How to make a great FREE website for your trade or property business

Getting your construction or property business online pt1

A lot of building trade and property businesses either don't have a website for their marketing or have done it poorly themselves, so I thought I'd write a couple of posts about websites and doing it yourself for free and how to make it work for you.

Now, I'm not discounting web designers and going to one for your website, it has advantages over making one for yourself, however it has a cost too! At the end of the day it's your decision, I hope this series of posts will help you, if you do go to see or already have a website designer doing your site.

So, What do I know

Firstly let me tell you about why I think I'm qualified to talk about websites. I'd like to point out I'm not an expert web designer/ builder, however I've read a lot and formed my own opinions of what I think makes a good site and there are a lot of differing opinions out there, I've also had a bit of experience in building my own sites.

I built my own first website back in the 90's using HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) which is the main programming code for websites, since then I've made several websites using hosting packages from companies such as 123-reg.co.uk which is the type a lot of trades use now or the hosted ones from the likes of Yell!

What free website builder to use 

I now use Google sites and have made 19 sites to date for myself and other people using Sites, I made my own electrical website for my business, which is now dormant, in that I don't work on it, there is a lot I could do to make it work better, however it still gets me calls every week for jobs, so I keep it live to pass that business on. I've also made the Marketing for Trades website using Google Sites too.

I like Google sites as it's simple to use, there are plenty of templates to choose from and if you spend a bit of time learning how to use it and can use something like Microsoft Word then you can make a perfectly good site to start marketing your building trade or property business, for free which is really great if you're a start up!

What makes a good website

There are some key things that I think make a good basic website; 

• What you do and how you can help solve a customers want or need should be in the top left of the home page of your site (As on my sites), not your logo, I've said it before people do not care about your logo, it's only you that does, people want to know that they can find what they are looking for, so you need to tell them straight away how you can help them.
• Your contact number needs to be on the right in a large font to make it easy to see/ find. Some people will call you straight away without looking at the rest of your site, don't make it hard for them to contact you by looking for your number or going to a contact page (still have a contact page though) otherwise they may just leave and go somewhere else.
• Your logo I think it's still important to have this but have it on the right or left, lower down but above what is called the fold, that's the top part of the website you can see without scrolling down.
• Keep colours & fonts to a minimum, too many and your site looks messy and it makes it harder to read, you should really only use one maybe two fonts maximum and 3 or 4 colours. Less really is more.
• Use pictures They make a site come alive and break up the text on the site, if you've got your own that's best rather than use stock photos, it makes a site more personal and everyone has seen that american tradesman in a hard hat!
• Have a contact form rather than an email address, if you have a contact form it's easy for people to contact you, with an email address, you're reliant on them having to open their email program maybe cut and paste or type your email in and then send it to you, a contact form is easier.

One of the most powerful things about having a site you've built is that you can add and edit pages as and when you want, with a website designer/builder you'll have to wait and there will be a charge.

There is far more to a website, and just having a website alone will not get you business, I'll save the rest for the following posts over the next few days...



To your online marketing success

Paul Jennings


Once you've digested this post you can move on to part 2 about how to start getting your website found

Pay Per Click marketing for trades

Pay Per Click Marketing Part 2

For those that don't know what Pay Per Click marketing is and about how it can work for your business you can read part 1 here

As we know Pay Per Click advertising and Google Adwords Marketing is one of the best ways to drive prospective customers to your website and ones that are already looking for your product or service at the very point they need your service, This is especially great if your site is new and not been picked up and ranked by the search engines yet, which can take weeks.

Using Adwords in your marketing strategy can give a significant boost to your business and is a great return on marketing investment and if you've not tried it yet then do so.

A Sample PPC Ad for an Electrician

Below is a sample of one of the Ad that I ran for my business that did well

Writing an Ad is very simple but an art form in itself, you are limited on the number of characters so your Ad needs to be concise, yet draw the prospective customer in to click on your Ad. 
This Ad I set to only show in Hertford, so only people in Hertford would see it when they entered the Keywords I'd set, you see it's very relevant to them so they would click on it, then all that needed to happen was for them to be suitably impressed and get enough information from my website and call me.

Isn't it just a waste of marketing money!

Here's the thing if PPC doesn't work why are all the advertising companies using it! Google your trade now and see that yell, trust a trader, rated people etc are all using it and then charging 2 or 3 trades people around £12 for that lead, when they would have only paid £1 or £2 for it! 
Most of your competitors are not using PPC, so you will have a massive advantage over them!

The one thing with Adwords is that you can spend a lot of money and get little or no business from it, and I've heard this complaint from trades people many times, unfortunately I've not seen their particular Pay Per Click

marketing campaigns to comment on how they have spent too much with poor results but let me explain some possibilities as to why. 

First though let me clear up one myth and that is that your competitors can click on your ads over and over again and use up your budget, this is known as 'click fraud', However if they try this the Google Adwords program will recognise that the clicks come from the same PC and therefore not count clicks, this means that the competitor would have to use several different PCs and that would just be a waste of time (unless they were mental of course) This is time which would be better spent getting new customers. 

How to waste your Pay Per Click Budget

One way to use a lot of your PPC marketing spend is to set the wrong area for your ads to show, on my old Hertford Electrician site I have Google Adsense (Which allows you to have ads on your site and make money when people click on them) sometimes it shows ads for other electricians, now, my site is for Hertford and the local area only so why would an electrician from say Bath want to advertise in Hertford, it would not be worth them coming up to my neck of the woods for work!

When a a someone clicks on the ads they've lost money, this is because they've either set their ads to show UK wide or even worse, worldwide! 

Another point to note is that they have their Ad showing on Google's display networks, the problem here is your ad will get shown on a site with relevant content to your site but it may not be a great site to get prospects as they may not be searching for your services, therefore your budget may get wasted here when people are just curious and click on the ads.

Setting your bid too high means that your budget could get swallowed up pretty fast, it's best to aim for the second or third spot rather than the top where you'll be paying the maximum cost per click all the time. best to start low and increase the bid as you get reports from Adwords.

Start off your campaign with a few keywords, if you have lots of keywords and largely irrelevant ones your money will again be wasted, on top of this you'll not get good metric feedback. It's much better to focus your PPC campaign.

Making your Pay Per Click work better

Test, Refine, Repeat is what you should be doing with your Ad copy on a regular basis, start off with 10-15 ads and find the top performers, create duplicates and change a word or two test that Ad for a few days to see which gets the most impressions and clicks, then do it again, removing or changing just one word in the ad can reduce your ad spend and get a better return on investment as it may be that one word that influences a searcher to click. You also want to set your ads to show evenly so that you can see exactly how each performs on which day and what time during the day the day. I found my Ads always got more clicks around Wednesday late afternoon and evening. 
When you monitor like this you can set Adwords to show more often and at the best time!

Always be refining and tweaking your ads on a daily basis to see if you can get better results and reduce your spend and increase your ROI.


To your marketing success
Paul Jennings


If you run a trade business in or around Hertfordshire? I run 121 Google Adwords Marketing training for trades that can get you started and with £100 to spend on Google Adwords

And here is Part 3 in the Pay Per Click series about marketing your trade with Facebook ads