School’s Never Out for the Learner

This can’t be right. My son is not really going off to college next year. Heck, it was only a year or so ago I was coaching him in baseball, when “winning” a game meant less than the snow cone that followed. For the record, I stopped coaching when the 9 year-olds had better strategy than I did.

Nope, he can’t be going off to college. Because it was only a few months back that I drove he and a friend to a dance, filled with anticipation and anxiety about actual dancing, or perchance a kiss. Giddy expectation, largely unspoken, filled the car.

Men – though deemed to have the emotional capacity of cauliflower – can sense these things. We just don’t talk it to death.

Surely, we’re not selecting colleges for my boy. Not the one for whom I was just shopping for the used truck that’s been in our driveway now for 2 years.

Fathers know, but find it hard to swallow. Those who work at working, selected to slay the dragon of financial stability and craft creation know: the time comes too quickly. We were even repeatedly warned, “the time will come too quickly.”

But as with our universal inability to ask directions when clearly lost, we admit and accept not. Our inner pioneer is either comparatively blind or comparatively naïve, “It’ll be different; We’ll figure it out. I’ve got time.” It kind of was; we sort of did; time is up.

Now, with swelled pride I watch this accomplished high school senior weave through the college maze. Yet I also hear faint strains of Cats in the Cradle in the background. A man knows.

Here’s hoping he becomes famously wealthy in record time so he can support me and my eternally-patient wife in a lifestyle to which he’s become accustomed.

Click for: 3 Lessons My Children Taught Me, 2 Lessons I hope I taught them, and 1 We All Keep Re-Learning

3 Lessons My Children Taught Me

1. “This isn’t your childhood; you already had yours.” We have all seen other parents “living vicariously” through their kids, which – to me – is a nice way of saying, “Hey, I was a loser, so I’m going to FORCE you to correct my mistakes!” This of course, renders them a bigger loser. Will they ever learn? I once found myself attempting to create a museum-quality display “with” my son for a 5th grade project. I reeled back, seeing my own horrifically ill-designed volcanoes, and decided: it’s his grade, not mine. Thankfully, this extracted me from all future projects, except for the semi-regular mad dash to Hobby Lobby 7 seconds before they closed because the project was “just remembered”.

2. “The degree to which you object now is likely the identical degree to which your parents objected then. So how’d that work out?” Oh shut up. Next question please.

3. It is possible to learn new levels of love, understanding, and patience. Gandhi would be proud. When you’re young, you love your mother, and probably your dog. Then you love your spouse. And you think that’s it. Then your children come along, and a whole new wave of capacity appears. If you’re really fortunate, you recognize that God loved you enough for any of this to happen in the first place.

2 Lessons I Hope I Taught Them

1. It’s good to experiment. No, not with drugs or seeing if pregnancy will REALLY happen, but combine things that are not often combined. The “norm” really isn’t. Poke at an old problem with a new solution; who says you “shouldn’t” wear a t-shirt under a short-sleeved shirt? Try the oysters for crying out loud (my son once tasted dog food, of his own volition, when we were actually cooking steak that same night). Kids are going to experiment. I say let ‘em. Better with clothes and hairstyles than with car keys and alcohol.

2. Persuasion, Influence, and Decisions form your life. Maybe you should learn how to direct them, instead of being directed by them. This is a gray matter subject at best. I hope my children know what is trying to get “sold” to them and more importantly, how. Further, strong stands are often for movie heroes only, so I hope they understand that deftly-guided influence works as well, at a lower blood pressure.

1 Lesson We All Keep Relearning

1. Other people are really strange. Good thing we’re perfectly normal.


Yes, my son really is going to college. He’s naturally smart, handsome, comes from unflawed genetics, all that. So if you head the endowment at a high-caliber college where scholarship money flows onto the manicured grounds, send a link to your application. I’ll get back with you, soon as I face the fact that this is really happening.


Your Turn:

What Lessons Did Your Children Teach You?

Do any of your children work with you? What lessons are YOU learning from that?

Social Networking: Business Builder or Time Waster?

Last time, I mentioned the frightening reality of seeing 191 Facebook invitations. Even scarier than that many people pretending to be my friend is that many were people I’d not heard from since we “accidentally” swirled their head in the toilet in 7th grade.

