How much would you pay to stay anonymous?

I am going to be launching an experiment soon that has multiple benefits: educate the roofing industry on marketing while either building my private contact list or making money, and to see just how valuable your privacy is. I hope you'll play along.

The experiment involves writing a short but comprehensive e-book that gives the "secret formula" for using social media to create exposure of your roofing company, to engage deeper with your customers (past, existing and future), to improve your online communications, and to increase your sales. It is a formula that I know works because multiple roofing business owners pay me handsomely to do this for them (and they are seeing tremendous results).

Here's the catch: you will be able to download the e-book for free, provided you fill out a form with all the contact information I request (which is verified prior to you receiving the download to ensure you aren't making up a fictitious identity). If you prefer to not give up that information, you can just pay $19.95 and get the e-book immediately without having to provide any information.

Provided you wanted to read this e-book (which is non-transferable and can not be posted online for others to read for free), which path would you choose? Is keeping your information out of my contact database worth $19.95? Is it worth $39.95? More?

Please leave a comment below with your thoughts. I want this to be educational, valuable for all, and a fun experiment. You can also email me at Chris@RoofPal.com if you prefer.

Software solutions can speed the roofing process, saving time and money

Click here to read the entire article (published in Carolinas Roofing magazine)

Your customers are changing. The first generation of kids who grew up texting, buying music on iTunes, purchasing items on eBay and coding their own MySpace pages are now graduating from college. Many have purchased homes of their own, and some are now working as property managers, facility managers, multihousing community managers and homeowners association managers. In other words, the first generation of children who only know how to purchase something by clicking a button are now making decisions about roofing. What this means is the industry as a whole needs to adapt to them.

In the next five years, these kids are going to completely change the way services are bought because they want convenience and simplicity. If your roofing company isn’t “push-of-a-button” easy to work with, one day these consumers will stop calling or simply send you a text message informing you they no longer need your services.

Enabling the immediate transfer of information has tremendous benefit to roofing contractors. Increased speed, improved accuracy and significant reduction of manual tasks create an obvious case for reduced costs of labor, inventory and operating costs, as well as significantly improved employee and customer satisfaction.

Real-time data processing would allow you to achieve cost reductions and productivity gains by building an inspection report and proposal while you conduct the inspection. Customers could have the report in hand, sign-off on the recommendations and actually remit the down payment before your technician is off the roof.

In addition, requests for service or leak repair work could be automatically routed to your scheduling system, which would alert your technicians through their cell phones, giving them all the information they need, including GPS-guided directions to the facility. All work can be tracked and reported back to your office and to the customer as it is happening. While on the roof, your technicians could access all the roofing history for the building with a few clicks and update the records with pictures, videos, drawings and notes based on the work performed. Invoices would be automatically generated and sent to the homeowner or the building owners’ Accounts Payable representative instantaneously, significantly reducing the actual cash-flow cycle time.

There are several software companies that specifically cater to the roofing industry. AccuLynx, Dataforma, Facility Control Systems, RoofLogic and dozens others offer solutions that range in functionality, usability and price. With real-time data processing, everything is updated in the system as it happens. What now takes up to a week manually can be done in a couple hours.

THE BOTTOM LINE

It’s time for the roofing industry to evolve. Our processes are manual, complicated, costly and, frankly, take too long. If they haven’t already, your customers will soon demand you become “click-of-a-button” easy to work with. They want information and they want it now. As an industry we can no longer do things the way we’ve always done them. Real-time information isn’t the flavor of the month. It is 2012, and it is time we embrace the information age before we are left behind.

Click here to read the entire article (published in Carolinas Roofing magazine)

SEO Periodic Table - How to get your roofing website to the top of Google search

I found this great infographic on what is actually important for search engine optimization (SEO) and how important each factor is, and wanted to share it with my friends in the roofing industry (contractors, manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors).

What is most important to getting your roofing website or blog to the top of Google search? Here is a list (in no particular order):

Content quality. All pages of your website need to be well written, and there must be a substantial amount of high quality original information.

Content research. You should do fairly extensive research on which keywords are the most used to search for the content you are sharing.

HTML titles. Make sure your HTML title tags contain keywords that are relevant to the content on the page.

Architecture crawl. Make sure search engines can easily "crawl", or scan for current information, all the pages on your website or blog.

Link quality. Make sure the links on your website or blog go to trusted, high-quality websites.

Link text. Don't use link to another page on your website or blog using the words "click here" (or something similar), highlight a good keyword or phrase that makes sense for the destination page and make that word or phrase become the linked text.

