I’m amazed at the number of people looking for advice on designing landscaping flyers. While flyers do work to get new business using them along with a website helps raising sales numbers. I did some research on the percentage of landscapers with websites in the NYC metro area and was amazed to find it’s under 10%.
I’ve written several times about how to create and manage a website for very little money a year. I’m talking about less than $100 a year. What’s the cost of advertising with flyers? You have to buy the paper, print them, distribute them door to door or by mail. It gets expensive quickly! And then you have to think about the number of people who consider the flyer to be litter because they have absolutely no interest in your service. With a website, the people who find it are the ones most interested in learning about what you have to offer and become potential customers. You can use adwords to drive 100 local searchers to your site for less than the cost of sending one man around town dropping off door hangers.
Here’s the question of the day: How much money would you be willing to pay per new customer? My challenge to you this winter is to send out your flyers as usual and start a website using adwords to drive traffic. My money says the web version will cost you much less money and leave your employees more time to work and prep for the spring.
October 14th, 2007 | Category: Advertising | Leave a comment
Are you looking for a way to get more business without having to spend thousands of dollars mailing out flyers or being locked into an expensive annual contract in your local phone book?
Take a minute and do a search on Google.com for the name of your city, state and the term “landscaper or landscaping or landscape designer.” For instance, in the search form you may write in “palo alto ca landscaper”. On the right side of the page you’ll see a section of sponsored links. Using Google’s Adwords product, businesses are able to place ads alongside search results for whatever terms they wish.
How can this help you make more money? By writing very specific ads you will be able to attract the kind of clientele that best fits your business model. You can tailor the ads for design work, plantings, cleanups, bulbs, holiday lighting and more. This way you won’t be getting calls for people looking for lawn mowing when that division is booked solid for the year.
How much does it cost? Adwords work on a bidding system. For each search term you tell Google how much you are willing to spend per click. Google then places your ad next to their search results and watches how many people click on it. The more clicks it gets relative to the other ads the higher up in the sponsored links section it’s place and usually you end up paying less. You’ll have to sign up for an account to see what the rates are in your area as the number of landscapers advertising varies around the country, but count on it being very reasonably priced. Where I’ve been working in NJ people are more than happy to pay a month or two’s maintenance fee to buy up routes. Adwords will cost much less.
Do you need a website to get started with Adwords? A quick cheat if you don’t already have a website is to add you businesses information to google local and then direct your Adwords traffic to your local listing. Otherwise, send visitors to a special landing page tailored to what they are searching for. In other words, don’t send them to your homepage. Studies have shown visitors decide within 8 seconds if they are going to stick around and browse a site. Why not make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for. So if you’re advertising fall bulb planting send them to a special sales page all about bulbs and have an easily accessible contact form so you can grab their information and follow up immediately.
If you’d like help getting started with Adwords I have a client account where I can manage your ads. You set the budget and I’ll work on the ad and web copy to bring in new leads.
September 3rd, 2007 | Category: Advertising | Leave a comment
Aside from the day to day job of landscaping, I’ve been busy helping others setup their websites using the same software that powers this blog. It’s called Wordpress and is free, easy to use (if you can use Microsoft Word you use Wordpress) and search engines love it.
I need a few people to read through it and give me their feedback. The goal is to have a simple, step by step workbook for creating and promoting a service business website online. It’s a great thing to knock off on a rainy day so contact me and I’ll email you the latest version.
August 18th, 2007 | Category: landscaping book | Comments (1)
