Soap Warehouse Blog

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.

Hopefully you have had a chance to view our newest video for our new graffiti remover Blast Off.

The company that made that video for us is iMotion. If you think that video was hard for us or expensive to make, think again. Learn what we did earlier this year by downloading this PDF and action guide that won't cost you a dime: https://imotionvideo.infusionsoft.com/go/xmas1/a196/

iMotion Video wrote this short guide to tackle the biggest obstacle that they face every day..."How to make video commercials that sell" They produce hundreds (literally) of videos each month for businesses in all sorts of niches so they see their share of challenges for sure.

Make sure you get this action guide today because the form will also get you registered for their "Done For You" discount video productions, the same kind of program we are using.

This week, on Wednesday, they are going to have a 24 hour sale for their discount membership which is already a ridiculous deal.

We joined a few months ago and already are seeing the benefits. If you want to start promoting your business with video but don't know where to start or think you will have to spend a lot of money on equipment or time you don't have, the action guide will give you some good pointers to consider. If you're looking for a competent yet inexpensive video company to actually make your videos for you then you'll be as happy as we are.

Either way, make sure you get your action guide today before they take the page down: https://imotionvideo.infusionsoft.com/go/xmas1/a196/

The PDF and action guide are free so grab it while you can.

https://imotionvideo.infusionsoft.com/go/xmas1/a196/

Already it is June, kids out of school and temperatures are rising and hopefully the number of your jobs and profits with it.

We all know it was a very slow start to this year with the bad winter hanging on in the Northeast and the rains in the South and Midwest. But things are starting to slowly pick up.

I was hoping that I could get a discussion going on what each of you are seeing in your area, good and bad so you can see that there are others out there just like you.

For us at Soap Warehouse the economic, environmental regulation and weather issues that effect you directly effect us.

We also want to bring you information that will help you meet these challenges and hopefully aid you in over coming some of them. Here are some links to information that may help or at least inform you during these times.

For environmental regulation info go to http://www.washwater.org/ or http://www.epa.gov/

For business building join one or more networking groups. Here is an article about Kudzu:
http://www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneur/2008/september/196302.html

Links to different sites are here:
Kudzu http://www.kudzu.com/
Merchant Circle http://www.merchantcircle.com/corporate/
Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/


Is that Yellow page ad just not bring you in the business any more? Try these other places:
http://www.entrepreneur.com/marketing/marketingcolumnistkimtgordon/article199484.html

I hope some so these ideas help you reve up your revenues this summer.

In the larger cities like Nassau things are about what they are here in the US just slower, but once you get over to some of the little islands, things are drastically different. These islands are too small for many cars, so they use golf carts! These islands thrive on tourism and they know one way to make a tourist pick them over the competition is appearance. For example: If you had the choice of renting a four person golf cart between 2-3 different companies and they are all located together in the same area at the dock when you landed, would you go to the one where you saw carts up on blocks obviously in need of repair with others with stains on the vinyl, or to the one with scuffs on the cart bodies with pealing decals OR would you head for the one that had gleaming clean carts all nicely parked in a row? Well you guessed right the clean ones rent first.




Have a great week and I am glad to be back home, but it sure was pretty to look at.

I just read some very interesting but true advice I would like to pass on to you.

It is better to be just 1% better for 100 reasons than to be 100% better for only 1.

If you take that philosophy with your business you will see that even little changes make a big difference.

For example if your biggest competitor is always giving a 10% discount to new or referral customers and makes a big point of it in their advertising, then you offer 11%. Not that discounts are the answer, I usually do not recommend them but rather suggest that you give bonus value instead. But you get the idea.

Sometimes you can not out do someone or something by even 1%, take "available by phone 24 hours as day" for an example. But you can offer a faster response time either for a call back or actual booked appointment. But you must be able to follow through on your claims so chose carefully. You could offer a superior brand of stain for deck work instead of the run of the mill that everyone else carries, this does not mean that you do not charge for it, just that you carry and market it as the best in the industry. You can offer free window cleaning with a house wash or complementary gutter cleaning with a roof cleaning. Anything that the customer perceives as you giving that extra 1% over and over during your job for them will make you stand out, get you referrals and more jobs.