Trust/authority. Your website or blog will become a trusted authority as a result of lots of inbound links, many shares on social media, and other similar factors.

Physical proximity. The closer geographically you are to someone, the better.


Additionally, here are the second-tier items that will help get your roofing website or blog to the top of Google search:

Words and phrases. On each page, make sure you are using the words and phrases that you want it to be found for when someone does a Google search.

Engaging content. Use your website or blog's analytics to see not only how many page visits you get, but how long people spend looking at the page. Are they opening it and then clicking back or closing the window quickly after, or are they reading the whole page?

Fresh content. Are you producing new content and is it relevent to the "hot" search topics of your industry?

HTML description. Make sure your meta description tags accurately describe what the page is about.

Social reputation. Are people who are respected on social media sharing links to your website or blog?

History. The more someone visits your website or blog, and especially if they have "Liked" something on Facebook or shared on social media in any way, the higher other pages on your website or blog will begin to show up for them on search.


Last but not least, here are some additional items to consider that do have some impact on how your roofing website or blog will be found on Google search:

HTML headers. Make sure headlines and sub-headers use proper header tags with relevant keywords.

Page speed. The faster your page loads, the better.

URL format. The shorter a URL is, the better. Also, make sure the URL contains meaningful keywords to the topics of the webpage or blog post.

Number of links. The more external links that point to your website or blog, the better.

Social shares. The more people who share links to your webpage or blog post on social media, the better.

History. The longer your website or blog has existed, the better.

Social connections. The more those you are connected to on social media Like, comment on, re-Tweet, etc. posts containing links to your website or blog, the better.


Please also note the pink and orange sections at the bottom of the chart that discuss violations and blocking. These are some things you definitely do not want to be doing, as it will decrease your positioning in Google search.

If you have any questions about this blog post, please email me at Chris@RoofPal.com.

How roofing contractors can get more clicks on Twitter

Twitter is best used to broadcast and gather information. Creating a lot of interesting content to share with your followers should be your goal for the tool.

I was reading a blog post from Dan Zarrella last week and came across his research findings from studying how to optimize click-through rate of links that you include in your Tweets.

CTR: # of clicks on a link in a Tweet divided by total followers at the time

Without going through all of the details, here is what he found studying 200,000 Tweets containing links from highly followed Twitter accounts:

1. 120 to 130 (of 140 possible) characters is optimal.
2. Put the link 25% of the way through (at around the 30-ish character mark).
3. Tweet at a slower pace, with 1 per hour being best (I've made this mistake).
4. Use the words "via", "@", "RT", "please", and/or "check".
5. Check out paper.li - the phrase with the greatest positive effect was "daily is out".
6. Use more verbs & adverbs (action words), and fewer nouns & adjectives.
7. Tweet on the weekend (Friday, Saturday and Sunday had the highest CTR).
8. Tweet later in the day (2pm-1am had the highest CTR).

Honestly, I don't know if the results of this study relate to the roofing industry or not, but I thought it was interesting to share and definitely worth a try for a few weeks for those who use Twitter (by the way, I am @roofpal if you'd like to follow).

If you have any questions about this blog post, feel free to email me at Chris@RoofPal.com.

3 steps to determine if you need a mobile roofing website strategy

The title of this blog post is actually misleading. There are actually no steps involved in determining if you need a mobile website strategy for your roofing company - you do need one! The real question is, how much should a mobile website matter to you?

At a minimum you should have mechanisms in place to serve up content targeted at the someone viewing your site from a mobile device (smart phone, iPad, etc.). But how do you know what to measure to determine just how pressing a need this is?

Step 1: Turn on "mobile traffic" in Google Analytics

Every installation of Google Analytics has a custom traffic segment called "mobile traffic". Log in to your Google Analytics account and turn on this segment in the upper right-hand corner.

Step 2: Identify your % of traffic that comes from mobile devices

Browse over to your visitors tab. What percentage of your traffic is mobile? If it is higher than 1% you need to start thinking about a mobile website strategy. If it is higher than 10% you need to kick your mobile website strategy into high gear. If it is higher than 25% and your mobile strategy isn’t in full swing you are losing business to people who don’t want to navigate on a mobile unfriendly website.

Step 3: Identify the % of mobile traffic for new vs. returning visitors

Two other data points worth noting is new and returning visitors. What percentage of each is mobile traffic? If your returning visitors are using mobile devices to browse your roofing company's website in any serious way, then you are annoying them by not offering up a mobile option. If your new visitors are coming from mobile devices, then you may be turning away business and you don’t even know it.

