• New & Recurring Customers
• Search Engine Visibility

This is an IMPORTANT CONCEPT! Too often companies spend a significant amount of money on having a website built only to have it gather dust and disappear into the abyss.

There are two main reasons this occurs:

1. New competitors entering the internet. Dilution
2. The search engine (SE) placement of your website is based on the frequency of visits, among other factors. If your website doesn’t have a continual stream of new content, the search engines have no reason to visit.

A blog (a contraction of the term “web log“)[1] is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order.

A blog is a container for all types of different content separated into categories and tags. It allows a single piece of content to appear to a search engine multiple times. Hence, multiple instances indexed by the search engines.

Simply put, an article about a special for a new product sold in your local store can appear as:

• product + location (i.e., widgets roseville)
• product + special (discount widgets)
• product + manufacturer (manufacturer widget)
• product (widget)
• etc.

The point here is, one article (post) turns into 4 different search results.

This concept is the reason websites built like company brochures are DEAD. Blogging is a very powerful method to insure your website remains current and on top of the search engine results.

Some ideas for content for your website are:

• New products
• Safety tips
• Industry news
• Partner news
• Community events
• Completed projects
• Case studies
• Before and after’s
• Client testimonials
• Top 10 Questions (FAQ’s)
• A detailed explanation of a question
• How To Guides
• Helpful advice
• Daily Specials
• Customer of the Month
• Safety recalls
• etc.

The rest of this article will explain adding content to your WordPress enabled website. If you don’t have a WordPress or similar website, you might want to read my article “The WordPress Revolution for Small Business Owners.” Another great resource – How To Create Content For Your Website is FREE to download and provides 4 things you should know.

Static versus Dynamic Content

Most websites are a combination of static and dynamic information. Static information rarely changes. Examples of static content are: About Us, Contact Info, Services, and more. Dynamic information is constantly changing: specials, events, testimonials, projects, etc.

WordPress Pages & Posts

In WordPress, static content is handled in the Pages component. Pages are typically used in your website’s main navigation or tabs.

Dynamic information in WordPress is administered vial the Post interface. This is the blogging component of WordPress. Unlike pages, posts are displayed in the main navigation as a single tab. To navigate the blog, an additional navigation structure of categories is used.

Depending on your website’s setup, your blog tab can be named as Blog, Articles, News for a few. The navigation of your blog will typically be shown in the sidebar of your website and not in the main navigation.

“To add content to your website via the blog you will use Posts”

Key Elements of a Post

To be effective, a post must contain:

• your primary keywords (search term)
• location
• 2 – 3 paragraphs
• a picture
• multiple categories
• and, a Call To Action

Steps To Writing a Post

1. Create the Headline – The headline must include your keywords! It must be interesting. Must draw attention from your audience.Some examples…
   10 Things You Should Know About _________
   New __________ installed in __________ Home
   Incredible Savings On _____________
   _____________ Supports Our _____________ Community
   While Supplies Last __________, On Sale Now
2. Write a couple of paragraphs about your main topic, headline. Remember, short and sweet, 3-5 sentences per paragraph.
3. Finish the post with another paragraph summarizing the topic and include a CALL TO ACTION.

Pretty simple stuff!

I can’t emphasize enough, the most important part of anything you put on your website…

A CALL TO ACTION!

A call to action is what you would like your visitors to do next. This could be a:

• Call for an appointment
• Schedule an estimate
• Sign up for a newsletter
• Print a coupon
• refer your company, etc.

We have discussed the importance of having fresh content for your website, and the differences between static and dynamic content. In WordPress, Pages are static and Posts are the dynamic component to your website. Creating content to post should take no more than 15 minutes of your time. The rewards for your efforts will be increased search engine visibility and new traffic to your website.

How to post to your website is revealed in a quick video HomeBuildR.Net/Videos If you like what you have read, leave a comment below or share with your friends. Please don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter. It’s free and a great resource.