I’d suggested ‘splitting’ the Social presence to a) Friends, family and b) Business. Then, my marketing mind and all 3 of its neurons went a step farther:

Seemed wise to take a poll on the contractor business case for Social Networking. And we got the responses. Oh man, we got responses. Some were a little ‘heated’. At least one was likely from toilet-swirl head himself.

Controversy forces truth and helps affirm belief. So, among the contractor readers out there, one thing came through loud and clear.

And that was a general belief that Social Media is a big ol’...well, you can insert your own word there.

Not so fast. There are a couple warnings - -

Do not defend the personal case for Social Media after reading this. I get it. Totally valuable within limits, each can define their own.

If connecting with family, linking with old friends, or a video of you going into a spasmodic fit after shooting Dream Whip up your nose “works” for you, go for it.

Yet if you disagree with the assessment or have an angle to share, we’d love to hear it. Link below.

The Results Are In. And they aren’t that pretty…

Here are the questions and the answers.

1. I think Social Networking is a great way to stay connected and I do not distinguish between business and personal. We’re all one big happy wedgie.

Agree: 11%
Disagree: 82%
Other: 7%

2. I think Social Networking is a great way to stay connected and I DO try to maintain distinctions between business and personal.

Agree: 73%
Disagree: 21%
Other: 6%

Conclusion Questions 1 and 2: Clearly, a separation of personal and commerce exists, should exist. Recommended: Create user groups for your business.

3. I believe Social Networking has brought us/the company more business.

Agree: 14%
Disagree: 46%
Other: 40%

Conclusion Question 3: A full 85.5% said they either ‘did not’ get sales or what they got was a waste of time.

Worthy pursuit from this conclusion: Find those who get sales without spending disproportionate time.

4. I believe Social Networking is mostly a colossal waste of time, brain cells, a contributor to A.D.D., and possibly a drop in GNP.

Agree: 34%
Disagree: 51%
Other: 15%

Conclusion Question 4: Between 50% and 100% more respondents felt Social Networking was either a waste of time or virtually impossible to determine.

5. I’d like to see how to engage Social Media for my business with a good ROI relative to money AND time spent.

Agree: 88%
Disagree: 6%
Other: 6%

Conclusion Question 5: 8 times more want this ‘ideal’ but are unclear how to get it. We’ve already got the solution framework laid out. “Automation” without mind-numbing input and resource waste is critical. We’ve hired a couple experts and vendors to complete. Contact us if you have input for this.

What is most obvious: Contractors ‘want’ to engage, ‘see’ the need to engage. Yet sort of like going door-to-door and ‘effectively engaging’ with the entire city, the time investment is currently unvalidated.

Therefore: have a presence, link between Facebook and Twitter accounts, change your pages daily, spend less than 20 minutes per day on this.

The Anti-Social Network

Just in time for Halloween, I re-activated my Facebook account. Talk about scary. Since I’d “forgotten” to post anything for the last 8 months, somehow 191 invitations piled up. And we’re not even to the scary part.

While wading through invitations, I attempted efficiency. And in my first ‘re-post’ announcing my new-found efficiency method, I ticked off the Facebook community.

What I meant to do was separate my business life and personal life.

I just felt that the business community didn’t really care about seeing a photo of me wearing a cute but overly large cowboy hat while in my underpants. Especially since I was 32 at the time.

Let this be a lesson to all those who “thought” the job interview went great, but the call-backs went strangely silent. That video of you on stage at the Marilyn Manson concert holds a clue to your spate of unfruitful interviews.

Anyway, when I posted about separating the two worlds, and my ‘limited’ acceptance of friends, some were annoyed. Yet I believe there are…

4 Facebook ‘Friend’ Segments:

1. People who you’ve lost contact with, and are sincerely happy to have them ‘linked’ into your life.

2. People you’ve lost contact with, that you frankly don’t miss.

3. People you sort of knew, but considered anti-social, weird, a little too into Star-Wars, and most likely to be wearing footed pajamas well into their 30’s.

4. The Unabomber

I really only want to stay in touch with Group 1, and might stretch to Group 2 for entertainment only. Yet some users “collect” friends, like baseball cards or matchbooks (with similar emotional investment) so they can proclaim, “I have 7,812 friends on Facebook!”

