Bret Wooton

Ad words for Dummies is also a pretty good resource. Don’t forget, there seems to be a ton of help just from your Ad words account page and on you tube.

Judging from the lack of replies, I would guess not many….

I too have done plenty of shows and they do work well when you are active in engaging attendants. If you sit back and let people walk by, it could be a waste of money. Corporate has a display that could work well.

In the Pacific Northwest we know a little bit about rain also. Keep in mind, we don’t see the type that you were getting, we see a constant drizzle for about 6 months with some sun breaks and showers thrown in. I have always been jealous of these operators that see record months in the winter, when it’s all we can do to stay afloat. (no pun intended) Carpet cleaning business certainly slows down when it’s wet. New customers don’t think they can have carpets cleaned in the winter because of excessive dry times, and our customers that know better want to wait until the rain stops. Many don’t see the point in paying for carpet cleaning when people are sloshing in the door. They wait to clean up the mess, usually until April or May.
My advice would be to put your best specials out during the wet times. People will call when the rain stops.

Thanks Justin. I did eventually find the area to input the zip codes. I understand the newsletter often has good information in it, but I would guess that there is a good portion of HB operators that don’t read it religiously or, like me, they just skim through it to look for specific things. I think that it would be helpful to have a specific headline or an attention line in the newsletters that would draw attention to a change like this where operator involvement is necessary; especially if it is time sensitive. Also, more e-mail alerts could get you more involvement. Personally, I read the newsletter more frequently when it was e-mailed. Now, I don’t open it as often. Maybe we should go back to emailing the newsletter in a link that directs us to the HB website.

I’m not sure exactly, but it sounds like you are talking about search engine optimization, a process that moves your website toward the front of web searches.
It just so happens that my sister is somewhat of an expert in that field. She has explained to me that most companies that provide this service do so through pretty generic means that will produce modest gains, at best. She has explained to me that in order to do this effectively, the SEO would have to get to know not only your business, but your industry to learn which words and terms are most searched for. This takes time tracking results and adjusting accordingly. This is also optimized through pay per click sites and other pre-paid sites that get alot of traffic. In order to get improvement on “organic” searches, you have to start there. I am working with her currently on starting this process with my own site. I’ll let you know how this progresses.

We run 2 vans in Portland, OR and we run credit cards maybe 60-75% of the time. For us it’s a matter of convienience and the cost is minimal at best. Our average job is around $170 and we are getting charged around 1.6% to 1.8%, I belive, when the card isn’t present to swipe. If we swipe a card (which we do most of the time) the cost goes down to something like 26 cents for MC. At the end of the day, the 50 or 70 bucks a month we spend on merchant services far offsets the time to make deposits and the risk of bounced checks, not to mention the convenience that is afforded to customers who don’t have to be present to pay at a vacancy or while they’re at work. The customer convenience is HUGE.