Just added: Free Downloadable Guide – How To Create Content For Your Website

One of the biggest hurdles that general contractors have to get past is the trust factor. Are we who we say we are? Will we do what we say we will do? Can we produce what we say we can produce? As a contractor we expect a total stranger to call us, schedule to meet, enter their home or business, tear something apart, then rebuild it to look awesome. That’s asking a lot from someone we just met or talked to on the phone.

That’s what it is all about in the service business – trust.

Today the property owner has ways of getting to know the contractor before ever meeting them face-to-face.

Thanks to social networks like Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter, the general contractor can be “checked out” long before ever meeting him. Before the internet boom, you had a square box in the yellow pages, or a flyer shoved into your door as a first impression to the contractor.

Today we can look at companies and people in a different way. We can see the contractors work, comments they have posted, who they associate with – and maybe that trust can be increased a little by getting to know them better. And there is more that we can do.

In searching for the right contractor that you can trust you probably want someone near you. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way that we could finding someone that we could trust nearby. There are ways to look up general contractors in your area. Here are a few popular sites.

Google , Yahoo, and Bing all have local search directories. Yelp is another. These local searches may help pinpoint contractors near you to help get started on your quest for the trusted contractor. Are there any other ways to finding a service business? Many more. How about the most trusted source of finding a contractor ever – Word-Of-Mouth.

That’s right, people are most comfortable getting a referral based on what their friends and family have experienced. Someone they know has already tried using the contractor and was happy with the results. Don’t have friends and family that have used a general contractor?

Example: Customer Testimonials

Maybe the contractor has a list of past customers for you to contact. Don’t be afraid to make contact with the past customers, it may help you build that trust. And in this business, trust is very important to both you and the general contractor.

What is Social Media?

Social media essentially is a category of online media where people are talking, participating, sharing, networking, and bookmarking online. Most social media services encourage discussion, feedback, voting, comments, and sharing of information from all interested parties.

It’s more of a two-way conversation, rather than a one-way broadcast like traditional media. Another unique aspect of social media is the idea of staying connected or linked to other sites, resources, and people. – Ron Jones, SearchEngineWatch.com

Why do you care?

FaceBook is the internet’s number one most visited website, exceeding Google Search. It’s rapid growth is explosive. Started in 2004 in a dorm room at Harvard, it was a way for a group of college kids to interact. Today, FaceBook is the definition of how customers are interacting with companies. It’s real time, and social. Companies can no longer dismiss it as just another time suck! Yes, I did say that Let’s face it, we all want results without wasting our time. How would you like to grow your business like this?

FaceBook allows people to connect with friends and associates on a professional and personal level.
On a personal level, you create a profile for all to see for the purposes of:

• sharing with family and friends*
• with members of special interest groups
  (small business owners, religious, hobby, sports, political, etc.)

This information can be shared with a select group of friends or everyone who stumbles upon your profile.
On a professional level, FaceBook is used to promote your company. Through advertisements, company updates, photos of your work and ongoing conversations to your connected fans.** Most importantly, it’s a tool to drive visitors to your company’s website.

3 Major Componets of FaceBook

Personal Profile – Your FaceBook Account
Groups - Network of like minded individuals sharing a common interest
Pages – Your company’s profile.

Implementation

1. Setup a FaceBook account
   • Personal email and password
   • Add a photo of yourself
   • A brief bio
   • Add info about where you went to school, your work, hobbies, etc.
   • Do you want to share this information publically or privately?
   • Do you want to be updated via email, text messaging, or when you are online?
   • Send out invites to people in your address book.
2. Setup a FaceBook Page
   • Create a business profile complete with logos, photos, contact information, etc.
   • Invite all who will help you to spread the word about your company.
   • Invite customers and associates to interact with your company by offering special discounts, event invitations, cross promotions, etc.
     Cross promotions – is a non traditional approach to expanding your company’s reach. As an example, let’s say you have a favorite hair salon or barber you frequent. Tell your friends and colleagues about their wonderful service. In turn, they will do the same.
3. Connect with Groups
   • Join other groups, this can be both professional and personal.
Note: This is not necessary to get started.

