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Many folks have asked me over the past few years where they should host their websites. Although there are many hosting companies around (some good and some bad), they all seem to have one thing in common…and that is that the world is their market. In other words, they go after any and all customers which means that they have to offer multiple plans and multiple options for the many different types of customers that are out there. And this my friends, is enough to make your head spin.

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Hey All,

I hope you are having a super day today.

I love talking to window cleaners on the phone for a number of reasons, but one of those reasons is because I get some great ideas to talk about on this blog. Recently I spoke to a window cleaner who is really seeing excellent results from his signs in his window cleaning business, so I thought this would be a great topic to talk about.

He bought 100 signs for $544 which is an excellent deal. $5.44 per sign? Whew. Each sign even comes up with a stand. The signs themselves are the kind that the politicians use. Not too fancy looking, but for $5.44 per sign, it’s a wise investment.

Anyway…what he does is he asks every customer who he does a window washing job for whether he can keep one of his signs in their yard for 5 days. He hasn’t had a customer say “no” yet. He even had one customer tell him they were having a party so they’ll need to take the sign down during the party, but they’ll put it back up the day after the party. And lo and behold…they did! Brian went cruising by the house the day after the party and there was his sign.

After 5 days he’ll go to the customer’s house and pick the sign up. But just imagine the exposure that he is receiving during this 5 day stretch. He said he’s growing his customer base nicely just from his sign efforts. He is doing no other marketing method at all currently. I really don’t recommend just relaying on signs as you’ll certainly see more results from taking a more proactive approach (flyers, postcards, etc). And brian will be the first to agree with that. But the point is that using signs in your business work!

I had a conversation with a window cleaner a couple of weeks ago who basically said that he doesn’t have any yard signs because he has a magnetic sign on his vehicle. He went on to say that since he parks his car in front of customer’s house while he’s working on the window cleaning job, that’s good enough. I respectively disagree. 

Have you ever heard of banner blindness? This refers to when a visitor to a website tunes out any banners or advertisements on a webpage. They just flat out ignore the ads and focus on the content. Banner advertisements don’t work as well as they did back in the 90′s because we’ve become so used to them that we don’t even see them anymore. Thus the term “banner blindness”.

This is what happens when someone drives down the street or walks down the sidewalk and sees your magnetic sign on your car. It’s part of the vehicle and they don’t pay a great deal of attention to it. It blends in. On the other hand, with a standalone yard sign sitting in a front yard all by itself, it’s noticeable. Way more noticeable than a vehicle magnetic sign.

Picture yourself driving down the street. You see a car in the street in front of a house which happens to have magnetic signs on it. Which signage do you think you’ll notice first? The magnetic signs as you’re driving by or a standalone yard sign by itself in someone’s yard? The yard sign is an item that doesn’t belong there, so therefore it stands out more. Make sense?

So the long and the short of it is that having some yard signs is one of those important “must have” silent advertising partners.

Contact some local sign shops and see what kind of pricing you can get. Buy a few dozen signs with the goal of using the “leave behind” strategy for some great yard sign exposure. Not every customer will say “yes” to you leaving one of your signs in their yard, but no biggie. It only takes a few signs to experience a higher call volume. Literally hundreds or perhaps thousands of potential customers could be traveling past your signs.

Another thought to keep in mind here is that let’s say the actual sign doesn’t generate the call, but they receive a flyer from you shortly after they see one of your signs. This is what exposure will do for you. Again, they might not call as a result of your sign, but because of the sign, they may be prompted to call you after receiving one of your flyers because they have been exposed to your business more than once which is ultra important. As I’ve written about before on this blog and have mentioned to folks in phone calls, the response rates increase with the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and up exposures.

So yard signs are a great way to get that exposure w/o a lot of effort on your part. Take care and have a great day.

To Your Success,

Steve

Hi All,

I hope everyone is having a fine weekend and a big happy Easter to everyone out there in window washing land.

We’ve been busy over here putting the finishing touches on a hosting service we’ll be providing to window cleaners and other service businesses, so stay tuned for that.

And 3 Bears Window Cleaning Directory is going to go through some major restructuring over the next few weeks with a new name, a new look, and enhanced functionality for the search engines. We’ll keep you posted on this as well.

I’ve learned a lot about search engine optimization over the last few years in addition to buying the necessary software to achieve high rankings, so I’m going to pull out all the stops when it comes to getting window cleaners who are listed on the directory ranked high so that they can be found when prospects in their town are looking for window cleaners. So now is the time to create a listing for yourself if you haven’t already at 3 Bears Window Cleaning Directory.

