Soap Warehouse Blog

Many times when I am speaking with customers on the phone I ask them if they will be attending a conference, roundtable or convention that is coming up in the industry. And more often then not I get the response “No”. When I ask why they will say things like; “It would cost me too much”, “I can’t take the time away from my business, or I work by my self”, “I have never been to a convention”, “If I was not here my crews wouldn’t do the jobs right.”

So when is the last time to you spent the time and money to improve the way you do business? Took a refresher course or class to learn a new skill set? Networked with peers? These types of activities should not be considered a luxury for your business; they should be a necessity, just like your equipment and labor.

Here are some major selling points on why you should attend these types of events.

• ·Learn first hand from industry experts that have successfully implemented business solutions in your industry
• ·Keep up to date on new and emerging products and methods
• ·Create or increase your professional network
• ·Learn talking points to communicate more effectively with customers
• ·Get immediate ideas, answers and solutions to issues within your industry and business
• ·Learn new and profitable marketing techniques
• ·Meet new vendors that can decrease expense and increase revenue 
• ·Hear new product announcements
• ·Visit multiple vendors in one location
• ·Get answers directly from vendors about products  
• ·See demonstrations of equipment or products in action
• ·Do comparison shopping
• ·Talk with others who are using a product or service you are researching

Conference events offer opportunities to expand your knowledge base, improve your skills and network with others in your field.  You can find out what your peers are doing, what the new trends in the industry are, and where there’s room for improvement. Learn what involvement role you can be in to help your industry as a whole.

At these events, you can participate in special sessions specifically designed to stimulate your personal and professional growth.  These can help you increase your ability to do a job, learn how to influence others through communication and marketing skills plus help you develop a personal brand that is distinctly your own while vastly improving your chances for success.    

You’ll have the opportunity to meet some top-dogs in your field.  You’ll get to ask them what keeps them motivated and rejuvenated on the job.  Through them, you can glean valuable insight on their journey to the top.  Conference’s and Convention’s are your golden opportunity to cultivate relationships with these industry superstars – what could be more profitable than that? 

Attending an event is one of the most exciting, accessible opportunities for breathing new life into a job that’s feeling dull and mundane or for a business that is floundering or just stagnant. When I came to work for Soap Warehouse over three years ago, I was determined to help our customers improve their business that in turn would improve ours. I am always amazed at the level of energy attendees achieve by meeting with their peers; the contractor’s passion for their field is palpable.  Everyone has so much fun throughout these events and they take that enthusiasm with them when they go back to their workplace. 

So let us get back to the main reason people do not attend events, the costs. Travel costs, hotel rooms, learning sessions, meals and camaraderie with peers. Sound familiar? Sure those expenditures are on the Con side of the argument but what about the Pro side, and how what you can learn can add up to future cost savings and increased revenue in the long run?

Take the plunge and attend an event. Create a spreadsheet and list all your expenses on one side. Once you are back home those costs will not change. Then list each thing you learned and as you implement them note what monetary improvements you gained from them. Ex: a new marketing technique gains you 5 more clients a month vs. your old way. How much extra income is that generating? Ex: Using a different soap decreases your cleaning time, As the weeks and months go by you will be able to see and track how valuable those upfront expenses have been to you. Granted some event costs may take longer to be recouped then others, but I have yet to regret attending any event as an attendee or exhibitor in the long run. I think after you give it a real try you will agree with me.

Word-of-mouth is the best advertising. 

Although this is a familiar saying, most contractors do not use the very people who create the best word-of-mouth advertising - satisfied customers. It's important that once you have satisfied your customer that you then learn how to use this satisfaction for a referral and/or reference programs. You can literally turn their enthusiasm and their contacts into new jobs and profits for your business.

There are two distinctly different types of programs - a Referral program and a Reference program. Both can help you capitalize on your customers' satisfaction. 

Referral Programs

In a referral program, you ask your satisfied customers to share your business information with neighbors, family and friends who might need services from you. In exchange for these referrals, you give your customers a reward. In most instances, monetary awards will work the best, but future free or reduced service costs can also be an incentive. These monetary rewards do not have to be large rewards to be useful, even a reward as small as a $20 or $25 gift card can work. Plus these do not have to be given up front but only as incentive for a positive outcome. If you do not see the referrals and the jobs you do not pay anything out. And of course with free added job service in the future you have no immediate cash outlay at all.

While referral programs can be effective, they do have one major drawback. Some people feel very uncomfortable about giving out information or approaching friends and family. Because of this, you must be careful and watch your customers’ reactions when you first ask if they'd like to be a part of your referral program. If they have a negative reaction to your request, do not try to overcome their objections. Tell them that you understand their feelings, and then change the subject.