Conclusion

It’s time to embrace social media as a means to gain credibility and authority for you and your business. With active participation, you will be able to promote your company and gain new customers. Additionally, you will be able to increase your sales to existing customers by offering additional products and services that they might be aware you offer. Lastly, you will be able to expand your network to industries and other companies who’s customers would benefit from your products and services.

WARNING: Don’t let this scare you, by thinking it will take time away from your busy schedule. There are tools available to integrate with your company’s website and cell phone to make this as painless and non-techie as possible.

FaceBook is a necessary ingredient to business survival. Having a business website will not get you customers without promotion.

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Download your FREE copy of 3 Components of FaceBook mind map (Adobe pdf).

The combination of various factors attribute to your website’s decreased visibility.

• Fresh content
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Saturation

While these terms may seem “Greek” to most small business owners, once explained they are really quite simple to comprehend.

To understand, you must first have an idea of the basic concept of how customers find your company on the internet. One of these methods is called Direct Traffic. This is where one of your customers enters your website into the address bar of their browser.

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users to easily navigate their browsers to related resources. Wikipedia
Common Browsers – Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, Blackberry

A second method of web site traffic is Referring Sites. A good example, is any internet Yellow Page site. A customer will search for your company and will be directed back to your website via a link.
And the third most common way is via the search engines, Organic. This method by far has the greatest potential for new clients. The 5 biggest search engines are (listed by percentage of users): Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, & AOL.

To rank highly on these sites, a website must be optimized. Optimization in a nutshell, is the process of catering your web pages’s information for it to be found vial the search terms commonly used by your audience (clients).
Books are written on just this topic alone. Let me give you a quick example. If you were selling “spark plugs”, a web page devoted to spark plugs would have to compete with all the major brands – Bosch, Champion, AC Delco, etc. That is only the beginning! Add to that, all of the major auto parts stores – Napa, Kraegen, Pep Boys, etc. The likelihood that your website will be on page one of the search engines is ZERO!
On the other hand, if you had a page that discussed the benefits of “Bosch BMW Spark Plugs” your chances of ranking increase. Taken one step further, what if you had a page listing all of your brands and wrote specifically about “Spark Plugs in Reno Nevada”? A number one page ranking for consumers looking to purchase a spark plug in Reno, NV would now be within reach. (This practice of targeting longer phrases to drive traffic is commonly referred to Longtail Marketing)

Search Engine Optimization allows your potential clients to find you.

Another factor that has been responsible for decreased traffic to your website is saturation. The percentage of your competitors with websites has been exponentially increasing. Added to this is the number of competitors who were once called associates. Many companies struggling to survive have added services and products that were once outsourced to companies like your own.

Critical Things You Must Do To Generate Traffic To Your Website

1. Provide Fresh Content - Every time you update your website, the search engines have a reason to come back and visit. With increased visits, you will have more pages from your website listed on the search engines. Quick question, how likely will your website be found if you are only listed once for a given search term? Versus, having 10 or more pages for an equivalent search?
   Contractors and other small businesses that work with a consistent flow of new clients have an easy means of adding multiple pages for a given search. This is accomplished by blogging or discussing a completed job in one or two paragraphs. You can read more about this tactic in the article WordPress Revolution for Small Business Owners.
   To emphasize my point, let’s just say you bought a brand new home. You move in and do nothing! The landscape quickly overgrows, the dirt and debris accumulate and very quickly your new home looks like manure.
   Are you expecting different results with your website?
2. Authority - To gain the status of an authority in any market, there must be others willing to recommend and promote your products and services. Newspaper articles, television appearances, referrals and the likes, help establish you and/or your company as an authority.
In today’s market we can not overlook the authority given by user review (Yelp, Angies List, Google reviews, etc.) and social media site (MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) Take a moment to look at any local search business listing on Google. Those companies with the most user reviews, consistently rank the highest (are displayed at the top of the list.)
3. Get your site listed!

When working with clients, I have found many to have a pretty website that is showing up on one of the major search engines, but not the others. What about all of those other potential clients that aren’t using the search engine that your website is listed?

And that is just a start! You need to have your company listed in not just the search engines, but social media sites, internet yellow directories, business directories, and with mobile search GPS and local directories.

