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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