This elicits jealously among those in footed pajamas, causing them to rewatch the entire Star Wars trilogy – or my preference, its eulogy – during which they begin “friending” people they haven’t seen since the entire 5th grade gave them a wedgie of galactic proportions.

Thus the reason I got so many invitations.

I half considered starting an Anti-Social Network where those with fewer followers are revered.

Now to the business sector. Mixing B2B and Social Media (aside from LinkedIn) is often viewed as handing out business cards at a funeral: you just don’t do it.

Yet there are clever ways to achieve social networking goals and business goals simultaneously without revealing too much “Personal” and without being an overly promotional buffoon.

Next time I’ll share the Business Side of Social Networking.

Midterm Mindlessness

With midterm elections just around the corner, the political rhetoric has been ratcheted up a few billion notches. And in case you missed it, the focus seems to be on our still-lagging economy. If I hear one more political ad promising the complete and total turnaround of the U.S. economy within 24 hours of electing Joe Schmoe, I may just have to start a campaign of my own. Why?

I’m as sick of the economic non-news as you are. (Part of the reason its called “NEWS” is something in it should “NEW”.) I’ll go so far as to say the following, which could cause a flurry of hate-mail being sent my way.

There’s no point in crying about the newest Economic non-news, especially if…


1. We start looking at what’s more important in life than money. How can it be bad to return focus on family, simplicity, and doing without meaningless clutter? Gosh, we might read a book instead of forking over $50 to go to the movies. Which one could “enrich” you in two ways?

2. We remember that if we weren’t selling our stocks or homes when they were “up”, why in the world would we become anxious in contemplation of doing so when they’re down?

3. We recognize that the “value” of our gains was merely “potential” value, only becoming realistic if sold. Big difference between “potentially” and “realistically”. Potentially your service van can compete in the Indy 500. Realistically, you’d be better off on foot.

4. Embrace the “C” word. I’ve yet to see homeowners go without heat, or plumbing, or electricity. Be very thankful you’re in your field of work, and that commodity is not a four-letter word. And more importantly…

5. Just be thankful, period. You’ve got health, or the hope of improvement, plus family, friends, and faith in better days ahead. Even what Americans call “poverty” materially dwarfs 70% of the rest of the world. We need to show less attitude, more gratitude.

6. All this stuff is God’s anyway. We’re just renting it. (Some of us a little behind on the payments perhaps.) Regardless of your faith or belief, there’s a pretty decent chance you believe someone other than man made the earth, its resources, its glory. Further, I’ll imagine you’ve yet to figure out a way to take it with you when you’re gone. Want what you have.

If THIS is what the economic turmoil brings us, bring it on. It’s here anyway; neither you nor I caused it; we can only control how we respond.

A choice, as I see it. Now go share some good news. There’s plenty enough to go around.

Thoughts and considerations –

1. Do you have ONE PERSON you’d like to thank? I bet more than one. Why not ‘pay out’ with some thanks to somebody who could use it? Pretty darn easy to. Click here to get started.

2. Do you have a whole BUNCH of people you’d like to thank at one time? Like, um, maybe YOUR CUSTOMERS? We have contractor Holiday Cards available again this year.

3. Would you like to triple your market penetration for pennies? Check out the radius marketing program through Express Copy.

In Proverbs we are told that the wise learn from the mistakes of others. Using this method, I must be a fantastic teacher.
Mistakes are powerful lesson builders. Nowhere is this more evident than when you a) Measure everything, b) Are in the “Marketing for ROI” business, and c) Have teenage children in your household.

Email marketing inherently brings mistakes. Since it’s free and everyone can send an email, you see both wise and idiotic marketing side-by-side. Usually the higher the media cost the higher the research and testing.

Yet the wise have certainly learned from the mistakes, testing multiple email methods to maximize results.

Here’s what a 4 year study from the minds of MarketingSherpa in a multi-million dollar test updated June 2010 says are do’s and don’ts that are costing you big time. There were dozens but I condensed it to The TOP 9 EMAIL MISTAKES from Contractors. A few of these are shockers.