Why is this important? Imagine for a moment, you have a stunning billboard offering a $100 dollars to anyone that calls. You’d be overwhelmed with phone calls! But is that really true? What if your billboard was on some dusty one lane road in the middle of the Arizona desert?

Same scenario, you now have 50 of the same billboards in all 50 of the top cities in the US (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, …) What do you think your phone traffic will be like now?

Listing your company and website in multiple locations in the internet is like having those 50 billboards!
The downside, is this can be time consuming and expensive to accomplish. I know too well the time it takes to just list in one directory. For me, it takes about 5 minutes per site. And I have all the tools to get it done quickly via copy and paste, etc.

Good news, you can accomplish this yourself with patience and time. Or you can have our construction marketing agency do the work for you for an incredibly low price.
Enough of the self promotion…

Let’s recap: Your website’s traffic is constantly being eroded by increased number of competitors (Saturation)
More importantly, smarter competitors who understand the value and necessity of a holistic approach to on and off line marketing.

3 of the most important things you can do to ensure your website is being found by your potential clients

• Update your site often
• Capture reviews from your clients
• List your website in as many quality locations as possible
  WARNING: If you are selling water heaters, listing your site on a kitchen gadget sales page, won’t get you noticed BUT it will hurt you.

Be sure to visit us often for great free tips and advice on marketing your company on and offline. Sign up for FREE for our newsletter with other great tips and advice.
We are always welcome to your comments, questions and feedback. You may comment by clicking the link below.

• Sustainability: Your Business’s Best Defense Against Recession … – This is a guest post by Kevin Wilhelm. Kevin is the Chair of the Seattle Chamber’s Sustainability Committee, an Advisory Board Member to the Center for Sustainable Business, and is an adjunct faculty at Antioch University-Seattle where …

It almost goes without saying, when you are working on a job you typically put up a sign in the front yard. Why stop with your website?

Construction Marketing 101 tells us that we need to advertise our company. We all rely on a few tools.

• Business Cards
• Truck signs
• Yellow Page Ads
• Street signs

Why? …

We do these things to promote our business! We pass out cards to acquaintances, friends, associates and other businesses.

Our company vehicles pass 100s’ of potential clients every day hoping to catch the attention of an interested buyer.

We spend good money placing our ad in the Yellow Pages. Because we know the phone company will distribute 1000s’ of directories into our local markets.

Lastly, we proudly display a yard sign in front of a home or business where we are working.

Again I ask, why?

We do these things because we want to gain exposure to our companies and the services we provide.

I’m sure some of you have heard about the power of Ophrah. A recommendation from Ophrah is a ticket to best seller list for books, your own TV show or celebrity status. Getting Ophrah’s stamp of approval produces far greater results than the time tested Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

We are ALL GUILTY by not promoting our company’s website.

It occurs to me, we all recognize the need to have a website. What we don’t realize, having a website doesn’t guarantee results.

The missing element is promotion!

Having a stack of business cards doesn’t gain you new clients if you don’t pass them out.

Driving your company vehicle around with out your company’s name and phone number won’t get you calls.

Then why do some of us not at least use a street sign? Yes, there are some HOA’s (Home Owner Associations) that don’t allow it. And so too, they can be costly to produce. That shouldn’t stop you. One sign can generate you new calls. One call and you are able to harvest a ROI (Return On Investment) 10 or more times.

Everything we do as business owners has to be evaluated based on our returns. Having a website and not promoting it produces no returns!

In my last article, I discussed the WordPress Revolution. WordPress is a tool to use for your own website.

• Automated traffic generation
• Ease of Use
• Ability to syndicate your content.
• and more

We need to promote our websites to get traffic!

So how do we promote our website?
We enhance what we already do. Our business cards, truck signs, yard signs and yellow pages should list your website.
We make sure our websites can be found by people searching the internet. We do this by ensuring our sites are optimized for the search engines.

We provide fresh content to keep the search engines coming back.

We syndicate our content.
Let me briefly explain. we’ve all heard of the AP (Associated Press). This is a news service where all the traditional media use to capture new content. From radio, television, newspapers and the like, all rely on AP for breaking news.