Still, there are some good reasons to start a referral program. Some customers will be happy to participate. Plus, referral programs are very easy and inexpensive to initiate and administer.

There is another advantage to asking your customers for their referrals. It's a good way to find out if your customers are truly satisfied with the work your company has done. If you discover that none of your customers are willing to act as referrals, you should re-examine your work. Are you making promises you can't keep? Did you create expectations that you couldn't - or didn’t - meet? Did your technicians do a good job? Did they clean up after themselves when the job was completed? Before you ask your customers to participate in your referral program, or give you a refference you have to decide which kind of program would be best for your business. There are two types of referral programs you should consider.

In one type of program, you ask your customers to give you the names, phone numbers or e-mails of the people they know who might be interested in using your services. Once you have the list, you contact the referred names and try to set up your free evaluation appointments. Using your customer's name in the introductory process of your phone call, it could go like this:

 “Hello, Mrs. Green? My name is Jim Sample from ABC Sample House Washing. We just finished work for your friend Mrs. Winter and suggested I call you. She said you might be interested in hearing about having your house and roof washed. I’d like to make an appointment with you - at your convenience for a free evaluation. What day would work best for you?"

An e-mail might be just as short but could also include links to your site or to a pre set landing page.

“Dear Mrs. Green,

I am Jim Sample from ABC Sample House Washing and your friend Mrs. Winter gave me your e-mail address and suggested I contact you. She thought you might be interested in having your house and/or roof washed like she just did. I’d like to direct you to our web site where you can learn more about my company and our services. We offer a free, no obligation home evaluation and I would like to set up a time at your convenience to stop by. The web site is www.ABCSampleHouseWash.com, and my phone number is 1-800-555-1234.”

The second method is to ask the customer to recommend or reference your company to their friends and family, by leaving them business cards or tri-fold brochures. When these friends and family members call you, they mention your customer's name. If the referral purchases services from you, your customer receives the reward. Many find this less intrusive than the first and this type of system is used much more effectively than the first.

But in both instances immediate action after the service is performed is critical. A satisfied customer is most likely to make a referral for you with in the first 48 hours following the service than is any other time. So try to include time urgency to your referral offer. Like a higher monetary gift amount or larger free next service if the new customer responds in the allotted time frame, say next 72 hours or three days.

How To Start A Referral Program

1. When you finish a job ask your customer if they would be willing to act as a referral for you. If they are interested, explain how your referral program works.

2. Leave a form for the customer to fill out - with a stamped, self-addressed envelope for the customer to give you the requested information. Make a note in your calendar to call the customer in seven to ten days if you have not received his referral list. You could instead offer the customer a web landing page to fill out this information thus saving printing and mailing costs and receive a possible higher and faster return than old the hand written method.

3. If your customer does not wish to fill out a form for the first type of program, explain that he can recommend, or give out your company and services as reference, directly to his friends and family by using the provided cards or pamphlets. Make sure they understand that if they want to receive the reward, the referrals must mention their name when they call you to make their appointment and they must receive a service for the referral reward to be paid. Contact alone is not enough, purchase must be the result.

4. Always fulfill your customers reward promptly for their referrals, with a thank-you card when the referral turns into a customer. The past customer will be more likely to continue once they know the promise of reward will be properly acted on.

At the Very Least, Ask for Testimonials

You may find you have a very satisfied customer that states they have no friends or family locally or do not want to participate in either program. In this case ask for them to give you an oral or written statement about your work. You can give them a satisfaction survey card to fill out and give back or mail to you with a fill in the blank portion where these customers can write their comments that you can then use as testimonial statements. You can also do this in a follow up e-mail to them, with in the 48 hours discussed earilier, asking for their feed back on your service.

Pictures speak louder than words,

is also a very well known saying, but still very true. Even if you never got the first taker for a referral program, you can still use your satisfied customer’s property and the job you performed to get you future work by taking pictures.

Before and After photos shows potential customers what you can do for them without words. They can see for themselves the results you have produced for others. Never miss the opportunity to take high quality photos of every job you do. You can take long views that include your equipment in the picture, include your uniformed technicians performing the work, and close ups of the dirty vs. clean surfaces. Always make sure it can be recognized as being the same area or location and if possible in the same light, even if you have to drive back by a few days later. You want no doubt that the photos are the same property. Videos are also becoming more of the norm and taking the time to invest in creating some and posting them on your site and even on Youtube will be worth it.

