the social networking, social bookmarking sites, at the bottom of your blog post automatically.
Subscribe To Comments – that is a another blog, that’s another tool that allows people who want to receive any updates to a particular blog post you have where people are posting comments to receive notifications that those comments have been updated. So that’s a tool if you want to kind of engage people who are used to replying to, and going back and forth with each other via comments on your blog, if you want to encourage lots of comment sharing you can use tools like that.
TinyMCE Advanced – I don’t even remember why I recommended that. I’m not sure which one that is. Let me go pull it up on my site here. I’m sure it is good enough to recommend, I just don’t remember what it is. The name is not reminding me what it is. Let me pull it up here. Okay. The TinyMCE Advanced is the upgraded editor, the what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor of WordPress. It has bunch of extra features that make it easier for you to write content in your blog, and do some formatting things. So it’s an upgraded tool from the generic WordPress editor that they have, it has bunch of extra features. So you can install that, and it will help you when you’re writing your blog posts editing exiting blog posts. Sorry about that, I forgot what it was.
The Viper’s Video Quicktags, that’s one to use when you want to do videos in your blog post, if you are sharing a video from Youtube, using the Viper’s Video Quicktags plug-in allows you to use a smaller snippet of code, in order to share the Youtube video right in your WordPress blog, rather then have and then go and grab whole bunch of extra code, and format it, and do all bunch of crazy stuff like that. Viper’s Video Quicktags will allow you to format it very nicely.
WP-Spamfree Anti-spam – you’ll notice that once you start running a blog, you’re going to get what is called “blog spam.” People go and find new blogs that are in search engines, and to try to improve the ranking of their websites or promote their proxy services, they will use automated tools – and by the way, don’t do this. I am not telling you this to get an idea, I am telling you how to prevent people from doing it, it’s just really bad. So basically, don’t do this. But people use automated software to go to blogs, and spam blogs by writing automated blog posts. And they’ll read something like, “I really like what you said here in your blog post. Oh by the way, you may want to check out this Viagra site I have,” and they’ll have a link to Viagra on there. So it’s very generic, bland information that they’re adding, and they have links to a variety of get-rich-quick, Viagra, adult-entertainment type sites which are clearly inappropriate on your website. And so the WP-Spamfree Anti-spam thing is one of the best tools I’ve found for helping cut down and the amount of that stuff you get. It’s very, very effective but occasionally something still gets through and you still need to manually remove that. It’s easy to do, and all you need to do is click on delete on that comment, or do not approve the comment if you’re manually approving comments. But basically, this tool will help cut out a lot of that, automatically flag it for removal. And I believe it has some artificial intelligence feedback loop, where the more spam it sees, that is like a certain type of bug or spam, it actually learns from that and improves over time. So that’s my understanding of how it works.
Last one on here: the last recommended plug-in for WordPress is Google Analyticator. And what this plug-in does is, it helps you to integrate your WordPress site with Google Analytics, which is the tool I am going to recommend here next for keeping track of who’s coming to your site, where they’re coming from, what they’re looking at, how long they’re staying on there, what the bounce rate is, and we’ll talk a lot about those strategies when we talk about Google Analytics. However, that is a great plug-in for making it very, very easy to integrate analytics in with your site. And that is a summation of my recommended plug-ins, some really, really good ones there. I strongly recommend that if you are going to install WordPress, you install those plug-ins, it just takes a couple of minutes each to do.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” to take your handyman business to the next level.
Alright, so here we go – Themes. Themes you get change the way your website looks, if you’re using WordPress they are really easy to do. With themes in general you can change the way your website looks. But is really easy to do on WordPress. WordPress right from your admin control panel, you’re going to log in there, there’s a place where you can go on a look through literally thousands of different themes, they are all pre-designed for you. The overwhelming majority of them are completely free. There are some that they’re going to ask you for a nominal fee in order to do it, and then there are some premium themes that cost you $50 to $100 in order to get, if you’re looking to do that. But there’s some really great free themes for your blog.
And you can go and try on different themes, go through your website when you’re setting it up. You can try one , put it on there, it’s basically one or two clicks. It shows you what your website would look like in that theme. You click “Save” and it actually save the theme to your website for you and makes the whole thing look that way throughout. So a really powerful tool for doing themes, and you can use a variety of them and you can change it later if you want, if you get tired of it, you want to upgrade, you want to look at new ones, you want to make a different one every week, you can do that. I don’t recommend making a different every week by the way, but you can. So you can use different themes to do that, you can always upgrade your theme later with minimal work if you’re using WordPress, and you’re doing some standard formatting stuff. So, instead of manually formatting things inside your editor when you make new post, if you use relatively standard “Heading One,” and instead of big and bold and things of that nature, it will actually go and update your theme for you across all of your posts and make it look really pretty. It’s a really powerful tool to be able to use themes if you format your website correctly.
Insulation themes – really easy, like I said. You log into your admin and control panel for WordPress, you go to the theme section, you can literally look trough hundreds of them, it shows you a little thumb images, you click on the one you want, it’ll show you a bigger picture, if you want to apply it to your site you click another button, it applies it to your site, you click on “Save.” That’s really how easy it is. So themes are very powerful, and great ways to change the look of your website.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn how to use your website to effectively market your own handyman business to generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
