As a contractor you should always be looking for new ways to reach out to potential clients. Marketing is a scary word and may seem like an expensive investment for a one or two person business. Heck, it may even seem expensive and very time consuming to a company of 10 or more.
The biggest difficulty that contractors face is not knowing what works and what doesn’t. It’s time to clear things up, and show you what is worth investing in and what isn’t. Over the next few months we will show you the most effective marketing tactics every contractor must do. This week we are starting with the basic steps necessary to start your very own blog.
Here they are...
1. Have a Website up and Running
The first step in starting your very own blog is obviously having a website to host it on. If you already have a company website, this step is just a little bit easier for you. Assuming that you do not have a company website it may be a good idea to kill two birds with one stone and create a basic website to use for your company as well as host a blog on. Long gone are the days of expensive hosting, domains, and website upkeep. Anyone can create and maintain a high quality website in 2016 with ease.
If you ever spent some time and looked at many of your competitors website you might have realized how bad they are. That might be because they built their websites when platforms such as Weebly and Squarespace didn’t exist. Paying someone to code and design a basic website was and is expensive but without much of a choice contractors and business owners paid the price.
Here’s what you must do (if you don’t have a website):
- Go to weebly.com or squarespace.com and create an account
- Consider watching tutorial or guides on how the platform works
- Determine the overall structure of your site (sketch each page out on paper)
- Build it (this is much simpler than it may seem)
- Add a dedicated blog page
- Oh, and purchase a domain name (www.yourname.com) this can be purchased directly from Weebly or Squarespace
Here’s what you must do (if you already have a website)
First off: ask yourself if you are satisfied with your current website. If not this is a perfect opportunity to consider making either some slight changes or completely rebuilding it from scratch. If you are planning on driving traffic to your blog you will be better off creating a website that you are proud of.
- Add a dedicated blog page (either www.yourdomain.com/blog www.blog.yourdomain.com)
- Design your blog page to fit the theme and style of the rest of your website
2. Determine your Expertise
In other words figure out your niche. Where are you most knowledgeable? Do some research on the specific area you are most knowledgable in, who's writing about it already? What can you do better? Narrow it down to a specific few areas, and now split them up by keywords. Keywords are how readers will find your content so determine 2-3 words that most accurately describe the topic (use words that your readers may use when searching on Google). Write these words down, you should now have multiple topics with 2-3 quality keywords in each.
3. Draft out a Post Schedule
Now that you have multiple areas about which you can write it's time to sit down and create a topic by topic (week by week) schedule for at least the next three months. Trust us, spending an hour or two doing this right now will make the difference between your blog being successful or not.
How to do it?
Take your topic categories and make them the topic week by week. If you have five topics (i.e. Hardwood, tile, stone, vinyl, carpet) assign a week to each topic and alternate until you have at least three months (in the case of five topics you should have roughly 2-3 posts on each topic in three months). Select a day of the week you will post (Monday through Wednesday works best) and now decide on the specific question you will answer in each post. We find writing out the title or headline of the post takes care of this step. Find the 2-3 questions in each of your topic categories that readers really want answered (that you know enough about to answer for them). Now you should have a schedule for the next three months.
Hint: As a starting point ask yourself what are the most frequently asked questions from my customers and answer them!
Why it's important?
Consistently posting on a blog, especially as a business owner or contractor is no simple task. Split between running your business, keeping your customers satisfied, and actually doing your job you'll find writing quality content for your blog a difficult task. We find that most give up on the third or fourth post when they feel like they have exhausted all the possible post ideas. With a hectic schedule you will sit down to write a post and quickly give up because you'll find it difficult to come up with anything worth writing about. This is were your post schedule comes in handy... You should have three months worth of content ideas or questions that you came up with initially. Three months in you will have gotten into the habit of posting every week and will no longer require a post schedule. The purpose of a schedule is that of training wheels on a bike, helping you get into a posting habit.
4. Do Tons of Research about your Topics, Readers, and Industry
You are almost ready to begin writing awesome blog posts, but before you just jump in and do it here are a few things you should know.
Research is key
Even if you are an expert in your industry and have been for the last 20-30 years there is always room for growth. Looking for answers to the question you are preparing to answer in your blog post is not a sin. It’s perfectly alright to perform a Google search and see what people are saying from different backgrounds, industries, and experience levels. Who knows, you may even learn something yourself! Spending a few minutes researching will help you brainstorm a structure for your post. It will help you stay focused on answering the question and not going off on rabbit trails while writing. Finally it will allow you to touch on aspects that no-one else has, giving you leverage and making your post ultimately more helpful to the reader than any other competitors.
Who are your readers and where are they?
Never sit down to write a blog post and just assume you are writing to everyone. Ever heard of a target market? No business, no blog, no brand can have everyone be their target market. Otherwise it’s not a “target” anymore. Your goal is to optimize your content for the one reader that will be the most valuable to you. Is it a male homeowner between the ages of 40-55 living in a suburban neighborhood? Where does your reader spend his/her free time? Which social networks does your reader frequent? What are his/her interests, hobbies, their occupation? All of these questions will help you narrow down who exactly you are writing for and where you will reach them!
Who is your competitor and how can you beat them?
When you Googled your post subject earlier you probably found a few other posts answering the same question. Spending some time on their post should have given you a fairly good idea of what you must do to outperform them. Even if the post you may have read was from Forbes or some other uber popular site you can always make something better.
5. Begin Writing (consistently)
Now it’s time to begin writing. After you have completed the above four steps you are well on your way to having a successful blog. Marketers agree that in 2016 content marketing (blogging is a form of content marketing) is a leading tactic for effective lead generation and attraction of more customers. The key though: consistency. Many contractors/business owners give up way to early in the game. Running a successful blog is not a one month endeavor, it’s not even a four or five month one, it takes persistence and time. If you create quality content on a week by week basis that helps answer the most pressing concerns of your potential customers they will come to hear from you.
As a bonus, here’s one more tip: use quality images, preferably ones you have taken yourself (or consider using royalty free images from places such as www.pixabay.com). Relevant and high quality images help your readers retain more information as well as boost your credibility.
Already started you blog? Great, submit your posts to the PDXPRO Journal and we will publish your work!
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We hope this post was helpful and encouraged you to consider starting your very own blog. If so, please consider sharing this post with your friends and family (they might like it to). Contractors... for more tips, trick, and hacks on marketing your business or developing your blog subscribe to our newsletter.