And here is the POWER of SYNDICATION. One person writes an article, one time, one place and literally within seconds, it is distributed to millions of potential publishers.

Your company can leverage the internet to gain similar results.

We develop an ongoing conversation with our clientele. Whether it’s a customer we built a home for twenty years ago to an interested lead. We need to engage.

We engage these people with two main methods:

Email marketing

Social Media

RECAP: Evaluate what’s missing with your current efforts to promote your company.

Do you even have a website?
If not, you need one to survive. ROI 10x or more in 1st year returns.

Is your website on your…

Business Cards?
Truck Signs?
Yellow Page Ads?
Street Signs?

Are you promoting your website? Or is it gathering dust in the corner?

Feel free to comment on this article. If you would like further information on our service and would like a free consultation by clicking the CALL ME NOW button on the right or by going to our contact form. Otherwise, please sign up for our email newsletter. And as a bonus, we will send you a copy of our eBook 2 Easy Steps You Can Do NOW To Generate Leads

Here’s to your success and survival!

I will introduce to you a technology that’s easy to use, maintain and gets results! But before we get into the details let me give you a little history.

Gone are the days, when business owners would belly up to the bar and pay a web designer to build a website.

Why? Because pretty websites don’t get you noticed!

The way business advertise and market has radically changed. Yellow pages simply don’t work. Can I hear an Amen, bothers and sisters?

Brochure sites are dead. What do I mean by a “brochure site?”  Most websites built are ones that I consider to be a brochure site. Nice layout, good content and pretty pictures. But like a brochure, it’s rare we redesign our company’s brochures. We see this with our suppliers, some come out with a new catalog annually, while others simply add sales sheets when a new products are added. Keeping their same ole catalog for  multiple years. We only wish the prices would remain that constant.

At least with pricing, you can print in black and white with 100s of line items per page.

The dirty little secret that seems to get no attention is…

Most websites are built by web designers with expensive programs like DreamWeaver and the likes. Any changes you would like to make requires a call back to your web design company. Which always takes time and money.

In the end, we all have heard stories from business owners that have a website and not traffic!

No traffic is a direct result of not providing fresh content for your site. Mind you there are other way’s of driving traffic to your site. PPC(Pay Per Click) advertising, article marketing, social media(FaceBook and Twitter come to mind) and others.

Which brings me to the point of this article…

The WordPress Revolution

WordPress is a widely known in the blogosphere as the number one blogging software.

WordPress has grown from a blogging platform into a fully functional CMS(Content Management System) Briefly, CMS’s separate the presentation from the content of your website. Website pages consist of a design elements such as graphics and layouts(presentation),and content: headlines, paragraphs, links and such. With CMS, you can change the entire look of a website without changing the content. CMS’s are database driven. Information is stored in a database and combined with the template or presentation layer by the CMS.

In contrast, using the services of a web designer and their high-end programs creates individual, static web pages. Each web page is a single file. Adding new pages creates more files. This has been sufficient for small “brochure type sites(< 20 pages.) Remember, brochure sites don’t get you traffic! No traffic = no new clients.

With the rapid transfer of business advertising from traditional methods(print, media, direct, etc.) to web or internet based advertising and marketing. The competition is exponentially greater than it had been even last year.

If you are not constantly updating our website you will be buried by the sandstorm of competitors and websites that do.

WordPress not only allows you to easily make changes, WordPress also allows you to automate the traffic generation to your website.

Why WordPress?

• Easy to update
• Over 8,000 plugins to extend and automate your website
• It’s search engine friendly, out of the box
• Thousands of competent developers, designers and a huge community of active members willing to help
• It’s FREE

WordPress is revolutionizing the way websites are built. With WordPress, you too can easily update and add content to your website. I like to tell my clients, many of whom are contractors who spend the majority of the time working in the field and not on a computer…

If you can type a Word document or send an email, you too can update your website.

Why is this important? When you post new content on your website, it is possible to automate notification to 100’s of websites. But, most importantly, it tells the major search engines(Google, Yahoo, Bing and others) to come back and visit your site because, you have something new to show.

