Here’s a great tip from the guys at Brownbook on how to effectively use video to drive traffic.

Video has opened up a whole new way to present your business to prospective customers.  But many business owners don’t know how to get it working for them.  The biggest question is one of quality, and how good is ‘good’.  Big businesses want to make an epic, and small businesses just think they do.  They’re both wrong.  Savvy consumers today see through glossy marketing videos.  Here’s what you do: Whether you’re big or small, get a handcam, point it at the CEO or business owner, and get them to TALK about their business.  Keep it short – less than 2 minutes – and avoid multiple takes.  In most cases us consumers want to see you in the raw, without all that high production; we want to see you, hear you, KNOW you.  Then we’ll trust you – and if we trust you we’ll buy.

FYI: Brownbook is a great resource that’s free and gets results from the search engines. You can add photos, videos and more on your company’s listing. And if you don’t have a website, you can use your Brownbook profile as your home on the web.

Here’s a very useful tip that I use ALL the time. Instead of calling my cell phone provider to get a phone number:

I call:
1-800-GOOG-411

• It’s quick
• You can receive a text to add to your phone’s contacts
• You can even get a map showing the area around the business.
• And it’s FREE

To see other useful tips, check back often.
Quick Tips for Contractor Marketing #1 & #2

There are literally thousands of helpful, time saving tips. Any one of these tips could save you hours of time in a given year.

I’ll post these tips daily, so check back often

Contractor Marketing Tip #1 - Use military time to quickly enter hours in a website.

I’m constantly updating client’s directory listings on websites like YellowPages.com, InsiderPages, Yelp and others. Some allow you to enter your  business hours once and apply to all checked off days. And then there are others, where you must physically enter the hours for every day that you are opened.

So here’s the Quick Tip: Enter your time using the 24 hour standard(i.e., 500=5am, 1700=5pm, 1830=6:30pm, etc.). In most cases this will get you to the exact time without having to scroll through a long list.

And as a bonus…

Quick Tip #2 – Send a Text message with email.

Sometimes it’s helpful to send a text to a client via email. The reason you would do this is to keep a record of the text in your email box.

To send a text via email you need to know the phone number and the mobile phone service of your customer. And for that matter, you can also use this tip to send a text message out to your employees in the field.