There is a very good chance that search traffic from a mobile device is coming from someone who needs a roofer ASAP. Make absolutely sure that your mobile content gives the information they need in a hurry - an easy way to report a leak or request an inspection, an easy way to contact the right person for a project or service work, how to get to your office (if appropriate), etc.

If you aren't getting any mobile traffic at all, that should raise two questions: why not, and what should you do about it? As more and more internet traffic migrates to mobile devices you should see an increase in mobile traffic over time to your website. If you see none, that means you have likely done zero optimization for mobile and local search. At a bare minimum, register your website with Google Places and consider at least starting a free account (plus profile data) on Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, and any other services that heavily promote mobile usage.

If you have any questions about optimizing your roofing company's website for mobile devices, please feel free to email Chris@RoofPal.com.

YouTube Videos Rank Higher in Google

Roofing contractors should use YouTube as much as possible.

Please watch my video podcast about using YouTube for roofing contractors

YouTube (purchased by Google in 2006 for over $1.6 billion) has now become one of the world’s most visited websites. Google indexes those videos and more often than not, you now find YouTube videos appearing on the first page of search results, sometimes outranking aged and established organic listings.

Since there is a clear priority by Google given to YouTube videos and because they are so well received on social media platforms such as Facebook, your roofing company should be taking advantage of all of the benefits.

It is very easy to upload a video to YouTube (accounts are free and simple to set up). Here are the basic steps:

Shoot Your Video

Create a short, content-rich video. Shorter videos are viewed much more frequently (under two minutes is best). Small HD video cameras can now be purchased for just over $100 and include software to upload videos directly through WiFi (or plug into your computer, save and upload the old fashioned way).

Video Name Keywords are EXTREMELY IMPORTANT

Include in the name of your video keywords that you expect people searching would use to find information about your services ("roof repair Dallas", "metal roofing Los Angeles", etc.). I can’t stress how vital it is to ensure EVERY word in the title of your video is relevant to your content. Do not include the date or time in your title and only the location if it is relevant to the search. Your video listing could be on page one of Google search within 24 hours.

Create Incoming Links To Your Video Listing

Anchor Link TEXT is the visible text in a hyperlink. Within your website and/or blog, link back to your YouTube video using your keyword(s) in your anchor text.  Also, you can ask friends and associates to link back to your YouTube video using the same method. By applying links to your YouTube videos (and having other sites do the same) it tells Google that your videos are relevant to the keywords or keyword phrases you have chosen.

Drive YouTube Video Viewers to your Website

Once people begin finding your video listings for the keywords you have chosen, you have created a lead generation path that will last for a long time to come. Mention your website address during the video or place a screenshot of your website and your website address at the start and end of your video so viewers know how to get to your website. I also recommend including a hot-linked URL (your website address with the http:// at the beginning) into the beginning of the description of your video in the "About This Video" section.

If you have any questions about or need assistance using YouTube for your roofing company, or if you are interested in learning more about the RoofPal Official Microcast Series which now produces video blogs that can be personally branded with your company name, logo and contact information, please email RoofPal@gmail.com.

Are you on the recieving end of your own social media marketing?

If you are looking for a good way to evaluate how well your social media marketing is working, try being a recipient of your own content.

Not only should you spend time being a consumer of your products and services, you should also be a consumer of your own marketing (including social media). Think of your marketing efforts as another service offering. Is your social media content really a valuable service iteself?

How often do you go back to check your own blog for something you wrote in the past? If you do, it is a sign that you have actually posted valuable information. If you never go back to reference your own blog yourself, it might not be valuable enough for anyone else either.

The same is true for your social media accounts. I store links on my Facebook page in order to reference recent relevant content for my marketing newsletter and podcast. In other words, I am my own customer (I go back to remember what I published). How often do you check your posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google+? If the answer is "never", then maybe the content you are sharing isn't as valuable as you think it is.

Much has been made of influence scores (Klout) and re-tweet or like/share metrics, but the simplest metric of all is to look at your own behavior. If you never go back to look at your own content (i.e., you find no value in what you publish), chances are that no one else does either. You can begin improving your social media marketing by publishing things that are of value to you. Do that and you’ll automatically begin sharing information that are of value to others.

If you would like an independent evaluation of your social media marketing, please email Chris@RoofPal.com for pricing (it's not as expensive as you might think).