And that my friends is why the brochure type site is dead! If you are not updating your site regularly, the search engines stop visiting. When they stop visiting, your site is destined to disappear into the abyss.

WordPress has revolutionized the internet and the way websites are built. If you would like to learn more about our design services, please visit us SiteDesign.HomeBuildR.net

We’ve all heard about Twitter, but as business owners who haven’t adopted this tool for increasing traffic to their website here is some good news.

Twitter is one of the fastest growing websites in the world. As of November 2009 Twitter is now one of the top 50 sites on the internet.

One of the hottest use cases for Twitter, as you well know, is businesses communicating with their customers or potential customers. CNET News

So what’s my point? Twitter is a great way to drive traffic to your website. Without going into the specifics of how to accomplish this, I would like to introduce those Twitter users to a new service that helps them get more followers. This service is TweetLarge. TweetLarge is a Twitter service that will send you 1000 follower’s for free. With more followers, your company’s reputation increases thereby helping to gain your company additional notoriety.

And the best part, it will take less than 10 minutes to implement.

Go to TweetLarge.com and follow the 3 easy steps, and you too can have 1000 new followers for FREE.

And for those of you wondering why I haven’t been posting fresh ideas for your business marketing, my time over the past month has been helping a group of contractors network together to gain new business for the New Year. That is the bad news, the good news is my goal is to post 60 new articles over the next 60 days. So check back often to see how I’m doing and feel free to leave comments on the information I provide to help your business survive in these tough economic times.

Conversations on marketing are all too often “Academic” for contractors, working in the field appeals more to us than in the office. This article is a great resource for a glimpse at some of the patterns we are guilty of in our businesses. To help you understand, I have added personal comments in red. – HomeBuildR

Mistake #1: Lack of Marketing Mindset!

Most professionals shiver with disgust on a mere thought of having to promote and sell their service because they are confused what marketing and selling really is.

Regardless of how good you are at what you do if you can’t get enough visibility and not enough people are interested in your products and services, you’ll have a mediocre business at best and always struggle to stay afloat.

You are in business to solve other people’s problems profitably, and marketing helps you “get exposed” to more people and make them “hungry” for your solutions.

Make a commitment to become a life-long student of marketing and continually apply what you learn. Soon your business will soar.

Mistake #2: Spraying and Praying!

Poor strategic planning, lack of clearly defined target market, niche and ideal client result in confusing marketing messages and costly “hit and miss” promotional tactics that fail to deliver the desired response.

Evaluate who your best clients are and invest time, effort, and money into only those strategies that help you best reach the largest number of prospects who can potentially become your ideal clients.

The more precise and targeted your promotions become, the more successful and profitable your business will be.

A great example, sending out mailers to a zip code with out identifying your potential clients first. It makes no sense to me to send a mailer out to homeowners that already have a swimming pool in their backyard when I’m looking to build new ones.

Mistake #3: Confusing Marketing with Sales!

Before you can have a paid client you must have a prospect. And before you have a prospect you must have a lead!

Lack of effective, systematic lead generation strategies, and trying to jump from “stranger to client” keeps the business pipeline very dry for most service professionals!

Make lead generation one of the core activities of your business. The bigger you can build the database of qualified prospects the more relaxed you’ll be about the future of your business.

You’ll also become more effective in pursuing only those potential clients who are the best match for you – resulting in creating a more fulfilling business for you and better results for your clients.

Sales happen when you market well.

Mistake #4: Under- or Over-Spending!

Without knowing the value of each client there is no appropriate marketing budget. Promotional efforts are abandoned all together, or there is too much money wasted on tactics that eat up all potential profits.

Track each customer’s spending habits. Over a period of time you’ll be able to determine the value each customer represents to your business. This number is critical in your marketing efforts. Without it you never know how much you can really afford to invest in your new client acquisition strategies.

Mistake #5: Failing to Keep In Touch!

A lack of consistent contact causes valuable client relationships to suffer, and results in increased attrition and permanently lost sales.