Besides verbal testimonies, visual testimonies are the most influential single element for potential new customers.

One of my Facebook group members asked a question that made me think that the answer should be a blog post.

He wanted to know if most pressure washing professionals are using QuickBooks (QB) for their book keeping. Well QB is the #1 seller for a reason. But we use QB for so much more and since I have friends that work with Intuit in QB design and debugging, I have learned how QB can also help small business owners with their marketing.

And since June is National Entrepreneur Do-it-Yourself Marketing Month this would be a great time to show everyone some tricks and hand out tips.

First if you are not using QB you should really consider it. And if you are not fully using the report features, you are missing out on a major portion of what QB can do for you.

Did you know you can use features in QB to segment your customers in to specific groups to use later for marketing?

Go to your QB and pull up the Customer Center. Once there click on any customer you want. There you will see just under the Customer name a field called “Customer Type” This was designed to be used to indicate almost anything about your customer taht you want, but it can be used for marketing by creating reports. It has been reported in surveys to QB that over 60% of QB users do not use the "customer type" function which is a terrible waste. To get to this field click on the “Edit Customer” button, top right. Once there click on the “Additional Information” tab. Now you can access the drop down menu and use the “Add New” feature. I would suggest using this to segment your customers buy type of work you do. For example if you do only a limited type of work like only house or window washing you might want to list the types but Square foot size ranges or type of house or building. Ex: Under 1000, 1500-2000, Two story, split level, ranch, strip mall etc.
 
But most of you have a range of work you perform like house wash, roof wash, and flat work (such as driveways or side walks). Then your list could look like this: House wash <1000sq, House wash/gutters, Gutter clean only, deck wash only, deck wash/strip & stain, etc. I have not found a limit to the number that you can use and no # is given in QB help.

Some might want to use the “Job Type” under the “Job” tab in this way instead which would also be fine, but if you have already been using QB for a while and have never used the Job function it is not possible to go back and convert past invoices so this may not be where you want to segment. But you can use it moving forward as a great tool to separate invoices for the different jobs you do for customers. But you must be consistent in naming your types of jobs to make reporting easier later. But with the “Customer Type” area you can go back and modify all or as many customer records as you would like.

Once you are using the “Type” area you can create reports that give you details to make e-mail or direct mail campaigns work.

You can also use Custom fields to help you even further. For instance you could set one of these fields to be called “last date of service” then every time you have finished invoicing a customer you go here and enter in the date the job was completed. Later when you need to find customers to fill your schedule in a specific location or area you could create a custom report asking it to give you all house wash only, house/gutter and house wash/roof cleaning customers that you have not serviced yet this year to be listed. This list could further be sorted by adding other criteria like city or zip code and then be exported to an excel file where an e-mail list is made to send out a targeted e-mail offer, for example saying that you will be in that area next week and that you have three slots open and if they call and book an appointment by Friday they will get a free gutter cleaning (Or any other added service benefit you may want to offer)

Using the date of service you can also make your lists for thank you cards for the past month, find customers that have missed their normal yearly cleaning time or even for sending out customer Birthday cards if you have made a field for that.

Other things to look for when researching customer files: Review their invoices. Are they a once a year house washing customer that you have been washing for the last 5 years? You could send out a customer appreciation or referral offer. Is there a pattern of when they call or schedule their service with you? If you are slow in June you could possibly pre sell past July customers early with a phone call or an offer. Have you ever done any extra side work during one of these visits but not every time or have you ever noted there was other work available at this home that you have not done or that some one else is doing? Send them an offer like; “With any house wash every 100 square feet of flat work cleaned, you get 10 feet free.” to help get work you have not had in the past but know is available.

Make use of the notes section! Take notes on the job in a note book or on the quote form and transfer these notes into QB for a future gold mine of marketing information. Like “Customer just put in a pool, add quote for pool deck next year.”

In the newest QB version 11 they have a great new feature that allows you to attach additional documents to the file as a whole or to each invoice, estimate or sales order. You can use this feature to attach photos of the job, either at the time of the job quote, or B & A photos of the job after you are done. Then next time you can pull up what the property looked like to remind you of certain things you may have forgot to include in your costs or to notice changes when you visit that have been made since that last job that might change the price. Such as added planter boxes to the deck railings. You can also use this to attach copies of supply lists or invoices so you can remember how many cans of stain, the exact color and price you paid last time. This way you can find out the current pricing for these items ahead of time and adjust your billing or estimate accordingly. You can go back and attach new documents to old invoices with out a problem so even if you have supply lists, invoices and photos 10 years old you can still add them now to your current customer records. Once you have made and attached the copies, you may be able to get rid of the old paper work altogether. Clutter saving alert!

