Hi everyone! I’ll be leaving my job as an internal auditor at a holding company to start Apex Window Cleaning with a partner in Columbia, MO on March 1st. I just wanted to say hello and let you guys know how grateful I am for all the help and good discussion I’ve seen on the forum (special thanks to @Trad-Man and @Luke for your training videos and product reviews, you guys are awesome!). I’m really looking forward to getting out from behind a desk for a while, and though I’ll enjoy the manual labor, my main goal is to get to a point where I can put most of my energy into developing the business.
My marketing plan, which is drawn heavily from the Marketing Blueprint, is to start by doing some small EDDM, Facebook, and Adwords campaigns, and a lot of canvassing, then to scale up slowly as I can handle the work and find what’s effective. I’m blown away by the kind of community there is here and how much valuable information is shared freely. I’ll probably have some dumb questions at first, but hope to be able to contribute soon. Have a good one!
@SteveEngland
ok…I’d like to know how you actually know that for a fact.
You DO know that you can pause and play your ads even based on weather conditions right?
Oh, and “Welcome” to the op.
By the way there ain’t no dumb questions if you hit the search bar and asked and can’t find the answer. Don’t worry too much about that-you’ll find what you need right here.
[quote=“thorSG1, post:8, topic:46142”]
ok…I’d like to know how you actually know that for a fact.
You DO know that you can pause and play
[/quote]I
Yes. All ads are paused and have been since I drilled down on the Adwords dashboard. The Adwords dashboard gives detailed metrics on keyword incidence, geographic location of visitors etc. For example, I chose a 20 mile radius in The UK from base for ads to appear. The impressions data shows however that 39.7% of ad impressions were from USA!! Only 18% were from UK, the others from rest of the world.
Yes several times. I was left with the impression that a misspent $200 is of little interest to a multi billion $ corporation. What also did not sit well with me is that the pre-payment facility has been withdrawn for all accounts. Therefore money is taken by direct debit automatically rather than the campaign stopping if the pre-payment runs out. For this reason an ad placer has to check regularly the amounts being debited and where the paid clicks are coming from. The daily amount can be controlled and the budget per click to control the page ranking but no distinction can be made over who actually clicks the ads. It could be someone looking to buy a squeegee and your ad is clicked because they entered into google ‘window cleaning squeegee’ and you paid for a front page placement. $3 wasted immediately. Exact phrase can also be entered ie “window cleaning” with no another keyword but google will still place your ad on the assumption that someone may want to know how to do it rather than looking for the service. They click through and you pay.
Welcome Austin! I quit an underwriting job in insurance to start this in Nov 2016 and haven’t missed my cube for a minute! I hope your experience will be as good as mine. When I quit I had been running my business part time for 6 months and only had $330 a month in storefronts. Now I have around 1800 per month and resi adds on some. I grossed 31k for the year. Honestly, I likely could have made more but I was really enjoying working for myself and having the liberty to take off in the middle of the day and work on a house project or take my wife to the zoo. Almost all my storefronts came from going in and talking to the owner or the manager and handing in them my business card, and a few houses came from the storefronts and then most of them came by referral. I did doorhangers once for resi and got 2 calls out of 600 flyers, so after a good number of hours of me and my wife handing those out I decided against it. Those marketing methods can work, but they take a good amount of time and repeat saturation, and I was much happier with my other methods. I have found I have a 5%-10% close rate for any given day when I canvas storefronts. I hope this info helps and best of luck!