At times we all forget that people buy when they are ready not when we need to make a sale. Developing ways to keep in touch with prospects and clients generates six-figure windfalls for me every single year.

Often my clients reveal to me that they have been reading my tips for years before ever investing a dime in one of my products.

Start an ezine. Send out a monthly postcard. Write and publish an article a month. Start a blog. Host a monthly teleseminar. Get into podcasting. Whatever your method – find a way to frequently and regularly connect with current, potential, and past clients.

Real estate agents do an excellent job with this, every year they will send out magnetic calendars for their past clients. I often amazed how many of these calendars are on refrigerators in the homes I visit.

Mistake #6: Refusing to Brand Yourself as an Expert!

A close relative to “spraying and praying.” Being a Jack (or Jane) of all trades confuses your potential clients and diminishes the perceived value of your services and products.

Analyze your strengths and the market you serve. Can you identify a specific service or product that is more popular than others you offer and that you are really good at and passionate about? Can you notice a trend that some clients tend to get better results with you than others?

If so, make a conscious effort to position yourself as an expert who offers only specific solutions to specific audience and in the upcoming months and years become better than anyone else at doing it.

Most of us prefer do deal with experts. So the time and effort you invest in positioning yourself as one will pay huge dividends; you’ll effectively differentiate yourself from others offering a similar service, and gain a competitive advantage that’s nearly impossible to beat!

Mistake #7: Engaging In Price Competition!

Failure to properly position and differentiate your services from competitors forces professionals to sell their skilled service at too low, “hours-for-dollars” rates.

Often prospects can’t tell the difference between one service provider and another and base their decision to price alone.

Unless you don’t mind being treated as a commodity and making only a fraction of the money you really could me making, you should take steps to clearly communicate you HUB (Hot Undeniable Benefits) of doing business with you.

Mistake #8: “Winging it” Sales Process!

Not understanding the proper syntax of an enrollment conversation, most professionals practice the “show up and throw up” sales method, which easily turns off even the most eager potential clients.

Develop a set of five to ten “must-have-answered” questions that illustrates your expertise and ensures you this prospect is the right type of client for you.

It’s important to remember this: While you are engaging in sales conversations about your product or service all the time, your potential clients only do it once in a while and they rely on you to guide them through this process.

Don’t disappoint them and rob them of opportunity to work with you by being lousy at closing the deal!

Mistake #9: Over-Depending On Referrals!

Not knowing the difference between getting referrals and a strategically developed word-of-mouth marketing system many professionals can’t understand why satisfied clients don’t refer them to friends and colleagues and they don’t know how to solve this problem.

Your good clients want to refer you to their friends they often don’t know how to do it. Unsure about how aggressive you’ll be in pursuing the contacts they give you, they prefer the safer option of not giving it to you at all.

Know when it’s best to approach clients about referrals (hint – it’s not at the end of your engagements!). Educate them about your follow-up process to make them at ease with your practice. Those two simple tweaks alone will make a huge difference in your “referral-ability”.

You probably wouldn’t be reading this, if you were not guilty of relying on referrals as your sole method of lead generation. It’s Shocking, how many contractors stick with referrals as their main way of getting leads, as if it were a badge of honor.

Mistake #10: Misusing Technology!

Many professionals mistakenly assume that “internet is a business”. They either refuse to get into “that business” all together and miss out on huge marketing possibilities, or try to convert their business to be 100% internet based. Both are costly mistakes.

Savvy professionals recognize new business development opportunities that internet makes possible so they make online marketing an important part of their strategy, but they don’t drop everything else.

Employ the power of online marketing to make your business easier to find, and to keep in touch with current and potential clients. But also give your promotions a healthy “multi-dimensional” appeal with offline strategies like postcards and phone calls and watch your business explode.

Mistake #11: Being a Lone Ranger and a Super Hero!

Lack of delegation skills, not having a support team, and working alone without access to a community of like-minded peers who are committed to our success diminishes the opportunity to creatively brainstorm new ideas, explore new opportunities, or uncover blind-spots.