If you have different crews or employees doing work for you be sure to use the “Rep” drop down menu for this. This can help you track who did the quote? How many hours some one worked or the number of jobs done when paying your employees or if a customer has a praise or complaint you can easily tell who was last at that job. Or if a customer asks for the same tech you will know who to schedule. Even if changed to a new Rep at the next job visit or quote, the older invoice will still retain the past information. Great feature to use.

Now one feature I wish they would change is in the wording of the drop down menu in the “Job Info” tab. Right now it lists: None, Pending, Awarded, In Progress, Closed, and Not Awarded. I would like this to also allow you to add to these ones like: Quoted, Scheduled, Do Not Accept Job, etc.

But even leaving it this way you could still do a search for all pending sales orders to find customers that you quoted for a job (pending) that never called you back, to allow you to make a call or mailing list for follow up contact. You can also get pretty long with your job description with about 100 characters. The “Job Type” names must be shorter, at about 20 characters and this is where you can segment your customers by the work done, if you did not want to use the first location I discussed earlier "Customer Type".

Another really cool new feature in QB 11 is the map and directions feature. Not sure if a booked customer lives near one that is calling to schedule? Just click on the word “map” in blue under the customers address and the location will come up in Google Maps. It can also give you directions between addresses. It also gives you a space to enter notes if you have to remember things like “Gate will be locked, combo is 5-23-16 and must close gate behind or dogs will get out.” But this only works for the main address for the customer, so if you have a commercial customer with one mailing address and multiple locations knowing where their post office box or corporate office is may not be as helpful.

There are so many ways you can use the custom fields for marketing there is no way to list them all and I am sure you might think of ways I have not heard of yet. Only realize that in the older versions there are only 7 slots that can be used for custom field entry and once they have been made and used they can not be changed unless you make one inactive. Once you make it inactive it will not be searchable. The newer QB11 and maybe even QB10 will let you have more than 7. This has allowed us to add things like Facebook Friend and Newsletter subscriber as custom fields to our current customer accounts.

Well I hope this has helped you QB users and any that may be trying to decide if QB is a smart investment. But no matter what computer book keeping system you use, be sure to continuously make back up copies. We back up our QB files to readable/writable disks each week and once a month run a complete drive copy of our data to alternating portable hard drives. This way we can never lose more than a single week of QB data or a whole month of most of our other data to fire or theft. Another way is to pay for off site down loading, which is becoming very convenient and more affordable than ever before.

When you are thinking about adding or replacing a wood deck to your home you need to do the math.

First is the actual cost of the materials. Pressure treated lumber is the most affordable decking material running at about $15 per square foot installed as a national average. A little bit more if you want additional decorative features. Cedar can run twice as much at around $30 per square foot but should last longer with proper maintenance, with Teak wood setting you back the most between $40-60 per square foot, but it can stand the most weathering with the least amount of maintenance. You can also consider composite decking which will not require repeated staining or sealing but that will run between $25 to $50 per square foot installed, almost as much as Teak, for your initial investment.

Once you have decided on the size of your deck and the material you can not forget the maintenance costs. This is the major contributing factor of how long your deck will last. Most decks will cost over their life time any where from $300 - $1,200 dollars a year to maintain. This will vary not only because of the size and material of your deck but with the amount of cleaning, type of staining and sealing that is required and if you do the work yourself or hire it out to a professional. Even with a professional the costs will vary due to the quality of the contractor and the materials they are using. It will not pay in the long run to hire some one cheap that uses inferior products that will cause you to rehire some one the very next year vs. a competent contractor using superior products that will last 3-5 years before the work needs to be repeated.

The way to tell if your deck needs treatment is to throw a bucket of water at it or look at it right after a hard rain. If the water beads up, then your sealant is working. If the water is absorbed by the decking, then it's time to reseal. A deck that isn't sealed properly is vulnerable to the elements and could experience rotting, warping and splitting. Routine maintenance is far cheaper than replacing the deck so make sure you keep your decking in tip-top shape. Stain is not weather proofing, only a color enhancer, you need a sealer for that.

Even woods that do not requiring routine staining and sealing need to be cleaned and cleaned correctly so not to destroy the wood and its own natural properties. Be sure the contractor you hire is experienced with your type of decking. Even composites need cleaning, especially for mold and mildew and they can be damaged if cleaned with improper chemicals.

