Posted on March 19, 2011 by admin

Question:        Where are all my customers?

Answer:          They’re on the internet.

My name is Kim Hopkins. I own a 25 person contracting company in Los Angeles and I also own an internet marketing company which helps other contractors around the country use the internet to get new customers for their own companies.

If you’ve been wondering where all your customers are I can tell you: They’re on the Internet. In 2008, 82 percent of consumers used search engines to find local services and sixty-four percent of consumers used the Internet as their primary means of finding a local merchant. This number continues to grow every month. If you truly want to attract new customers to your contracting business, you’re going to have to have an effective internet marketing system.

My electrical contracting website generates over $500,000 a year from new customers.

I started an electrical contracting company in Los Angeles in 1979. In the late 1990’s, the Yellow Pages began losing effectiveness and at the same time, jacking up their prices mercilessly. So, I built my first electrical contracting website and within one year the website was already out-performing the Yellow Pages Ads. By the next year I was able to drop the expensive Yellow Pages ads completely, and invest just a fraction of the money I used to spend on the Yellow Pages into internet marketing.

Today my electrical website brings in over $500,000 a year from customers who found my contracting company on the internet. Click here to see my company’s internet marketing stats for 2010.

In order to succeed with internet marketing you need to have a good website and you need to attract lots of potential customers to your website.

For your business to succeed with internet marketing you need to:

Have a good website

Attract lots of potential customers to your website

Sell jobs to these customers

Make a profit on these jobs

 

The purpose of this website is to help you with these four subjects.

 

 

 

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Will Having a Website Get You More Customers?

Posted on March 18, 2011 by admin

You don’t need a website if you’re already rolling in customers and money. For a contractor, the primary purpose of a website is to attract new customers and make more profit. That used to be what the Yellow Pages did. Every year, however, fewer customers turn to the Yellow Pages to find a local business:

Customers Looking for a Local Business*

Annual Decline in Percent Who Use Print Yellow Pages

2007                                                                              8%  Decline

2008                                                                              3%  Decline

The Internet now beats print Yellow Pages by 2 to 1 when it comes to looking for a local business to patronize:

Customers Looking for a Local Business – July 2008*

Internet   60%                           Print Yellow Pages  30%

*Source: TMP Directional Marketing, sponsoring company for a series of in-depth studies of the media habits of 3,000 Americans.

As an electrical contractor in Los Angeles, I experienced not only the decline in the effectiveness of print Yellow Pages but also the rising costs. I’ve been in business since 1979 and over the last 30 years have built a 25-person electrical contracting company. Most of my customers are repeat and referral, but to really expand I also need to advertise. For years, I used Yellow Pages.

In 2004, I began suspecting that my Yellow Page ads were costing me too much. I have a customer tracking system that allows me to track where my customers come from. So, in early 2005 I did the math:

Cost of Print Yellow Page Ads vs. Income, Mid-2003 to Mid-2004, L.A.

Gross Income from ads                    $95,357

Cost of Yellow Page ads (5 cities)   $29,059

Percentage of Gross Income spent on advertising: 30%

Almost one-third of the gross income from my Yellow Page customers was being eaten up by the ads themselves. Most businessmen figure that advertising costs should come to only about 10% of gross income. When I saw these figures in January 2005, I decided that I would not renew my Yellow Page ads.

That was a scary decision as I had relied on them for over 25 years. Fortunately, I had built myself a website in the mid-90s, so I could switch to Internet Marketing. In my first year, 2005, Internet Marketing alone yielded $258,677 in Gross Income. This was more than double the previous year’s Yellow Page income of $95,357. I was able to minimize costs of Internet Marketing so that advertising ate up a lot less of my income than Yellow Page ads did. I’ll talk more about that in the next article in this series.

I am able to maximize income and minimize costs of Internet Marketing because I’ve been on the Internet since 1995, when I first built my own company website. I’ve had time to learn Internet Marketing because I have a relatively large electrical company.

When I proved to myself that Internet Marketing works, I decided to help contractors (at least those who aren’t electricians in L.A.!) find new customers on the Internet. Please don’t hesitate to contact me here or at Happy Contractor to discuss it or ask questions.

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Three Places Your Website Can Be On Page 1 of Google

Posted on March 18, 2011 by admin

There are three different places your website can appear on page #1 of the Google search results. These three places are:

1. Google AdWords (sometimes called Pay-Per-Click)
2. The Google Map ( Now called Google Places)
3. The natural listings (sometimes called the organic listings)

The Google Pay-Per-Click section is usually at the top (but not always) and also on the right-hand side of the page. These listings are labeled “Sponsored Links,” and anyone who is willing to pay money to Google can get their website listed in this location.

The Google Map is toward the top of the page, sometimes on the left-hand side of the page under the Sponsored Links, and sometimes on the right side of the page. It’s easy to find because it looks exactly like what it is – a map. To the side of the map there are one or more businesses listed. Being listed by Google on the map is free. In fact, you can’t pay Google to be put on the map. Google needs to decide for itself that your business is “relevant” enough to be put on their map.

Underneath the map, in the natural listings, are the first 10 websites of page after page of listings. There are 10 websites listed on each page, but for practical purposes, your website needs to be on page #1 or your potential customers will almost never find your company. Again, being listed in the natural listings is free to you. Google decides on what order websites get listed on the basis of which website they consider the most relevant for whatever search term was typed into the Google search bar.

So there are the three ways your company can be listed on the first page of Google. Only one requires actual dollars to be listed. The other two are “free” listings, although for most competitive search terms, such as Plumber San Diego, it generally takes specific SEO (Search Engine Optimization) know-how to accomplish this. That’s why many contractors hire SEO experts to get their website listed on the first page of Google. But, to be honest, if an contractor has some free time and is willing to learn how, they can often do some of all of the SEO work themselves.