Ok….I recently was sent an email asking about costs to get started in the window cleaning business. This is actually a hard question to answer because it really depends on how a person’s financial situation is, but hopefully you’ll benefit from the answer.

Steve,

I received everything and have read the manual twice since I received it.  Nice job.  I have looked at a lot of businesses over the years and owned 3 different ones and I must admit you seem to be dead on when it comes to the window cleaning business.  My career has been spent in sales and marketing roles so i really enjoyed all the tribal knowledge on the marketing side.

I do have one question as I look at planning my entrance to this business.  Assuming I follow your process to the letter and I will, what do you think would be a good solid amount of working capital to start out with?  Just for the record I would not be taking out any salary of any kind.  Just covering all expenses and supporting the marketing campaigns your recommend.  Can you give me a good estimate?  I am playing around with some numbers but I figured you might be able to give me some ballpark figure so I might use it as a benchmark.

Best regards,

John

My Response:

Hi John,

I appreciate your comments most definitely.

The capital question is a good one, but it’s a tough one to answer because I don’t know how deep your pocketbook is.  )  There are so many ways to get started with some methods (like postcards for example) costing a bit more vs other methods (flyers) that are less expensive.  So I always recommend that for folks who are starting on a shoe string budget, you really can’t go wrong with flyer distribution. They’re inexpensive to print and they provide a quick return.  It’s almost immediate.  What I would do this saturday is hire a couple of neighborhood kids, pay ‘em 20 bucks each, drive ‘em to a good subdivision filled with your target prospects, and let ‘em distribute for you.  A great investment.

Even after I had postcard campaigns going on autopilot though, I still continued to distribute flyers every saturday at 9am.  No more than 4 hours later, on average 1000 flyers was distributed. So if you do that consistently with 4000 going out each month for the first 6 months (and even beyond), it’ll build you a really nice customer base.

If you didn’t want to do any flyer distributions though and you had a few more bucks on hand, I wholeheartedly believe that postcards is the way to go. I do want to say that you should have (time and money permitting) as many marketing methods in place as you can. But with this said, postcard mailings really pack a punch.  If you set it up properly (info. in chapter 7) and are willing to be consistent with it, the rewards from postcards are excellent.

In terms of marketing, for $110 (not counting window cleaning supplies), you could be out the door with 1000 flyers (including printing and 3 people to distribute @ $20 each)  Postcards are a tad more expensive, but I’ve seen some good pricing at gotprint.com and psprint.com.  The last time I checked, gotprint has 5000 postcards for around 100 bucks and psprint has ‘em for $106 after the 25% discount they have going ’til april30th. Regardless where you buy ‘em, buying 5000 postcards at a clip will save you some good money.

The other costs involved are for things like signs, t-shirts, polo shirt, bus. cards, letterhead, etc. So if you decide to get it all up front, it might run another $250 to $300 max.  Personally i would get the bare minimium needed to create a solid impression to prospects and pay for the rest from job profits.  Just a thought though.

I hope this helps a little bit.  If you have any additional questions, please let me know. Thanks again for your comments for sure.  Have a great day.

Regards,

Steve
256-546-2446

Hi All,

I hope you are having a fine day today.

I  haven’t posted to the blog in a few days due to a few other tasks needing to be done. For example, over the years I’ve realized that window cleaners really need some good low cost webhosting for their websites, so I finally decided to put together a hosting package specifically for window cleaners and other service business owners. Stay tuned as more news is coming soon.

Anyway…I recently received an email from a window cleaner with some questions. I thought it would be good to post here.

Steve,

It’s been a while since we’ve actually spoken, this is Peter. I’ve been in college and doing window cleaning in the summers, I purchased your package about two years ago. Needless to say business has been great, and I’ve built up quite a customer bank over the last two summers.

This summer I am planning on bringing on help because of the workload, and am looking generally to expand a bit, so a few questions. I’m looking for general ideas about the following, there may be nothing to say, but you may have heard that “this works” or “this doesn’t” Thanks for your time. . . .

1. What is the most important thing to look for in hiring someone new?

2. Is there a preferred age for employees?

3. What is the best way to train someone new? (speaking of which, I want to have them read through your book before they start, something to do to get excited untill summer officially hits)

4. Provide a car /use their own

5. concentrate on current area again with mailers/flyers etc. or expand?

My Response:

Hi Peter,

How are you?  Long time, no talk.  )

It’s good to hear that your business is doing great.  Very cool.

–The most important thing to look for in an employee in my mind is appearance.  If you’re working the residential market, your customers really need to feel comfortable with who is in their home. So whenever I hired someone, I always looked at their appearance first.