Knowing the costs beforehand can help you make the right decisions when it comes to choosing materials and who to hire to do the job. Keeping your deck in top shape will increase its life and there by reduce the yearly cost by spreading them over a longer period of time.

To find a professional contractor to clean or stain and seal your deck check out one of these links:
www.uamcc.org/
www.pressurenet.net/
http://www.bbb.org/search under “deck cleaning and waterproofing” or “pressure washing” in your area

You can also get products to use for your self at www.shopsoapwarehouse.com.

I will give you a short lesson on how to use your Google Analytics. First is if you haven’t already go to https://www.google.com/analytics and sign up to get your code and embed it on your web site so Google can track you. If you had someone else create your site they should have already done this so hopefully you have plenty of data to look at. But you can even start with as little as one month or one week of data.

Above you will see our data from the last week.

Here we will focus on just the top 10 key word searches to find long tails. 

We will ignore the #1 'soap warehouse', #3 'soapwarehouse' and #6 'the soap warehouse' because they had to know about us already to use these. #2 is a good one to start with 'best degreaser for Chinese'. Even though it did not get us great results it lets us know what people that are searching, are interested in, so we now have the opportunity to give it to them and improve our results and possible conversions into sales. Same thing with 'how to remove extra heavy grease from kitchen equipment' which is an extremely long 'long tail' yet there were 4 searchers that used that exact term just this week, although it could have been the same person using the same search to find us again. Since these two long tails fall in the same kitchen hood cleaning category it tells me I should look to use these terms in our permanent product description on our web site or to create a blog post or article about this subject. Or since this long tail did find us it is possible we have already done one of these things right. The way to tell? Copy the phrase into Google and see what comes up!

So when checking the first one 'best degreaser for Chinese' we do not show up on the first page but are #1 on Page 2 of about 469,000 results, so 11 out of 469,000 is not bad but we want improvement. This link goes directly to our Kitchen cleaning product page which is right where we would like some one to land vs. a home page where they would then have to click into the site to find what they would want. But here is where some detective work comes in. Go back and pull up each of the first three listings to see why they ranked higher for that long tail.

The first one brings me to a company that resells cleaning products. Not even one on the first page talks about how it will clean Chinese grease, but it might be in there some where. So nothing I can use from this site. On to the next. Which is an article entitled 'Home remedies to Remove Sticky Grease from Stoves and Kitchen Appliances'. This shows the power of a blog post and it didn't even mention the word 'Chinese' at all. Just because it used the words grease, degreaser and best so much Google gave it high relevance points that pushed it up in the ranking. Now to #3, this is one to focus on, first it is a site for a competing product 'Bonzi' hood cleaner. Pay close attention to the wording that Google found to rank it this high. We would need to improve on theirs to be able to get better results. DO NOT do what some people do and just copy ranking text so you will be right under them on the page. Remember you want to be first, not just one of others. They only mention 'Chinese grease' two times on this page, so we would need to increase on that number or match the words 'degreaser for Chinese' exactly like the searcher did for Google to rank our page higher. If we go and make these changes and then give it a week we should see our page rank improve if not pass Bonzi. But we don't just want one spot on page 1, we want more, we should also write a blog on this subject using these exact words plus ones found on our site and the Bonzi site to rank higher than the Bonzi site alone.

Let us now move to the other very long, long tail, 'how to remove extra heavy grease from kitchen equipment'. This gives us some hope, we are now seen on page one in spot #7. The article 'Home Remedies’; has moved up to #1 and Bonzi is no where to be seen even to page 5 but there are lots of other competiters around. Again shows how blog posts work especially when it uses so many of the key words multiple times. #2 links to a site called Thrifyfun. It is a Q&A site, one of many that can really add to your ranking. When you find these connected to your key words you should really think about joining them and adding your voice to the conversation. Same with forums, the more you show that you are willing to help and educate the public or with other contracors the higher your creditability climbs.

#3 is the eHow web site. Again this is a great one to join and where to post how too information. This does not mean teach a potential customer how to do your job but educate them in how to choose a contractor, how to increase their homes value - with your type of service, how to spot a problem that a professional contractor like you should be called to fix for them, etc. eHow has some good and not so good articles and videos, do a search on their site for key words that pertain to you and see what you might be able to improve upon or to comment on to clear up any incorrect information.

#4-#6 are competitors and like before when you find these, read what they say and try to improve upon it on your own site to move up your ranking.

I hope this demo helped and that you have a better idea of how to find and move up to #1 for your key word phrases.

The term ‘long tail’ was first used by marketer Chris Anderson to describe the strategy of finding less-competitive niche market buyers vs. broader markets, that single or two word, short key words will generate. Key words are a corner stone of inbound marketing.

