Advertising

Just wondering how much of everyone’s jobs comes from internet vs other kinds of marketing. Been doing this 5 yrs now and stay busy from word of mouth. Finally got a web sight just to look professional. Any comments on this are appreciated.

Ours comes from all forms but get a lot from website, too. We Just now got home from bidding three jobs in the county over and all three said they found us when they googled power washing and we came up first. We also get a large amount from yard signs.

Do you put your yard signs out on jobs or all over the city?

HomeAdvisor and the website drive 75-80% of our business. We get a few messages to our facebook page too.

I stopped knocking on doors and hanging door hangers. Too much time for too little return, but it helped me get started. That and local Facebook swap & shops.

HomeAdvisor charges for $16-25 for leads, but I just price it in as marketing cost. 8 times out of 10 it’s a good lead. The other two times HomeAdvisor knows it was a bad lead because they almost always credit it back when I call. Besides. For $16 I generally make $300 or more on top of that in revenue before insurance, fuel, consumables, etc.

The good thing about HomeAdvisor as well is they make sure you have insurance and do a background check so you’re typically competing with real businesses.

Beware of Thumbtack if you’re trying to grow a business/make a living. You will be competing with some uninsured guy willing to take $50 for just about anything and also happens to own a pressure washer. Thumbtack is mostly price shoppers who don’t mind paying cash up front to the lowest common denominator. The leads are much less expensive than HomeAdvisor, but you get what you pay for. Which are typically people who don’t care about quality or insurance as much as getting a job done in twice as long for half the cost OR MORE.

Two people I’ve sent quotes to on Thumbtack have messaged me with the very first sentence being “I’m a single mom” and the other “I am unemployed”. I feel bad, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I can’t work for free or I would. Rant over. Good luck to ya!

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We do both. We invested around $2500 in signs last month just so they would be everywhere over 4 counties. Our goal is to be in your face so much that when you think of power washing in this area, we’re the name that comes to mind. And it’s paying off…

I want to do yard signs so bad… but someone in our area just defaced hundreds (if not thousands) of yard signs with stickers that say something dumb and have a kid’s brace face picture on it. Also, in our area yards signs get picked up and thrown away or stolen by businesses who aren’t even your competitors.

Yeah we lose them constantly, too. But, if you sell one job off of just one sign, it pays for 30 more.

Ive been skeptic of home advisor as they get bad mouthed a lot on the web. Your one of the few ive heard good things said about them. I had a bad experience with Y.P in the beginning and stayed clear of advertising. Looks like to get really big in this business im going to have to take the plunge. Lol. Thanks everone

We won’t touch home advisor after the horror stories I’ve read. They bug us constantly though. We use to do a lot of work through thumbtack but have gotten so busy that we don’t pay for leads anymore.

I got SCREWED by Yelp. Ended up spending over $1000 in advertising “clicks” that only came within 2 days of my bill date. There is ZERO exaggeration there. Also, I was supposed to get a video commercial professionally shot and never happened. I will not ever pay for per click advertising. Angie’s List is trying to get me to paid advertising, but I’d rather chop off my … nvm… than use paid advertising again.

For some strange reason I can’t get a review through Angie’s list either. It’s a little easier through HomeAdvisor as they send an email with the link when you finish a job and it bugs them a couple times about the review. You don’t have to bug them. Lol one older gentleman loved the work I did on his house so much he gave me $100 tip, but he was tired of getting the emails from HomeAdvisor so he gave me 5 stars and commented “leave me alone”. I about fell out of my chair because I knew exactly what happened. I’m sure he meant for that to go to HomeAdvisor.

Now when people as about that review specifically I get to tell them the story and laugh a little every time. I’m still laughing.

Anyway, from what I’ve read about HomeAdvisor from others who have used it, it just sounds like they don’t know how to pause their leads or request credits. If you get denied for the credit request you gotta call and talk to a real person. Sometimes they credit it, sometimes they don’t.

I love HomeAdvisor. I’ve made 10’s of thousands of dollars from HomeAdvisor. AND I’VE GOTTEN COMMERCIAL LEADS FROM THEM!

Oh… and I should mention I never got a single call from Yelp. Just a message from someone asking if I could lightly mist a dirt road for an event to keep dust down. Seriously.

Mr fix it any advice how to get to the top of the page and stay there. Are you competing with a large market in your area? here in central florida its dog eat dog and there are lots of p.w companies.

Florida is the power washing king of states so you’re probably dealing with wayyyy more competition than the average guy. It would probably take an extremely professional and talented person to get you to the first page on google, let alone the top.

It took me a lot of work to get to the top and I’ve been an IT analyst for over 20 years.

There are lots of factors that goes in it that I couldn’t possibly begin to help. Research SEO and start from there if you want to do that work yourself. We also spend hundreds a month on google adds just to get every bit of exposure possible. The old saying rings true “gotta spend money to make money” :+1:

My website sucks. I know it does. I finally talked my kid brother, who does SEO and software development, to redo the website and fix our SEO. My page doesn’t come up on the first page at the moment, but I’m very luckily centrally located to a city where 2/3s of it’s population lives in the 'burbs. My only saving grace on Google is that I show up in the top 2, maybe 3, on the google map listing.

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Thats true. $$$ makes $$$ just looking for a piece of the pie not the whole thing lol. But your right to get to the top page is a art by it self

I just meant that the more you invest in marketing, the more $$ you’ll make. It pays for itself and much more.

I use Home Advisor too and while it has been great I recently move to ewebify. I end up paying $35 per lead but its sent only to me and I dont have to compete. Working pretty well so far.

what do you pay for your yard signs if I may ask?

I just started and I did not even have any equipment and just started posting craigslist ads like crazy and got a huge job thats almost 1k.

I ran to the store and picked up a 99 dollar pressure washer

Great way to go out of business before you even start. You’d be much better off renting a machine then buying a real machine after that job. Hopefully you have insurance.