Depending on exactly where a contractor is located, the payoff for a good Google listing can be big. My own electrical contracting company earned around $500,000 in 2010 from the customers who found my electrical contracting company on the internet. And some of my other company’s clients are earning even more.

On the other hand, if your total customer base is one small rural town of 15,000, and everybody in town already knows you and your company, you’re not going to benefit much from internet marketing. Of course, the odds are that even if your company is based in a small town you’re going to want to get jobs lots of other people who live outside that town. And for this, marketing your company website on the internet is probably the most cost effective way to “get out the word” about your company.

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The 5 Elements Of Effective Websites

Posted on March 18, 2011 by admin

There are five main considerations in designing an effective website. In order of importance, they are:

1. Website content matches company goals
2. Technical construction of website
3. User experience
4. On-site SEO
5. Off-site SEO

I’m going to go over each point in order. Because I’m writing this for contractors and not for website designers or SEO (search engine optimization) specialists, I’m going to emphasize points 1 and 3. These are what you, as a contractor, can and should have the most control over when working with a website designer.

1. Website content matches company goals
Different websites can be built for different purposes. There are information, blog, forum, catalog, social networking, business, and many other types of websites. I’m going to assume that as an electrical contractor the purpose of your website is to attract potential customers who (1) find your website, (2) look at it, (3) contact your company for electrical work, (4) hire you to do the work, and (5) pay you for the work. Your website should be designed with all 5 points in mind.

If your website does its job properly, by the time a customer who has looked at your website contacts you, they should already be 90% sold on the idea of hiring your company to do their work. What they are doing when they call you is mostly verifying to themselves that you can deliver on what your website promised them.

What Kind Of Customer Do You Want? – A properly designed website should attract the kind of customer you want and also be designed to repel customers that you don’t want. I could write an entire article about this, and maybe sometime I will. For now, just know that this can and should be done. Just for fun, if you’re interested you can take a look at my company’s website, www.TheElectricConnection.com and see if you can guess which kind of customer we are trying to attract and which kind we’re trying to repel. Hint: What kinds of customers are profitable, and what kinds are not profitable?

What Type Of Work Do You Want? – Do you do only commercial work, or only residential work, or both? What about industrial. Do you like to work with general contractors or only work directly with owners? What about property management companies? Do you do residential service calls, do you provide 24 hour service, and do you work on weekends? Whatever kind of work and customers you are looking for, that’s who you build your website for.

2. Technical construction of website

This is where all kinds of programming issues, such as HTML, Java Script, FLASH, CSS, XML, etc. would be discussed. But guess what? I’m going to do everyone a favor and not go into all that stuff. Instead I’ll just say that if your website isn’t technically set up correctly, your website viewers are not going to like looking at your website very much and they’re not going to stick around long on your website.

Major technical problems are more common that you may think. One of the two websites I was asked to review today has a technical problem in its coding where the navigation bar becomes invisible when a visitor is using either the Firefox or Netscape browser to view the website. It works fine when viewed with Internet Explorer, which is probably what the website owner uses, so he/she doesn’t know there’s a problem with the website.

3. User experience
After talking to thousands of customers over the last 30 years I have learned that people view the world and evaluate information in three basic ways:

1. Aesthetically
2. Emotionally
3. Logically

To one degree or another, all people relate to – and respond to – information in all three ways, but most people respond best to one of these three ways more than the others. With this in mind, your website should be built in a way that will appeal to all three types of people. In simple terms, your website must look good, convey a warm, friendly feeling, and also be logically organized with lots of written information available for those people (about 20%) who will want to read parts of your website in detail before they decide to contact you.

On a well designed website, every page should incorporate all three aspects – aesthetics, emotion, and logic – in such a way that any of the three types of people will relate positively to the page and form a positive impression of your company.

Think of your website as a giant funnel where, no matter which pages any of the three types of customers decide to click to, they are all eventually drawn deeper and deeper to the same place, and that place is a place in their mind where they make the decision to call you, or email you, or run down to your office and beg you to do all of their electrical work forever. Perhaps I went a little bit overboard on that last sentence? Anyway, you get the idea.

4. On-site SEO (search engine optimization)

This is another area where I’m not going to go into a lot of detail, but here’s the basic deal: Search engines, like Google, have the goal of providing their users with a good searching experience. When someone types in “electrical Contractor San Diego” Google wants to provide that person with the most “relevant” websites possible. They list 10 websites on the first page, and another 10 on the second page, etc. But how does Google decide which websites to list in front of other websites?

What Google does is send out “spiders” that crawl all over your website and see what it’s like. If Google likes what the spiders find, they consider your website more relevant than other websites that their spiders have crawled and Google doesn’t like as much, and Google will list your website closer to the top of the list. On-site SEO can be a large and convoluted subject to study, but the basics can be learned fairly quickly. One way to do this is to buy and read Search Engine Optimization for Dummies.

5. Off-site SEO

Search engines like Google also look at other factors in determining which websites are listed first. Most of these factors boil down to links from other websites to your website. Each link from another website counts as a kind of “vote” for your website. But all votes are not created equal. A vote from a highly regarded website can count much more than a vote from a less important website. Exactly how Google decides the relative value of each vote is an endlessly discussed and changing area of study. Off-site SEO is a even larger and more convoluted subject than on-site SEO, but the basics can be learned fairly quickly and is covered in Search Engine Optimization for Dummies.

Final Thoughts

OK, Guys and Gals, there’s my overview of the five main considerations in designing an effective website. I hope this information has been helpful. If you have any questions feel free to contact me.

 

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Hello world!

Posted on March 14, 2011 by admin

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment