Let’s jump right into website hosting providers. Alright, let’s talk about cost. Usually website hosting providers — by the way, a website hosting provider, if you don’t remember, is the company you’re paying a monthly fee to in order to keep your website’s pages up and available on the Internet so when someone types in your domain name, the website actually appears. So let’s talk about the cost of website hosting providers. A lot of website hosting providers are going to charge an upfront-setup fee and monthly fees. The website setup fees, in some cases, are waived if you commit to a long enough contract, or if you pre-pay six months or a year out or something like that. That’s very common. It’s not always, but it’s very common, or they’ll run specials of that nature. Setup fees can run somewhere around $20 per month. Hosting fees can be $10 to $15 per month. You’re not going to need much more than a $15 account. Now, you can buy dedicated servers and get really high-end accounts. But for most websites, most handyman websites, you’re not going to need anything more than the low- to mid-level plans, because you’re not going to be doing a ton of traffic. Most of the extra features they’re going to be offering for these upper plans are not going to be worth while for you to pay with. So I don’t necessarily recommend it. So somewhere in the $10 to $15 range, I think is pretty reasonable for monthly fee for web hosting plan, for most businesses. And the setup fee is going to be probably around $20. So yes, those are the costs for doing that. If you want to get the specific recommendations for what we recommend, go to LearnToBeRich.com, and there is a downloads link, and I have a recommended email and web hosting providers link on there, where I actually have the ones that I recommend right on there.
Alright, the next one is the software needed. So your web hosting provider is going to need to provide you with certain software, that you’re going to want to have on there. Both to run WordPress, which is the software to update your website with content and be able to manage it, and things of that nature. So you’ll need that. Either you’ll need to have the ability for them to automatically have WordPress on there, which a lot of web hosting companies do, or you’re going to definitely need some prerequisites in order to be able to manually install WordPress on your website. So, software needed: you definitely want to have PHP. PHP is a programming language that’s designed run on web servers — very powerful, very flexible, open-source, free type of software package. It’s not going to cost you anything extra than your hosting fee. By the way, it won’t cost you anything extra besides your hosting fee for any of these: PHP, MySQL, PHP MyAdmin, and WordPress. They’re all free right now. I expect at least PHP MySQL, PHP MyAdmin to remain free forever; WordPress, who knows. I expect it to be free, but you don’t really know sure, but it’s free right now.
So basically, you want to go and get a web hosting provider that’s got a PHP, MySQL which is your database — that’s going to be what stores all of your data from your blog posts, and articles, and contents, and keeps the structure in data of your website stored. So it’s called MySQL. And then the last thing is PHP MyAdmin. You’re probably not going to use this very much at all, except when you’re configuring your website, or if you’ve got to do some backups of your database, or things of that nature. You want to have something that really easy to use and PHP MyAdmin is a great resource, that if your web hosting provider, if you’ve got a choice between two, and one of them offers PHP MyAdmin and the other one doesn’t — I would go with the one that offers PHP MyAdmin because it’s that important.
The next thing is WordPress, and we talked about that. Some web hosts and providers will actually provide WordPress for you right on the server, because it is so popular. Where you basically, its already installed, you click on one button or a couple buttons, and it automatically installs the basic version of WordPress for you. There is some configuration you will need to do to it. Or, if they don’t do that, if your web hosting provider has PHP MySQL and PHP MyAdmin, then you can manually take WordPress from www.WordPress.org, and then install that on your web server. In most cases right there, as long as they have those other things.