• The “From” line: How many emails do you send with your company in the “From” area, thinking, “Hey, they know me and my company, so this is a good, trustable source?” WRONG. One of the primary strengths of email is being “personal”, so making the “from” box appear personal is the exact same advice behind “blind” or “shielded” Direct Mail envelopes. (As your PowerPack advised you years ago!) Personal emails get read first, many company ones are trashed instantly. Get in that first group.

• Remain consistently “known”: Often a company will send an email from the salesperson, then from the CSR, then from accounting, then back to the the tech to confirm an appointment. BAD IDEA. Finally, the branders ‘win’ one, but we knew this one anyway. It is better to have either a) consistent spokesperson communicating in the ‘from’ line by name, OR b) “customer service”@, OR c) Something creative like, “TheDreamTeam@”.

• Watch the “Subject Line” Branding Attempts: Have you been told by the “experts” that putting your company name in the subject line is a good branding idea? WRONG. Findings from the research team indicated, “This single mistake sends response rates tumbling.” Another shot in the ‘branding’ vs. ‘direct response’ marketers mini-war.

• Subject Lines RULE Open Rates: Are you sending emails without thought to the Subject line? Are you ‘salesy’ sounding things like, “Check this out” or “We have some great deals”? KISS OF DEATH. Fact: the highest paid group in all of marketing are Direct Response copywriters. Within that, are the elite “headline” writers whose fees can be in the thousands per hour. Yes, per hour. Their trade has ballooned by writing emails that get opened, and that dear friends is from “Subject Lines” since they are the ‘headline’ of your email. I save the emails I get with the best ‘Subject’ lines, and have for years.

A Hint: Novelty, entertainment, intrigue, question, controversy ALL outpull the corporate ego schlock everyone else is sending.

• Subject Line Brevity: I got a subject line this week that said: “Come By Our Booth at Comfortech to See the New ” Really UnSmart. Due to the various pane previewers out there, most can’t even SEE more than about 30 characters. Keep Subject lines under 40 characters.

•Formatting Nightmares: We all get emails in two basic forms: HTML (graphics, formatting) and plain text (plain and legible). But which is better? This battle has raged on like, “Is it Lady Gaga or Lotta Gaggy?” The answer is finally here.
Send in HTML but with very plain graphics. Why? The test showed that high graphics – though nice to see – slowed emails, reduced opens, and appeared as ‘blanks’ more often. And thought Plain Text gets read more often, it does NOT share stats like HTML. Thus, the “hybrid” model. (If you send in MIME format, your emails will be sent in both formats, but you’re still cautioned against high graphic emails.)

• Common Link Mistakes: Lazy marketers or unaware contractors often send links that are more than one line long, causing it to slip to the next line, rendering unopenable except by cutting and pasting. Response Killer. Avoid link-wrapping and long tracking links.

• Prefix Disaster. Lots of email senders think its “old fashioned” to include the http:// because you don’t need it. HOGWASH. Include the ‘http’ because larger providers won’t present your link as “live” without the URL. Give the full prefix or expect a far lower open rate.

• Readership List Death. Many business owners felt that “cheap” or “free” meant “smart” in their corporate communications. So many swapped out product announcements, home show appearances, and newsletters from hard mail or traditional “paid” media to email. The study showed two things happened, both bad.

First, email is to be short or linked to a longer subject like we do in SMI. When the email was long, it was summarily discarded. (We reported this in SMI over two years ago.)

Second, since email is known to be cheap and fast, customers saw company information delivered this way as cheap, thus deletable. (How “warm” do you feel when you get an e-birthday card vs. a mailed one? Just checking.)

Research shows that mailed vs. emailed gets higher open rates, better branding, imaging, and most importantly higher response rates. The study showed between 4 and 22 times the response rate for a variety of items from the same company, for same product, to same list. Pretty good test.

Hudson, Ink recommends (this was not in the study) that you send short, content-rich emails to your broad “free” list, linking them to a longer article or product info within that email. Then supplement your email communication to your “paid” list (customers) with real mail. This way, you’re communicating both ways to the higher value list members.

We have seen response rates actually increase over the past 2 years with traditional “real” mail. (Same as the now-famous Wall Street Journal article on Direct Mail versus Email response.)

So if you’re going to use email – and you should – use it well.