Here at Soap Warehouse we had some very difficult key word problems. First our major market, truck wash chemicals, can be a very large and hard market to find the type of customer we need. For example just searching the word ‘truck wash’ can yield over 400,000 results and will first mainly show only physical Truck Wash locations or businesses. So we needed to add other words.

Here is where you have to start thinking like the person that you hope is out there looking for you, your product or service.

You must choose additional words to add to the others. I tried adding the word ‘chemicals’ but that generates over 700,000 results. Seems like we were moving in the wrong direction, but with this search we can be found, as of this writing, on page 4 and have at times been on page 2 because of key word phrasing. With usually 10 web sites shown per page, being in the top 20-40 of over 700,000 results is not bad. But we did not start there. When I first started here over three years ago this same search would not find us in the first 50 pages! But you need to always strive to make at least the first page if not one of the top three of any search you can. So we started using the key phrases we wanted to be found for in our product descriptions, in our blog posts, printed articles and even in Facebook posts and Twitter tweets. The more times the phrase you want to use is connected with you and back to you the better.

For instance the words ‘best truck wash soap’ was a phrase used back in ’09 that we found was used to find our web site. We learned this from checking our Google analytics for all the key words and phrase that where recorded as bringing someone to our site. When I first checked that phrase in Google we did not show up at all on the first 5 pages so I stopped looking and I did not have any idea how that first person got to us but that was fine. They used a phrase I was sure others where probably using or would use in the future and I wanted to improve our ranking. So I wrote a blog post and an article using that phrase. We shot up to page one almost over night. Since then we have used that phrase in forum posts, and other ways to keep us on the first page. At this writing we are #2 and #5 plus have two other mentions on page one using a combination of these words even though they are not in that exact order. And these posts are not saying we have the best truck wash soaps, which can be seen as boasting or as blowing smoke at a potential buyer, but instead they are telling a potential customer what they should be looking for to find the ‘best truck wash soap’, which hopefully will bring them to check out our web site and try one of our products.

You must first give potential new customers information they want or would like to have before you try to sell them. Most people are turned off by a strong, in your face, use me attitude. Most people want to gather information, learn for themselves and make informed decisions to choose you, your service or product on their own with out feeling pushed into it.

Now what about specific products? Here we also had an issue. Over 17 years ago long before the internet our most popular truck wash was named ‘Brown Derby’ due to its color I guess, I have no idea I was not there, nor would I have chosen that for a name if it was bring introduced today. #1 because the most famous ‘Brown Derby’ was a restaurant in Los Angeles, CA and now is a restaurant in Disney World and other less known locations across the country. So when I first came here if you put in the words ‘Brown Derby’ in Google you came up with pages and pages of listings for articles about the old ‘Brown Derby’ restaurant, their famous ‘Cobb’ salad, ‘Brown Derby’ deserts, Disney World reviews and just about anything else including head wear, but not our ‘Brown Derby’ truck wash. In fact the first mention of ‘Brown Derby’ at all was a link I found to a forum post from back in ’05 that had copied a product description of another product that was mentioned as like ‘Brown Derby’ in it. Not what we wanted.

So when we first changed our web site we included additional words to the ‘Brown Derby’ to help distinguish and target those trying to find our product. Words like ‘brown truck wash’,’ brown soap’, brown derby truck wash etc. This pushed us up into the first page. And even though we are as of this printing sitting at the top spot on page one for ‘brown truck soap’ we are not there for that exact phrase, that is actually held by another companies product in spot #3. We are in #1 out of 9,620,000 results because of our combination of these words, how many times they are used and the relevance that Google placed on our sites listing because of how they were used. Much to the dismay of the company sitting at spot #3 I am sure. See the actual page view:

brown truck soap search

This illustrates that the complete content of your site is important not just the exact key phrase. And believe it our not the #2 spot is being held be a company selling a truck shaped bar of hand soap. This is why you have to constantly be adding new content and tweaking your existing content as new long tail key word phrases are found. Even reposting a blog or tweet can place you back up on top of a search that you may have slipped down the page on.

Here are some great articles that expalins more on long tails and has some great resources; http://www.brickmarketing.com/define-long-tail-keywords.htm, http://www.searchengineguide.com/matt-bailey/keyword-strategies-the-long-tail.php, http://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-should-long-tail-keywords-be-targeted-first/28002/, and wordstream has a great tool you can use http://www.wordstream.com/long-tail-keywords

So start researching your long tails and use them to get your self found. I will show you how in our next post.