Let’s talk for a moment about whether or not you need a dedicated IP address. For most businesses, you are not going to need to pay extra to get a dedicated IP address. If it’s free, great. If it’s not free, I probably would not necessarily recommend that you get dedicated IP address, unless you plan on doing more than just local marketing for a relatively local business. If you are going to go and do business nationally, or you really focus significantly on your web site business, then you may want to go and spend the extra dollar or two a month, or whatever it’s going to cost you, in order to get a dedicated IP address. By the way, the price for a dedicated IP address varies significantly from hosting company to hosting company. Some of them don’t even offer it, some of them will charge you a dollar extra, some will charge you $5 per month extra, so just realize that you don’t need it if they offer it. It’s totally up to you whether or not you get it. It’s kind of nice, if you’re doing some fancy stuff with domain names, and you want to have a dedicated IP address to work with. It’s also, some people thought for a long time that it gave you a slight boost in search engine ranking. I think that the more recent update to that is that it doesn’t have nearly the impact that people once thought it did.
Alright, let’s talk about the amount of hard drive space and bandwidth that you would need on your account. For the overwhelming majority of people on this particular webinar, the handyman business owners, the amount of space and bandwidth you’re going to be need on your accounts is not going to be anywhere near what you would automatically get with your starter- to mid-size-type account. In fact, if you’re paying $10 to $15 per month, I would venture to say that the overwhelming majority of you, like 99%, would not need anything more than what they’re offering. You know, most of these guys are offering ridiculous-size packages now. You know, 100 GB of a hard drive space, 3,000 GB of bandwidth, or ridiculous amounts of space and bandwidth. That’s really not going to be an issue for you in most cases. You can get by with relatively small-size hosting accounts, if you’re doing just a WordPress-type site, as long as you’re not uploading huge audio and video files to your server. And we can talk about, when we talk about using video marketing later. We’ll talk about having your videos hosted on Youtube anyway, which doesn’t take up any of your space or any of your bandwidth. So, you’ll want to go and do that. Space and bandwidth are not really going to be a major issue for most of you. If you have 100 MB, and I know that really small, you probably could get by with most accounts doing that. Bandwidth, you’re not really going to have an issue. So, if you were thinking about taking notes on that, I wouldn’t even bother. Just go ahead and skip it over, and realize that most accounts are going to be fine.
The one thing I will point out about web site hosting providers is, you either want one that’s going to make regular backups for you, and then insist that they send you the backups, and that you check them and make sure they’re good. Or, you’re going to want to have a system in place for making backups yourself. There are few things more frustrating in life than spending a year or more building a website, writing contents for it, optimizing and getting everything set up, only to find out that a hard drive crashed or something happened where your website is no longer available, and you do not have a recent backup or a backup at all. So I will save you some of that pain, by trying to tell you right now, make backups of your website, and make them often. How often? I have a backup of my main website, the www.LearnToBeRich.com site, sent to me via email every night. Okay? I’m going to talk a little bit about a plug-in you can get for WordPress that’ll do that for you. I strongly recommend that you do that, because it will make a backup of any new content you put on the site. And then you’ll have a stream of backups. And then of course, you need to figure out how you’re going to save your backups locally on your computer. But you are going to want to go and do that backup very often, so that if something happens, you can restore it and get all or at least most of your content and your website back up as quickly as possible, with as little headache as possible.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for using unique selling propositions in your handyman business to generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright, so here is your website setup guide and five easy steps. Step number one would be domain name. So you’re going to want to get a domain name where somebody goes on the web and they type in something in order to get your website, like “handyman.com.” I doubt that’s available for you, I think someone else probably already has it. But it could be your handyman service, and I will talk little bit about selecting your domain name here in a minute. But domain name, step one, your website hosting provider that is the company that’s the company that’s going to actually host your website, where are all your web pages will exist and be online, and you pay someone a monthly fee to do that. Domain names usually pay a yearly fee in order to register that. Website hosting, you’re usually going to pay a monthly fee. Your website creation software, I told you before, we’re going to want to use a blog software and in order to do the creation where you actually have the blog post content up there. And I’m going to recommend WordPress for that one. So WordPress is completely free right now. I don’t think they plan on charging anything for it in the future, but that is what we’re recommending, and it’s free in order to create your web site. So you want to do that.