Always leave the owners property better then you found it, and I do not just mean on the job you are being paid to do. I mean make sure you pick up all of your trash or even their trash that your cleaning uncovers, within reason. If your service included furniture removal and replacement for a deck or patio cleaning be sure it is put back correctly or better than you found it. It may cost you only a few extra pennies to rinse off those plastic planters, deck chairs or cushions to make them look better. Of course you can always offer side services for a complete through cleaning job on these items first. And you must be willing to do these sort of small jobs that take up extra time before you offer them to the customer. It does you no good to advertise that you offer these services and have to later, while on the job, refuse to do them because you have booked your time so tight that you can not accommodate them. No matter how much pre-planning you do or questions you ask, something else will always come up once you are in front of the customer.

But if you do that extra 1% for customers over and over it will pay off 100 times over.

This is a list I got from Entrepreneur magazine a while ago.

Top 11 things to get exposure for your business:

#11. Be reachable - Have a clear and concise business card. Have a press contact listed on your web site that can answer questions and be reached on the first call.

#10. Get on-line. As mentioned in a previous post this is a #1 need in today's market. Add articles even if just links, showing that your company is in the news as a leader.

#9. Perfect your elevator pitch. You should always be able to tell anyone in just a sentence or two what you and your company does, and have a business card with an offer ready as a follow up.

#8. Show your face. Have a press folio made up and photo's available to be used for any print article. Also good to use the same ones on line to let the contact know on site they have the correct company they are looking for or saw info on.

#7. Establish yourself as an expert. Speak at meetings (even if just the Rotary Club), become a media contact for your local newspaper. Write articles or answer questions posted by the general public on web sites.

#6. Do not send sloppy copy. Have a pre created standard press release about you and your company, even if it is just the same statements that you are using on line, that can be used by anyone in the media.

#5. Know your audience. Make sure where the press release is going is where you want your future customers coming from. Local newspaper, subdivision newsletter etc.

#4. Tell the whole story. Think as if you had to write a headline and two paragraphs about your company. What would it say. Be complete, brief and concise with your info.

#3. Plan ahead. Check with publications you read or would want to see your story in. Find out what their upcoming issues will be covering and see if you can write a story or give info that they may want to use and quote you on.

#2. Distribution channels: These are ones that the media go to when looking for information. PRWeb, Business Wire, PRNewswire, Market Wire. If you can get your business story on one or more of these it will work for you.

And #1. Respond Promptly. Most writers are on a time line and will move on to their next contact if you are not immediately available for comment or with a story.

Good luck.

Next to business cards post cards can be money well spent it just depends on how you use them.

Spending hundreds on bulk mailings in mailers or on post cards can be great for the large companies that are building and maintaining name recognition, but for the little guy this kind of marketing expenditure can be out of reach.

But don’t give up on post cards yet. One thing they are great for is repeat customer business and to build customer loyalty.

Say you have a customer that gives you a referral, but you do not have a referral business card program in place like I spoke of yesterday. You can use a post card as a thank you for sending you business and list an offer on it as your thank you, such as $20 off your next visit or for a free added service. You would be surprised to know most people like to see a concrete figure instead of a percentage, even when the percentage off may have been greater in the long run. For example you offer $20 off of your next service instead of 10% off, which they perceive as less value, and their next service call costs $300. You have saved $10 but they are happy they got the $20 off. Also discounting lowers the percieved value of your work. That is why the free added service offer works best.

Post cards are also great for recouping lost business. Say you see April that a loyal customer that calls every year in March has not called you yet. First send a kindly reminder card that their service is due, it may have just slipped their mind or they have been busy and have been meaning to call you. Remind them your days fill up fast this time of year and to call now for the best times, they need a reason to call you. Then if in a few weeks still no call, you may want to extend an incentive offer to them. Always make a definite offer with a definite dead line. Like you have an opening during such an such week and can do it for X amount but only if they call by a certain date. Also never have an offer cost more than 10 or so percentage of what you are making for the job depending on your expenses and mark up rate. You are trying to get back business you've lost not give it away just to have a job to do.