Over 48% of mobile users, use their device to search and find information about local companies and products while they are out shopping to help them with their buying decision. And out of those 48%, 53% make a decision to purchase or order services because of their search.

This confirms that not only do you need a presence on the internet that is optimized so potential customers can find you, it is imperative that once these mobile viewers find you they can see and understand your content so they might chose you over the competition.

It does not matter if you have spent hundreds of dollars on a web design, you need to keep up to date and be sure now that your web site is mobile freindly.

Here are a few articles and tutorials I have found that may help you. And if you are not the tech savy one, make sure your web designer if earning his keep.

http://blogs.sitepoint.com/7-tips-to-make-your-web-site-mobile-friendly/

http://webdesignledger.com/tools/11-excellent-solutions-for-making-your-website-mobile-friendly

http://www.noupe.com/how-tos/tutorials-for-making-your-website-mobile-friendly.html

http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/07/make-your-site-mobile-friendly this one is much older but still has some good info.

So do not put this on the back burner just because you think you are generating enought leads from your current web site. Go ahead and mobilize yourself today.

Finding new ways to market your business with out breaking the bank is one goal almost every small business owner wants to find. 

During this month I plan to give you some suggestions, links to resources and hard facts to try and help you reach this goal.

Social Media is the new way to reach old and potentially new customers. Inbound Marketing is the future of small business. Outbound marketing may become all but extinct in the next 10 years. It is necessary to have more than a web site these days and to try and find customers via direct mail, e-mail and other media campaigns. Customers are tuning out and avoiding traditional methods business use to use to sell their products and services. New prospects want to find you when they need you, not you find them and interupt their day. They want real value and information even before they are willing to contact you about a service you could provide for them.

As we know most web surfers will make a decision to stay on your site in less than 3 seconds and many web analyst’s are saying that it has moved down now to less than 2 seconds.

So how can you make your web site be the one a service surfer will find and then stop and take a look at?

I will give you a list of 5 key elements here and then elaborate a little for you under the list.

1. Quality information above the fold and on the left 1/3 of the web page.
2. An obvious offer and call to action.
3. Examples of how to solve their problems (the reason they have searched)
4. Include visuals (especially video)
5. Ways to continue to be educated or engage if they want too.

With #1, it must be immediately clear to the viewer that they have found a site that matched their search no mater what it was; example seeing a house being washed for house washing, a painter painting a room for a paint company, etc.

Your business name that corresponds with the work you do: Bill’s Pressure Washing and House Cleaning. You can even use multiple names and have multiple sites if your work is strongly divided, such as All Kitchen Hood Cleaning and Bill’s Pressure Washing. You can still use one phone, just have two separate numbers that are forwarded to a single phone, most phones now will let you know where the number was forwarded from so you will know how to answer the call.

Or you may need to have multiple landing pages added to your web site, designed toward each part of work that you cover. It no longer smart to have just one main page of your web site listing everything you do. You must have that plus a page for your deck cleaning and repair, roof washing and gutter cleaning, house washing, concrete cleaning, Christmas light decorating... any job you do can have its own page which in turn can all link back to one contact entry page.

And with so many new searchers using their phones, iPads and other smaller screen devices you will need to revise your pages to give those viewers information in the way they will see it, only the left top 1/3 of the page.

Ok on to point #2. Now that your surfer has stopped you need to grab them with an offer and call to action. Do you offer same day free estimates? Free gutter cleaning with new roof cleaning? 20 sq ft free concrete cleaning with each 100 ft cleaned?

What ever the offer is, make it stand out, be clear and then have an obvious button to click on for them to take action with. I could write a complete blog just about how to do this, and I will, but for now just know this is what needs to happen to get the contact.

Point #3, to be able to give examples of how you can solve their problem, you first need to know what that problem is! This is where creating pages within your web site with Meta tags and key words to specific words and long tail phrases people to search are become very important. You want some one that searches for “lowest priced house washing in Fulton county” to find your page on house washing, not to be taken to someone else’s page or even to your web site to a page about deck washing or roof cleaning, even though you may do all three, that surfer will have clicked off your site before you can blink. I will expand on this in a future blog post.