–There is no preferred age for a quality employee.  I had men and women of all ages work for me.  You’ll run into a dud young person just like there will be the occasional dud older person.  )  I did find that college students made good employees for the most part because they liked the flexibility of the work and I didn’t need to commit to using them for 40 hours per week.  So it was nice for both them and me.  Older folks are nice though too.  They’re definitely more stable, but they also might have more demands (need more money and work hours) since they usually have more responsibilities to fullfil.

–I always put a new person through a 90 day probationary period.  They worked side by side with me or a crew leader.  Don’t let any new person run loose or go to jobs by themself until they’ve at least gone through this 90 day period.  Sure you can have ‘em read my manual (only chapter 5 because if they read more than this, they might get ideas to start their own window cleaning business) for window cleaning techniques.  But I personally would just train ‘em for a couple of hours.  Hands on training one on one.  Cleaning windows is easy, so it shouldn’t be that hard to train someone one on one.

–I wouldn’t provide them a vehicle.  Let them use their own from job to job.  But I would cover some of their expenses depending on the work they did for me.  If they did a real quality job or did a job in a speedy fashion, I paid them extra.  You can call it a bonus, a car allowance, etc. etc., but whatever it’s called, it was over and above their hourly pay.

–I’m not sure if I can answer your last question w/o knowing how hard you’ve marketed to the current area already.  Have you spent some good quality time marketing to your current area?  I mean really, really hit the area up multiple times?  If so, then definitely expand outward for sure.  Tried and true Flyers work very well.  I got an email from a window cleaner recently saying he went out for 3 1/2 hours with his 2 sisters and mother and generated $1700 in estimates in that time from just under 1000 flyers distributed.  So I always advocate using flyers in your business.  I did this every single saturday and it generated excellent activity.

With that said though, at some point you’ll want to integrate some postcard mailings into your marketing efforts too.  You can read more about this in my manual.

Hope the above helps.  Take care for now and keep in touch.  Have a great night.

Regards,

Steve

Good Evening Steve,

This is a super important issue for me and something I want to do wisely. I have a customer base of almost 450 clients, a percentage of which are residential clients. Coming to the Customer Factor from a progam like ShineSC that has a very difficult to navigate reminder program, I am even more clearly aware how I have not established solid relationships with my clients.

Honestly its been because there hasnt been any good way to really keep track of who needs to be called when before The Customer Factor and it is EXTREMELY time consuming to do the same things Factor does for you automatically.

With that being said, I want to start immediately with re-establishing strong relationships with my customer base and really would like advise on which way you would suggest. I am thinking about either using Factor to send them all a letter or maybe using Send Out Cards.

Either way, I want to begin now to re-establish those relationships BEFORE I start making courtesy reminder calls that they are due for services here in the Spring. Please let me know your thoughts.

And this is another subject completely, but I really would like to visit with you because of all of your experience in this area. I am completely redesigning my website, from the ground up. I "settled" when I first had it created and ended up with a product I wasn’t happy with.

What is worse, even when I try targeted and specific keywords for my website searches to see how I am ranked in the search engines, I am always listed about the sixth or seventh page. I don’t have to tell you that they are probably not going to browse through six pages of results to find me.

I know the vast majority of searches end after looking through the first page of results. This brings me to my need for your help. I want to set my website up in such a way as to make it EXTREMELY search engine friendly and make it so that more and more potential clients are able to visit my site and are at least given the opportunity to see what we can offer. So I mean this very literally, ANY and ALL help that you can offer to help my website would be much much appreciated. This is highly important to me and since you have lots of knowledge in this area, I know you could really help. Thank you again!

Sincerely,

Nicholas

My Response:

Hi Nicholas,

Good morning. 

If you have not contacted your customers on a regular basis in the past, then my recommendation would be to send them a personalized letter first.  The prob with making a phone call right off the bat is it comes across as too "telemarketerish" if you know what I mean. 

My philosophy over the years has always been to reach out to my customers multiple times and not just when I wanted to do their job.  So I sent out on average of 6 greeting cards per year per customer, with most of the cards just saying general type things like "I hope your summer is going well" to give you an example.

This worked to not only generate immediate referrals and plenty of customer goodwill, but when the time came to follow up for an actual repeat appt. via a phone call, it didn’t seem like I had my hand out just looking to take more money from them.  I really think most service businesses get this part of the process wrong.  Follow up is great and is obviously necessary, but it’s important to plant seeds throughout the months following a job.  It makes the actual callback a whole lot easier for you.  And it makes it very difficult for your customer to take a chance with another window cleaner, no matter if he’s a bit cheaper or not.

