You are a landscape company, painter or maybe you build custom decks. How do your customers find you? Yellow Pages? Very expensive for a small business.

A sign on your vehicle with your business name and phone number? A business card to hand out? Flyer’s?

All good ideas and small companies use them all the time. A favorite of lawn service and tree service small businesses seems to be throwing a ziploc bag with a pebble and a flyer into the lawn of a likely customer.

As a consumer I personally tend to look for lawn care or tree care from a small business. The price is usually a little more reasonable than a service picked out from the ½ page Yellow Page ads.

However it’s a pain to try & find a pen when I see what appears to be a reliable lawn care business in the neighborhood. I even look at the flyer’s but I’m not likely to call. My experience in calling is that it may or may not get returned that day. It would be great if they had a website where I could see what they are all about, get prices, email an inquiry.

I know so many people who feel the same way. My wife usually gets names for things we need done from work. Her coworkers are always asking do you know any good lawn care, tree service, deck repair, painters, plumbers etc. Word of mouth is a fantastic way do get business & happy customers will of course spread the word.

A website will enhance this for you. Your web address can be on your vehicle, business card, local business listings and more. It’s not that expensive and the return on your investment is great.

So your a small lawn care service, maybe a one person outfit or maybe you have a two truck outfit. You want to get more business and expand.

Your tired of missing calls from potential customers and having to return them at 6pm or later since you were out on the job. Tired of getting their answering machine & trust me they are hesitant to leave a message on yours.

So you decide to get a website where your customers can get their questions answered and see all the services you offer.

You could buy a domain from godaddy and try to use their on line website builder. Time consuming, cumbersome looks like a godaddy cookie cutter site and does not stand a snowballs chance in h*#% of appearing in the search engines anywhere near the top 5 pages much less page one.

You could buy your own web design software, ftp software, get your domain hosted somewhere, maybe godaddy and try to do it yourself. Big learning curve big time commitment.

Or… you can hire a website designer. Good call.

That first web company you tried wanted $1,200 for a 10 page site with a contact form. Plus $49 a month for hosting and maintenance. Not to mention $29 for your domain name that “they” will register for you (read hold hostage).

Whatever you do get your own hosting through Host Gator (cheap 24/7 service reliable) they are a world class host. Buy your own domain or if you have someone register it for you make sure they register at godaddy where you can ger a free account and they transfer the domain to your account as soon as possible. Get that in writing.

I have heard to many sad stories of domains being held hostage. Basically the design company owned it and leased it to the customer. Same with hosting. Many clients website code is encrypted & only that design firm can make site changes. They have you over a barrel. Don’t let that happen.

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Tom Dean

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A class act.

http://tinyurl.com/5qa9us

(poor mashable – ouch – that must have hurt)

Tom

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Thats the title of an interesting post on Mashable.

http://mashable.com/2008/06/18/twitter-ebook/

Apparently Mark Rizzin takes a dim view of John Reese’s involvement with Twitter and paints “ebook salesman” in a negative light.

unscrupulous jerks bringing in a load of undesirables

IMHO I think he is way off base.

Fortunately for those of us on Twitter currently, as studies plainly show, we’re nigh-immune to the shady tactics of those who would like to use the system for profit whilst at the same time adding no value.

Seems to me his twit & link baiting post to a blog page with around 20 ads is clearly a “use of the system for profit” with over one twit per his 9,000+ followers…

I wonder Is Twitter Vulnerable To Blogger Attack?

I would say yes.

Tom

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From the Walkley Public Affairs Conference on Social Media, Sydney, 6 May 2008.

Below the video is a link to the text version of this. Highly recommended reading from The Human Network.

Here is the text version http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=48

The moral of the story… we think you get it.

Oh yea – remember to “Think” before you “Twit”

Tom

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If you are still unsure about social marketing with facebook, myspace, blogs, weebly, tumblr, youtube etc. just look at what the current political candidates are doing.

Tom

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How I Fired All My Corporate Clients And Went From $ZERO To $28,462 per-month in PASSIVE INCOME – Starting With a $9.99 E-Book On Guinea Pigs!

Read The Story

Well… They have there own newsletter (the Guinea Pigs) and a strong following of Pig lovers. Of course some people want to eat them. There is a nice curry recipe at Wikipedia.

The point here is that a 6 figure business can be built on a long tail keyword like Guinea Pig care. Rabid fans and very very little competition. If you have Guinea Pigs you likely need a book on the care & handling, unless they are for dinner.

Tom

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Interesting article about Aplle becoming the “New Bully” – Compares bundling if iTunes and the dependency of ipods and ipods phones on using iTunes to access content (remember we talked about the importance of being able to deliver content via iTunes.

All of our site platforms can do that for you easily.

That’s me on iTunes in the pic – I was testing the delivery system – very easy for anyone to do from their admin panel.

” Meanwhile, Jobs has suddenly become the most feared man in Hollywood, bragging Thursday about Apple’s scary dominance in digital media sales. Apple has sold more than 3 billion songs and 95 million TV shows via iTunes. While music CD sales crash and burn, almost one-third of all music sales are now digital. As Jobs euphemistically said yesterday, “iTunes is leading the way.” from PC World

Read the rest of the article here – lots of interesting statistics.

Pretty soon you will need to have certain content available in iTunes – you can bet your competitors will. Read the stats in that article above.

Tom

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