One more important thing is for your card to have your customers name on it. Do not use the standard Dear loyal customer. Your customer needs to feel like they are important to you not just a number. That salutation may be fine for a general card you are sending to all of your customers to make an announcement but not when you are trying to win back a customer, and hand signed is best.

Good Luck

One item that is your best spent money for the dollar is your business cards. They are the least expensive way to get your name out and get jobs. Make it a goal to hand out at least 10-20 cards a day to people you meet, or leave them where ever you go. True many will just get tossed out in the nearest garbage can but you never know when someone will need your service and dig out that card "That guy gave them". Or when they will hand your card over to someone else that mentions they need to find someone to wash their house. You can expect less than 10% of any type of advertising including business cards to generate a call. Then it is up to you to land the business.

It is a known fact that people need 3-5 contacts from someone before they may buy. Also it takes someone to hear or read something at least 3 times before it sinks in. And the number one way to get business is by referrals. So how do you get those referrals? Leave your customers at least 10 cards with their name on the back and ask them if they liked your service to hand them out to their friends. Also make an offer to them, ex: you will give a discount off the next job for them or even send them a gift card worth $25. And that if their friend calls and uses their name that you will also give the new customer the same offer. Make it what ever you want but keep it the same so you will remember what your offer is all the time. You will find that if you change offers, one person will talk to another and may not be happy to hear the offer was not the same for them, a sure fire way to loose business. That is why referrals work, people talk! And remember one satisfied customer will normally tell two friends while an unsatisfied customer will tell at least 10 people they may not even know. So increase your number of good referrals and work extra hard never to have bad ones.

Since exposure is the key to generate new business. Post your cards everywhere you can. On subdivision notice boards, dry cleaners, the corner pub, just about anywhere in areas you like or want to work. Do not put them in locations where the type of customer you want probably does not go, like a Laundromat. If a client does not have $300 to buy a washer to wash his clothes why would he hire you to wash his house? But drive out of your way and post on the club house bulletin board in a upscale subdivision where you want to work, where you know the disposable income level is high and esthetics are important to the potential customer.

Good Luck and keep passing out those cards.

Good Morning and Welcome to a new month, June!

I can not believe half of the year is almost gone. How many of you have been making the goals you set for this year? How many of you even set goals? Goals are a very important part of business. If you are spending all of your time working and no time building your business, you will soon be out of business. You can not just sit back and expect the customers you currently have to always be there to meet your obligations. It is said that if you do not spend at least 20% of your effort; meaning time and money, to increase your business you will not be able to sustain it for long. Most new, independent or self owned businesses are out of business in the first 2-3 years. All businesses loose at least 10-15% of their customers each year for what ever reason. And in these tough economic times let’s face it, that percentage is probably higher. Keeping your clients equipment or property clean is not going to be a top priority for them when they have other bills to pay. So if your client base is shrinking or at least dragging right now what can you do to fill in the gaps? How do you find new customers? You need to look in places you may have not before.

For example, since the housing market is slow in most areas right now, many times the difference between which house sells is its curb appeal. Contact realtors in your area and give them special pricing to give to their sellers for you to do exterior cleaning. Sometimes just a freshly cleaned roof or front walk and driveway will make a new buyer like the house and think that the property looks great and that it will not need maintenance any time soon. Also contact new home builders about after construction clean up in a development. With so many homes sites out there they need to make their subdivision look the best to new home buyers. Also look for maintenance contract work that won’t dry up with the weather. For example I recently had a funeral home owner contact me looking for a referral for a company to do his three locations. He told me "No one has ever come by to see me about starting a monthly contract to clean my buildings, hearse and limos." He reasoned that most people including pressure washers do not like to call on funeral homes. But this is a business where image is key and they always have customers. There is never a slow month for a funeral home.

Have a good day and keep looking for new opportunities.