Admittedly, lack of good delegating skills is my personal biggest vice I continue to work on. It’s also what keeps most professionals and entrepreneurs from building a more successful business.

I’m finding that better planning, reminding myself of the value of my time, and constantly improving my delegation skills is very helpful.

Also, forming my personal board of advisors (mastermind) and being able to seek their counsel when needed is very powerful tool to keeps me focused and on track to achieve my business goals.

Mistake #12: Lack of Business and Marketing Systems!

Too much creativity negatively impacts profitability. Constantly working on new one-shot strategies and reinventing the wheel results in larger than necessary workload, overwhelm, and diminished profits.

Remember that many of your business growth strategies can become more profitable as you implement them again and again and tweak and perfect them over a period of time.

Bigger payoffs can be generated from focusing on one strategy, optimizing it for best results, and systemizing and automating it than from chasing a half a dozen of ideas that never get fully implemented.

Make it one of your business goals to create systems that can be duplicated, automated, or delegated and free your time to focus on money-making aspects of your business – like improving your marketing and generating more leads.

Whether you have a website or not. You are on the internet! Homeowners are increasingly turning to the internet for advice and reviews. Websites like Yelp, Angie’s List, Merchant Circle, Facebook and Twitter have become rich sources of information.

I don’t know about you, but when was the last time you flipped open the yellow pages? For me, unless I have seen of, or heard of, a particular company in my area, it is rare for me to get a number from the book.

Most consumers these days without the advice of family and friends, turn towards the internet as their primary source for research.

Which brings me back to the websites like Yelp and the others. These websites have one thing in common, they provide consumer reviews for restaurants, companies and service providers.

The chances are your construction company has a listing and you may have reviews.

Without getting into a lot of techie mumbo jumbo, you need to take the following 5 Simple Steps. In future articles, I will explain for you the merits of each service and how best to position your company.

1. Get a Gmail Account
   Gmail is a web based email service that you can sign up for free! With a Gmail account you will have access to
   • Google’s Local Business Center – Local Directory and Map functions for local searches
   • Analytics – Provides valuable information on your website’s traffic
   • and more
2. Take Charge of Your Company’s Listing on YelpYelp is rapidly becoming the premier source for user reviews and business listings on the internet.With a Yelp Business Owner’s Account, you can upload photos and logos, highlight featured services that your company provides and other useful information for your clients.A powerful feature for you, the business owner, is you can see how many times potential customers are viewing your listing.
3. MerchantCircle Provides a free listing for business owners. Here you can edit your business listing to show hours of operation, highlight services and offer coupon specials.
4. InsiderPages Simply put, another business directory with user reviews. But what I really like about this service is you can solicit, even bribe your customers into giving you a review. Unlike most review/directory sites like Yelp, who frowns on solicited reviews. InsiderPages encourages it!
5. Capture Your Twitter Username Twitter has had explosive growth even to the point that advertisers poke fun at the cliche type messages people post (called Tweets.) Well I’m not going to tell you to start Tweeting your diet. I will tell you, Twitter has an important business aspect which I will delve into in a future post. Realize too, companies like Milwaukee Tool, Porter Cable, Greenlee and others all have Twitter accounts. The important thing right now is to at least capture your username before you lose it forever.

So there you have it. 5 Simple Steps to promote your business on the internet.

Be sure to sign up for our updates in the top right hand corner of our website. We will be actively posting similar articles to help you gain more customers. In addition to the articles, we are in the process of creating step by step videos to walk you through the steps we recommend.

The last thing I want to do is overwhelm you in the techie mumbo jumbo. You will be able to accomplish these steps and many more without the need to spend the Big Bucks to have someone else do it for you. In the end, for a little bit of time and effort, you to can be well on your way to having more customers and money in your pocket.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Vogel, founder of HomeBuildR, helps Residential Contractors and Small Business Owners attract more clients. Be sure to sign up for email updates and lots of free tools for your business.

NOTE: Are you looking for fresh content for your ezine or website? Feel free to reprint this article as long as it’s kept intact and unaltered (including the “about the author” info at the end), and you send a copy of your reprint or link to david@homebuildr.net