And then website tracking software, let’s talk about that too. I also have a free recommendation for your website tracking software, which will help you to find out what is working what is not working and your website, how to make improvements, and things of that nature, and we’ll talk about that here in a minute. And then a last one is your email broadcast software, which we talked little bit about how to use earlier in the webinar. We’re going to talk about what I specifically recommend here, and getting that setup as well. And there are some low-cost and free ones of that too. I’m going to recommend to use those.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for using unique selling propositions in your handyman business to generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright, let’s take a look at the domain names. In order to get a domain name, you’re going need to use the domain name registrar. If you go ahead and contact me on the web site, I’ll show you the domain name registrar that I recommend. Domain names can cost anywhere from, if you’re buying a whole bunch of them in volume, a little less than $10, if you’re doing one at a time, $10 to $20 per year is probably about the range you should except to pay for a domain name. Now, of course you can go and try to buy a domain name that someone else took the time to register, and they’re willing to sell it to you for much larger dollar amount. That is not what I am talking about. What I am talking about is going and getting a brand new domain name directly from the registrar, and it’s going to cost you $10 to $20 per year just to get your domain name. And for those of you that don’t know the domain name is, the domain name would be what people type in on the web in order to find your website. For example, my domain name for my website is “www.LearnToBeRich.com”. So when someone wants to come to my website, they go to their favorite web browser, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, and they would type in “www.LearnToBeRich.com” and that would pull up my website. Yours would be probably something related to your handyman business. Or your name, I would probably recommend that you, well let’s get right into name selection tips. I would probably recommend that you get something that is easily understood when spoken on the phone, having registered, oh boy, probably thousands of domain names over my Internet career, I will tell you that it is extremely important if you are doing any type of offline marketing or any type of marketing you are going to be talking to people on telephone, that you have a domain name that is easy for someone to understand and spell. That may not necessarily be your name. I know that some people have much more complicated names, and they end up spelling that name over and over again, and people mishear them on the phone, and all sorts of stuff like that. So if you have a name like that, don’t use your name. If you have a business name that’s like that, or names that have common misspellings in them, don’t use a domain name that is commonly misspelled, because if you tell someone to do it on the telephone, then you’ve got to tell them how to spell it. So I don’t recommend that. You want to find one that’s really easy to understand when spoken. And I think my domain name has that, although I could be wrong. My impression is that when I say “LearnToBeRich.com,” people know it’s relatively easy to spell, not a lot of hard words in there and people know what to type in. The most confusion I get with my name is some people like to think that it’s got some weird number “two” or just the “B” instead of word “Be,” but it really is spelled out completely Learn-To-Be-Rich-dot-com. Okay, so if you want to have that.
Another way to look at your domain name is, you may want have key words related to what you are doing. So if your primary focus in your handyman business is, “I am a basement refinisher, I finish basements for people,” you may want to include that key word in your domain name. Specifically, if you’re doing it in a certain geographical area, you may want to have your business name (or at least your domain name) be “DenverBasmentRefinishers.com” or “FinishYourBasmentInDenver.com” or something like that, in order to have key words that are relevant to what you would want someone typing into a search engine to find you, As well as words are easy to understand and put in there.
The extension — there is no doubt in my mind that you do not want a “.net,” you don’t want a “.org,” you don’t want a “dot-this,” you don’t want a “.info,” you don’t want anything other then a “.com.” Get a “.com” domain name. Even if you have to go and pick something less than ideal, it is better to have “Joes-handyman-business-in-Denver.com,” that it is to have “JoesHandyman.info.” In my opinion, you want the “.com.” The “.com” is the defacto standard and what people normally associate with domain names, and there’s been an ongoing debate for nearly decade now about, “oh you know but .nets are just as good,” or “.info is just as good,” or “.biz is going to be just as good.” Nope, nothing is just as good as “.com,” get the “.com.” They don’t usually cost you any more to get the “.com” than anything else. They just tend to be the ones that get used up fastest, because those are the good ones. So go after the “.com,” get a good “.com” name, so yes. So use key words, you want a “.com” extension, you want something easy to understand when spoken, no fallen key characters. You don’t want to get, “learn-to-be-rich.com.” You want to get “LearnToBeRich.com,” or you want to get “JoeFix,” or how about “UpgradeMyBathroomInDenver.com,” or “DenverBathroomUpgrades,” or “DenverKitchenUpgrades,” or “DenverFlooringSpecialists,” or “DenverFlooringHandyman,” or something like that. Wherever it is that you are, you may want to do physical location, you may want to do something like that with the key words that you want to come up with.