So there you have it. Keep this list. Forward to a friend. You just saw how to make all the emails you send get opened more, read more, and pull better.

The Real Wealth in Contracting

Hallelujah. We now have a kitchen. Or most of one. At least I have a sink where I can wash my coffee cup without first having to remove some ladies' undergarment apparatus from Woolite. (Once it took me nearly two hours to untangle a halter top that had some origami kind of twisted front. I still don’t know if I got it right.)

We can now cook food in something other than a microwave. Since my teenagers eat roughly 11 meals per day, our home – when viewed from Google Earth – looks like a glow stick.

My refrigerator is no longer stylishly perched in the entrance hall, seemingly saying to guests, “Hi, welcome to our home. Please have some butter.”

And tracing my 12 weeks of family torment back to where it all began, we are once and for all…

Formica-less.

I hadn’t realized the kitchen design embarrassment my wife had endured all these years. The indestructible Formica had served us well, though it was potentially more suited to the Space Shuttle belly pan.

We now have quartz and marble countertops. Yet with manufacturing cleverness, they could be reconstituted Formica made to look like other materials, only priced 400 times higher. In fact many “hardwood floors” are really Formica with different names, same as many politicians.

Though my first home cost less than this renovation (I have no idea if that’s true, but you must make this type comment so others will do the “renovation gasp”) my wife is happy. And that counts for everything (unless you’re attracted to misery, punishment, weeping, gnashing of teeth, and sleeping in the yard).

You should be excellent at a) getting and creating “happy” customers, and b) committed to keeping those customers. Sure, you can have a “satisfied” customer and “hope” they call you back, but that’s so yesterday, so basic, so not you.

Though your job skills are important, no skill is more important than getting and keeping the customer. Why?

What value are your skills without customers? In this economy, not much. A fantastic plumber with no work is heading toward being broke. An “okay” plumber good at keeping customers and with a constant 2 week backlog is heading towards wealth.

You’ve got to be more than “just” skilled. Things have changed.

Here’s How The Contractors Fared, And Who Is Most Likely
To Take Their Business To The Next Level…

• The GC – Stayed in touch after he did a smallish bathroom job for our daughter’s room. He stayed busy while others moaned, and remembered to keep the pipeline full by treating ‘past’ jobs as ‘current’ customers. Smart. He scored this job and has a nice backlog of work. 2009 was his best year ever. Grade A

• The Plumber – Did fine work. However, he never said his name, never left a card, never asked to look at other plumbing issues in the house. We had to be reminded he was the plumber on the previous bathroom job. Guess he doesn’t care that we have plumbing in rooms other than the kitchen, or neighbors, all in 100 year old houses. He just does his work, disappears, hopes. Hard to call or refer a phantom. Grade D-

• Electrician – Did fine work. Uniforms, truck signage, left a card on every visit, we get his newsletter, postcards. Also called behind the work to check. Subsequently (and I’m no big customer) this company has done Hudson Ink’s 3 commercial properties, a warehouse, another house, and neighbors on both sides. Grade A

• Floor Dudes – Did ‘fair’ work. Has the people skills of a bruised turnip. Swept sawdust into our new floor vents, like we didn’t notice. Lucky they didn’t come on while the floor was wet. Fast, rushed, left zero company info, never called back to check or make good on the misstep. Our house and offices all have hardwood, as do all our neighbors. Oh well. Guess they don’t need more customers. Grade D

• Painters – Neatest painters I’ve ever seen. Cleaned up daily. Left swatches, mixed custom batches, really exceptional. To their discredit, never checked to see that we have other walls, or that I was planning to repaint our office façade, like I do every year. Even the company that did that job last year disappeared too. Never called, emailed, recontacted, nothing. I have no idea who it was. Guess I’ll just Google for painters. Grade C

• Countertop/Cabinet Contractors – Fabulous work. My wife’s birthday was during this time, asked if the marble could at least be ‘set’ while she was away as a surprise. They willingly complied, did an excellent job going “one step beyond”. I won’t forget that, nor them. They left company info and called after both jobs, Recontact works folks. Grade A

You may notice that the grades have little correlation to the quality of work. They have everything to do with getting called, referred, or remembered by a good “retained” customer. Recontacting customers means you’re keeping them by keeping yourself relevant.