Anyway…with all this said, back to your original question, I would send out a personalized letter to your customers using The Customer Factor.  In that letter, mention something like: The last time you’ve been serviced was on <insert token for "last job date" here>, so I’ll be calling you in a few days to follow up with you to see if you need to be serviced again."  Keep in mind that you can use tokens for further personalization like a "job type" token, "job price" token, etc.  It would actually be better to do this only with the customers who currently show on the quick summary screen as customers needing to be tentatively contacted now otherwise you may mistakenly send letters out to customers who you may have just completed jobs for and who aren’t quite ready to be serviced.

For the customers who don’t fall into the category of "tentatively scheduled now", I would start planning some greeting card campaigns.  And yes, that’s where Send Out Cards would come in handy.  They can put it on autopilot for you.  There is some initial work up front in selecting the cards from their card database and inserting the wording into each card, but once this is done, it really is on autopilot.  As a side note, once Send Out Cards is up and running, it’s not necessary to send out any personalized letters from The Customer Factor except the thank you letter after a customer’s initial job is completed.  Some members may also send out personalized "reminder" letters when customers are ready to be serviced again, but I just preferred to pick up the phone and call ‘em.   

I hope the above helps in planning your follow up.  I talk about follow up a lot on this blog and within my manual because it’s the one piece of the puzzle that I think separates the truly successful window cleaners from the not so successful window cleaners.  Oh…and speaking about follow up, the key is to just make sure to try and have both customer categories ("tentatively due" and "callbacks") display "0" on the quick summary screen within The Customer Factor.  If you can do that, then you’re well on your way.  I’ve had conversations with some members who let these numbers build up too much, and this is just leaving money on the table. 

As far as search engine optimization, this is an entire industry in itself. Professional search engine optimization firms charge upwards of $1000 to establish top website rankings for their customers.  So that’ll give you some indication of how involved search engine optimization is.  But I can definitely give you some pointers to get you started.  And feel free to also call me on this for further info.  Again…there is just so much to it. 

First off, I would go to my window cleaning directory and create a premium listing if you haven’t yet.  And when doing so, view the video.  I provide some detailed information on some search engine optimization aspects like meta tags and keywords.  And then reverse engineer the actual webpage (premium listing) you’re creating in the directory. 

Ok…so to back up for a sec, there are 2 ingredients to ranking well in the search engines.  The first is what keywords are used on your web page ("on-page" optimization), and the 2nd is the websites/links you can get pointing to your website.  This is called "off-page" optimization.

Most webmasters put all their energy into on-page optimization and getting their keywords correct, but this is actually only about 15% of the work required for good rankings.  A full 85% of your effort has to be spent on link building.  Sounds complicated, but it’s really not. 

I use ezinearticles.com to submit articles to.  Each article allows for an article resource box where I can link back to my site.  You can also submit a press release.  This is a wise investment. Webwire (http://www.webwire.com/) is a good place to go.  For $19.95, your press release will be distributed to multiple press release services and get you many links back to your site.  There are a whole bunch of different ways to get links like submitting to social bookmarking services, directories, etc.  I can provide you other resources if you’re interested.  But the main thing to take away from this is that getting your website ranked depends on much more than just having the correct keywords on the webpage.

As far as keywords though, what keyword do you want to rank for?  You need to make sure that that keyword is the first phrase in your meta title. If you want to provide me your website address, I’ll take a peek at it.  Most webmasters make the mistake of putting their company name in the meta title which does no good when it comes to trying to rank in the search engines.  Again…reverse engineer the 3 bears window cleaning directory and the premium listing you create for your company, and you’ll walk away with some good ideas.  Currently the directory is ranked #3 for "window cleaning directory" (search with no quotes) in google, so it’s ranked high.

I hope this provides you some initial info. to chew on.  If you have any further questions, let me know.  I’ve been thinking about putting together a video series on how to rank well in the search engines.  But just keep in mind that there are so many variables that go into it.  Another variable of course is competition.  Ex: Ranking for "window cleaning springfield missouri" is a whole lot easier than ranking for "window cleaning".  

Take care for now. 

Regards,

Steve

Note To Everyone: If you have an interest in viewing a tutorial on search engine optimization and how to get your website ranked high in the search engines, let me know. I won’t do it if there’s no interest, but if there is, I’ll be glad to put one together.

If you don’t have any website yet, then it’s important that you get one online as soon as possible. There are prospects right now looking online for window cleaners in your town. It’s just another way to bring in jobs. If you already have a website, great. The next step is making sure it’s not buried on page 20 of the search engine results where no one can find  you.  So let’s get it ranked high. Call me for pointers and/or once again, please let me know if you’d like to receive a tutorial or two on these all important ranking strategies.