And by the way, I don’t think I have mentioned this too many places elsewhere, but I’ll take this time to go for it now. And that is the concept of multiple websites and multiple domain names. I have mixed feelings about this subject, so I’ll give you some of the pros and cons and let you make a decision. There are advantages to having a website that focuses only on one type of specialty. However there are disadvantages to having a multiple websites to maintain and multiple websites when trying to rank multiple websites well in search engines. There are people that will tell you, you should have separate websites and separate domain names for each specialty or niche that you’re focusing on. So, if you’re doing some marketing, and you’re targeting real estate agents, and you’re trying to go after the home-preparation, detailing-type business for getting houses ready to sell, you might want to have a website that specializes in that. You may want to have a domain name that specializes in those key word. And when they go to your website, you may only want to be talking about that particular part of your business. There are some benefits to that, I will concede.
However, there are other people that will say, “No, what you need is more of a generic website with your business name, or some of the specialty that you do.” And then you can market to all these different niches automatically, and have all of them go to that one website. There are advantages doing that as well. And I will tell you, my normal feeling, up until six months ago, my normal feeling was: separate website for each niche, separate domain name. You end up owing a lot of domain names, you end up owning a lot of websites, you end up having to maintain a lot of websites in doing that. I tell you, one of our business models, we actually went out and registered 280 domain names for 280 U.S. cities, so that we could focus certain marketing on certain cities that we are doing in a national lead generation campaign. And there were some significant advantages doing that. However, the major downside was that we had to maintain 280 websites, we had pay for 280 domain names, we had to pay for hosting for all those different sites, although we did some combinations and tricky stuff with that. But you needed to do all that. Plus, search engines were trying to index each one of those differently, and that becomes a problem. Because if you have got, and I’m going to get into this later with link-building and things to that nature, but I’ll just give you really basic overview. If you’ve got 280 websites that you’re spreading your marketing out over, well they’re 1/280th as popular as if you have one website was all the marking going to one and all the people linking to one, all the people promoting one. And so there are benefits to having one website, where you’re combining your forces and combining your marketing, and laser-focusing, and really promoting just one.
So, about six months ago, I decided to go to a single website, a single domain name, and so everything I do now is on one domain name. It’s on www.LearnToBeRich.com. So for instance, this particular marketing course, The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing course — you might think I’d go register “HandymanMarketingCourse.com” or something like that, in order to promote that. And there are some of the advantages to doing that, if you came to the site you’d think, “This guy only does handyman marketing courses.” Now, you go to www.LearnToBeRich.com. This course is on there, all the information I have about my business on there. You see that I focus on not just this niche industry, but I also teach marketing to a couple of other of industries. I also do real estate investing personally. So there’s also stuff on there about things of that nature. And you’ll find that it looks more diluted, but now I get all the benefit of all the marketing I am doing for all the different products and services that I offer, all going to that one site. So that one site in itself becomes more popular.
So whether not you decide to do multiple sites for yourself, get multiple domain names, get multiple hosting accounts, or combine them on the single hosting accounts (which you can do in some cases), you should consider whether or not to do that. If it were me, and you were asking me personally sitting down one-on-one, for the overwhelming majority cases I would say get one domain name, get one website. And then you can actually write about everything you do related to that, on that one website. So that’s the multiple-domain-name, multiple-website question and answer, and there are pros and cons. I have done both. Right now, I am doing one and there is a reason why I am doing one. It’s easier to maintain and better for popularity, that one site. So that’s what I would recommend.