#4 - visuals. Visuals are becoming more and more important to surfers; they don’t want to have to read everything they want to know, they want to see it. Pictures tell the story many times much easier and faster than words can. The brain can process pictures over 10 times faster than when reading information that the picture is showing. For example:

These Before and After photos of removing rust from a concrete patio is understood much faster than reading the statements. “We can clean your concrete patio, walk way or drive way from rust, dirt, oil, and tire marks.” or “We can remove rust caused by patio furniture, so on and so forth.” Not that you should not still make the statement, but understand that people scan information, especially text and photos catch the eye. Videos are even better. You can improve the time spent on your site tremendously, sometimes by more than 20% with video. For example if your average page view is currently 6 seconds and you add even one 1 minute video, when it is watched you have increased your view time over 10%. Have multiple videos available that are shorter like 20-30 seconds and you will increase the number of videos a single person will be willing to watch and you can reach view rates of 20-40% higher than your starting 6% rate. Be sure to state near the video how long each one is to increase the chance of even the first view. People will not click on videos they feel are too evolved or will abandon one once it starts if it is moving too slowly or does not start to answer their problem or question.

Lastly give your surfer the option to learn more and engage with you in the future. Offer them newsletters, future discounts if they leave you their email, links to other information they may want to learn about, etc. These are opportunities to be able to contact these people in the future even if they did not click over and fill out your free estimate or contact form. They may just be price shopping and would like the opportunity to try you later if you sent them a discount offer and would be willing to just leave you their email address but not their name, so don’t require it.

I know this has been a little long but I hope you will come back and view the follow up posts that we will have. To be sure you are included, you can join our e-mail list, at the top right of this page, and you will receive newsletters or you can go and like our Facebook page's or subcribe to this blog and you will know when new posts are added. You can even follow us on Twitter. All buttons are at the top of this blog page. Thanks for reading.

We spent this past week in Louisville, KY at the Mid America Trucking Show.

 Our booth 62124 in the West Wing at MATS (Mid America Trucking Show)

We had over 1000 attendees stop at our booth during the three day event. We had 6 winners of 5 gallons of our Big Rig Brite truck wash, 18 winners of a water calculator and with our prize wheel gave a way over 800 other smaller prizes including 50 of our very popular "Brown Derby" hats in honor of our #1 selling "Brown Derby" truck wash.

We also participated for the third year in Bricktown Media's, Big Rig Network MATS Sweepstakes, giving away more 5 gallon tight drums of Big Rig Brite truck wash. The winners were Darrell West

  and Matt Jarvis

Show Specials will still be available until the end of April so if you are in need of some great products and have never tried us before you can visit our page of Show Speicals and buy some today.

I am sure there are more than 5 but these are the top ones contractors need to consider in making the decision to buy early and buy as much as they can now before the main cleaning season gets started rather then to wait or to purchase in smaller volumes during this year.

1. Buying in volume saves.

2. Buying before fuel costs rise that will increase all costs.

3. Keeps your costs stable for your customers.

4. Buying concentrated product vs. RTU saves on storage.

5. Buying in kits vs. single 5 gallon tight drums.

When you know you will use 5-6 kits of product during the year buying all or most of it early will save you money. Most freight companies charge the same for 0-300 lbs of product to be shipped so for most of you that would be at least 3 kits to make 3-6 55 drums of concentrated product or 6 - 5 gallon tight drums. Plus the next 300 lbs can be a fraction of the cost of the first 300. For instance 2 kits bought three times last year to IN cost one of our customers $2,220.44. If he buys at least 3 kits at todays shipping cost it will be $1,042.89 and even if shipping does not go up he will save at least one complete shipping charge of between $135-$140 this year. And if he could purchase all 6 now product and freight would only be $1,961.08 saving him over $259.36 from last year. He would be able to hold his prices stable to his customers and since our products are concentrated, he only needs to mix them as he needs them saving storage space he would have used if the product were all RTU (ready to use).

You can save even more if you normally buy single 5 gallon tight drums of product to go ahead and buy kits instead and place one large order. One customer in MI bought from us 5 times last year a total of 5 - 5 gallons of Mighty Max, 6 - 5 gallons of Brown Derby, and a few other single 5 gallons of things like Aluma Brite and Concrete Cleaner. His total expense last year, with most orders shipping UPS Ground, was $1,484.62. Now if this year he bought one kit of Might Max for $280 that would make him 11 - 5 gallons (enough for two years, or less if he increases his business), 1 Brown Derby super concentrate for $150 which will also make 11 - 5 gallons, plus the 2 Aluma Brite for $130 and Concrete Cleaner for $50 that order would weigh 290 lbs plus the pallet keeping it just under 300 lbs for a total shipping cost via R&L just once of only $163.58, for a grand total of $773.58 for at least a years worth of product saving himself $711.04, plus having twice as much of two products.

If you would like us to evaluate what you purchased last year and make a recomendation of what you could buy now to save yourself money in the long run call us at 1-800-762-7911.