A message from your customers to you: We’re paying customers. You paid to earn us. We want to remember you, call you, refer you, buy more from you, but need your help. Please don’t ignore us.

Once you’ve gotten a customer, your most important job is to keep that customer.

Getting Perpetual Traffic to Your Website: Google’s New Little Secret That Has Changed the Rules

Were these the good ol’ days? Back when Yellow Pages were the dominant marketing resource for contractors (around the Paleozoic era, just before Larry King’s birth) basically all you had to know is –

How big of an ad can I get for how much money?

After that, the Yellow Pages would design an ad that looked shockingly like every other ad in the book, and overcharge you mightily. If you paid more for more years, you got closer to the front of the section (whoopdee!). If you resisted, they would break your legs and call you names. It was a simpler time.

Though Yellow Page lookups have plummeted (down 24% in last 48 months, a precipitous decline – the online SuperPages not doing much better), they’re not dead. Yet a good bit of their viability has been drained by…

The internet. Okay, let’s call it Google. (You can suggest Yahoo, Bing, or Ask, but Google has 71.63% of the market according to Hitwise.com.) When you own the cards and the chips, you get to make the rules. Enter SEO.

Before the internet, we had to go based on “who was reading or watching what”. Now, we must get psycho-graphic and determine “What questions are prospects asking before they find me?”

In essence, this is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

So, everyone began looking at keywords, search strings, relevance, and recency as methods to be “found” on the internet. Changes here are near constant. Case in point - -

There are 3 hugely popular SEO myths that DO NOT WORK anymore, and one ‘secret’ Google revision that has really changed rankings.

3 Popular Phrases that are Totally False today:

1. If you build it they will come. No they won’t. Let me rephrase this. “If you build it, you will be charged.” Basically, you can build the Taj Mahal of websites but if no one can find you, what was the point? Do not let your web designer “forget” to include SEO as one of the main reasons you’re investing.

2. Content is King. Content used to be King, but has now become a second Lieutenant. It is still very attractive, but can be overwhelming. Content per site is actually shrinking. The new “King” is activity (thanks Google!). More in a moment.

3. Being ranked first means you have the best site. No, it means you have the most “findable” site in that search string. I’d rather finish 3rd-5th in ranking (still top half of screen, first page) and have the most conversions. Even though I’m a lead junkie, I’d rather have closeable leads than window shoppers.

With that out of the way, what is working now?

Through Google Analytics, find how people are finding you. Easy to go to www.google.com/Analytics and see where you rank in your chosen words.

Keyword Check: Are your ‘best’ words used throughout your site? In your Title, Meta Tags and Head tags? Now check density of word usage. If “Plumbing in Sacramento” is a search string, then use that phrase early per page, and up to 3 times per 300 words.

Keyword tip everybody misses: DO NOT just post an image on your site with some undecipherable code. Place keywords in the ALT Tags for all your images. You’ll thank me later.

Video is more “active” than text. Label your videos, title it for relevance among hopeful viewers.

What are the top pages on your site now? Look for commonalities on those pages to see why they get more visits. Apply these tactics to your conversion pages.

Index Status: Check whether your website has been indexed by major search engines. If it is not indexed, all this SEO focus is pointless.

Are you socially acceptable? Put links to Twitter and FaceBook on your website, and cross link from them back to your site. Completely fill out your profiles, again using keywords as appropriate.

Blog your little fanny off. A weekly ‘editorial’ is really a blog, and that can be posted on Blogspot.com

Backlink check: When a link to you starts on another site and points to you, that’s a backlink. Getting quality backlinks is critical. So get listed in directories, post on related forums, get quoted in blogs and submit your articles to directories. Check backlinkbuilder.com. I do not recommend ‘buying’ backlinks. Dangerous territory.

Google’s Most Recent “Change” that will put money in your pocket. Get ready. Where you used to be able to get ‘found’ on static content, now Google ranks “activity” on your site. This means as you gain popularity… you gain findability. I know, it’s the chicken and the egg thing. Easiest thing to do is stay active. Add links, add articles, add posts, add customer reviews, update news, change dates, Tweet like an over-caffeinated canary, add video, post your printed newsletter on your website.