Alright, so we talked about name selection tips. Once you get your domain name, you need to configure it to work with your web hosting provider, both the web site itself and also your email. You’re going to want to use your domain name in your email. So, and by the way, I will try to tell you when I am breaking my own rules. And I am breaking my own rule with this one. I do have my email configured to go, so that I think if you email james@LearnToBeRich.com, it comes to me. But when I send out email, I do not send it out with my domain name. Well, most of the time. There are exceptions to that too. Most of the time, I use a Gmail-based account, and it’s for a variety of reasons, but I wanted to keep the emails generic enough that if I’m not doing something specifically related to my business, I could do that. For you, for the most part, you’re going to want to have your email address set up so that you can use “john@DenverHandymanServices.com” or whatever your domain name is, so that it’s customized and you’re promoting your business as you do it. I do have my email address set up so that I can do that; I don’t always remember to do it. But you can set it up and do it all the time, and it’s really not that much work. And I’m probably moving toward that, so I should point that out too. So you want to able to configure your domain name to work with your website, so that when someone types in the domain, it actually points to the web hosting provider and specifically to your website. And also so that it’s configured to work with your email, so that when you want to send and receive emails it’s coming in under your name, or “info,” or “admin,” or “support,” or whatever you want to use at your domain name “.com,” or whatever it is you’re going to do. Okay, so that’s the domain name selection process.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for using unique selling propositions in your handyman business to generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright, welcome back everybody. I am really excited about this particular section. This is part of the world’s greatest handyman marketing course. And right now before lunch, we are going to be talking about websites and online marketing — something that is near and dear to my heart.
The overwhelming majority of the business models I have done in the past have focused a major part of their business with online marketing. So I feel highly qualified to talk to you about this particular section, and I’ve got a lot of really good information to share with you about how to setup your website, how to market your website, and some strategies that I am using now and have used for over a decade now about marketing online businesses.
So let’s get started. We’ve got quite a bit to cover. Looks like the there are probably about 25 slides to go through, so probably a little bit more than an hour’s worth of contents right now to get through. So let’s get started.
Alright, let’s talk about your website. All of your online-, and a lot of your offline-marketing are going to direct people to your website for more information. Your website has got to have some irresistible offers on it to get people to move from just website visitor, to become a prospect, to add themselves to your mailing list, to request information, request special reports, anything like that. So you’ve got to have some really good irresistible offers once they get your website. However, we’ve got to talk about some strategies for getting people to your website as well. So I am going to take some time to walk you through this process of setting up and creating your website. Now I want to point out to you that if you are not comfortable doing this, you don’t want to do it, you can outsource it. You can hire some else do it for you. I also offer a service where I will set up the website for you, so we can talk about that here later too. But let’s walk through the details what you will need to do yourself. I will try to give you everything you need to do it yourself, if you choose to do it, although some people will opt not to, and have someone else do it for them.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for using unique selling propositions in your handyman business to generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright, let’s talk a little bit about how to create some of these different widgets. Because they are important for doing your marketing, and I use widgets a lot, by the way. It is one of the secrets I use to generate tons and tons of leads on a variety of industries. I’ve used this, in just one industry alone, we were using an audio widget, and we were generating on average over a hundred new prospects per day on our website. So, do widgets like special reports work? Absolutely. Now, will you be generating a hundred prospects a day? Probably not, because you are focusing on a very small market. We were focusing on about 300 major markets across the United States, so we were generating approximately one new prospect per three days nationwide doing that. So, to give you an idea of the volume we were doing with just one of these types of widgets — is a special report we are doing.
Okay, so how to create special reports: articles. You can either write them yourself, or you can outsource some. I will talk to you a little bit about outsourcing your writing. Later on I will recommend the actual companies you can use. But basically the idea is that there are a lot of people that are willing to do writing projects, that are looking to do work at home, that could be highly-educated, stay-at-home moms who have time between watching kids and taking care of things at home, and they want to earn some extra money. A very good place for you to get some articles where you can pay a relatively nominal fee, it depends on who you’re getting and how you negotiate it, and where you go, and things of that nature. But on the low end, I’ll tell you what I pay for articles, but I wouldn’t aim for this price range. I am willing to do a lower price, more like $1 per article (low-end). More reasonable would be $5 to $10 an article. If you are doing really high quality technical stuff where they need to do research, it could be a little bit more. But somewhere in that ball-park, $5 to $10, I think is very reasonable for having an article written, especially if you’re doing them in quantity. By the way, the dollar rate is quantity. It’s not “write a single article for a dollar.” It’s too much overhead to do that.
But you can go ahead and do those types of things, and get articles and content written for you. Or you can write it yourself. So, let’s say you know from doing tons and tons of presentations about refinishing kitchens, or remodeling bathrooms, or whatever it is you’re doing, that there are certain number of things or tips that you want to pass onto people. Well go ahead and write an article. “The 10 things you need to know to about (blank).” “Seven ways to improve (whatever it is that you’re talking about).” “Four ways to do this. Four ways to save.” “Avoid nine months of agony doing your own kitchen remodeling. Learn from these tips.” Whatever it is that you’re doing, create special reports that people interested in the project that you can offer would want to request. And then they can read the information and make a decision on whether or not they want to do it themselves or use the information you’ve given them or whether or not they want to hire you and have you do it for them. So those are some great ideas using special reports and articles, and getting people to join your internal database and mailing lists.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for using unique selling propositions in your handyman business to generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright. Let’s talk a little bit about irresistible offers. When you’re making your presentation, your marketing offer to people, you want to make sure that you’re offering something of value, something that is desirable in your marketing message. You want try to make it as irresistible as possible, so that people are compelled to inquire. People are compelled to use you and your service over other people. The more irresistible your offer, the more effective it’s going to be, the more prospects you’re going to get, the bigger your internal list is going to be, and if you continue to offer irresistible offers in your newsletter, you’re not going to have any problem generating business. But the key is to come up with irresistible offers that make sense for you.
Now, what are you offering in your marketing message? It could be direct product or service, it could be an hourly-rate type of situation; it could be a fixed-rate type of situation where you’re saying “I’ll do this project for X number of dollars.” You could also package your prices and services, it could be a full basement refinish, it could be a full kitchen refinish, it could be “we’ll do the flooring, we’ll prepare your house for rent, we’ll do tenant cleanup, we’ll take care of tenant calls,” whatever else you could offer. Those are a variety of packages of products or services you could offer. You could also be offering a free or low-cost consultation to get people to request you come out and do a bid, and then get face to face your presentation, show your testimonials, build credibility, make sure that they know that that they can trust you, and then convert them to paying clients. So that can be an offer you’re making.
Another one that a lot of people overlook, especially a handyman, is the concept of offering free information or a special report, or an audio download or a video download, or something else of value in order to get more people to inquire, get them on your internal mailing list and then follow up with them automatically with your newsletter. Built credibility, build trust, make sure they know that they can trust you, and they are more likely to do business with you, through free information requests. So, what’s one way that you can make a very irresistible offer to somebody who might be considering refinishing or redoing their bathroom? Well, one way you can do it is “the seven things you need to know about refinishing your bathroom.” Or, “Six traps to avoid when refinishing your bathroom.” Or, “How to save money refinishing your bathroom.” Some type of special report, whether that’s an audio, video, or article, any type of free information. You know that somebody who requests that information from you is interested in refinishing their bathroom, and there is a chance that they are thinking about doing it themselves, but there is also a chance that they have not completely decided and that they may consider hiring someone to do part or all of the job. Especially if your information that they get consists of great tips for doing it themselves, but also points out what you offer that they might not otherwise be able to do for themselves. Or you can make a value proposition showing them why having you do it is better value then having them do it themselves. So those are some examples of irresistible offers, ways to offer things that you want to increase response rate in your marketing.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Learn what marketing to use and how to improve it to maximize your return on investment and massively improve profitability with “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course.”
