Question Digital marketing a sign shop with no money?

[FireSprint.com]

FireHour today at 3pm CST we'll go over a few ideas on how to market your sign or print shop with little or no money.

What do you do to get the word out on a budget?

Check us out on our FireSprint Facebook or YouTube channel!

https://youtube.com/c/Firesprint

 

[rjssigns]

Basic website is it for marketing yet people manage to find me anyway.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

Signs101 would be a great place to spend digital ad dollars. See what did there Signs101Admin ?

 

[Pauly]

On a budget.
Cheap basic website, share on social media. Ask your friends to share etc.

 

[Precision]

$2500 a month, web seo company. Get 150 -200 hits a month. 1st year did $100k in sales, 6 years later, were gonna do $900k+ this year. 6 employee shop.

 

[zspace]

Here are a few no cost suggestions. Some take a lot of work and have to be maintained to be effective.
E-blast customers, and prospects that didn’t order, every 3-4 weeks with an offer or relevant information
Ask customers to link to your website.
Donate service/product to a charity and ask them to link to your website or Facebook page
Email customers with a link to review you on Google
Build your business profile on Google
Add photos to your google business profile on a regular basis - at least monthly
Build a business account on Facebook and linked in, make sure they link to your main website

 

[FireSprint.com]

Interesting that most people seem to spend the big bucks or don't hardly spend anything at all. I wouldn't have guessed that!

 

[gnubler]

$2500 a month, web seo company. Get 150 -200 hits a month.

That sounds really expensive.

 

[Notarealsignguy]

If you're able to pump out some mediocre work, it seems like you really don't have to do much of anything to stay busy right now. No way would I spend 2500/month on SEO, that's enough to cover a decent sales persons base salary.

 

[EbmerStorm]

It requires an investment but a good SEO specialist or even company never fails.

 

[Precision]

If you're able to pump out some mediocre work, it seems like you really don't have to do much of anything to stay busy right now. No way would I spend 2500/month on SEO, that's enough to cover a decent sales persons base salary.

It is the cheapest and most effective $30k a year salesman. Wouldn't change a thing our business has gone from constantly looking and slum margins, to having the upper hand on the amount of work we have, and sifting out the low $ jobs. I reccomend it to anyone struggling that still has some decent operating capital and is young in years in the business. Very satisfied with the results.

 

[Stacey K]

It depends who your target is.

I spend zero money, I put my finished work on my F B page and word of mouth. My target is local.

Years back I had a nice website and my target was "the US" so I spent money hiring a hire to do the background SEO work.

One thing about F B - my sister has a daycare and her page is attached to her personal account. Last month she got banned for no reason (for real, they would not tell her) and now her business page just sits out there and she cannot access it. She tried creating a couple new accounts and they now use facial recognition so since she has a lifetime ban, she can never create another account again. She needs to take over someone else's account and create a new business account. Upon my reading on FB they often permanently ban a million or so users so they have to attempt to create new accounts, this looks good to the shareholders that they suddenly have a million new users. So, beware of FB, here today, gone tomorrow. Lots of stories of businesses with 5-10k followers and suddenly they have a ban and it's all gone.

 

[Solventinkjet]

I hate SEO companies. The major reason is their aggressive marketing tactics. I get emails and calls every day. The other reason is, in most cases for small companies, there aren't going to be enough changes to your site every month to justify paying a monthly fee to someone who's doing virtually nothing. Once you get your site optimized for SEO, there isn't a whole lot of maintenance to be done and what there is can be learned quickly. I've grown our site from a side project to a major source of income in 13 years by simply reading articles and books about SEO and putting those things into practice. The only reason to hire an SEO company in my opinion is if you simply don't have the time to learn and implement it yourself or you're in a highly competitive market where an expert would have more value.

 

[White Haus]

I hate SEO companies. The major reason is their aggressive marketing tactics. I get emails and calls every day. The other reason is, in most cases for small companies, there aren't going to be enough changes to your site every month to justify paying a monthly fee to someone who's doing virtually nothing. Once you get your site optimized for SEO, there isn't a whole lot of maintenance to be done and what there is can be learned quickly. I've grown our site from a side project to a major source of income in 13 years by simply reading articles and books about SEO and putting those things into practice. The only reason to hire an SEO company in my opinion is if you simply don't have the time to learn and implement it yourself or you're in a highly competitive market where an expert would have more value.

Do you have any books or resources you'd recommend for SEO for dummies? I don't think I'd ever pay a company to do this for us so I may as well learn about it.

 

[FireSprint.com]

Alot of what SEO is dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Simple stuff will get you huge gains, especially in regards to getting google to show you locally. For example:

- Updating your Google My Business profile, and logging in once a month to make sure it's all up to date.
- Include relevant, and current photos of work you do. Post these to FB, Insta, your own website, your google profile, etc.
- Update the titles and descriptions of all these photos. Make the image name something descriptive about the photo.
- Make sure your address and phone number are on all of your website pages.
- Make sure your company info is accurate and complete on every other site you can think of. https://solo.co/blog/25-free-listing-websites-every-small-business/
- Any chance you get to fill in a title, company name, or description of your company, anywhere, make sure it's accurate and complete. Consistency helps here too.
- If you have a friend, or someone that mentions you on their website or blog post, have them include a link to your website as well.

These things are pretty simple, but many business overlook them. This kind of stuff is the first step to SEO.

(And I am a hypocrite and don't do all these things as well as I should...)

 

[Solventinkjet]

Do you have any books or resources you'd recommend for SEO for dummies? I don't think I'd ever pay a company to do this for us so I may as well learn about it.

SEO for Dummies is actually a good place to start. It goes through the basics and why to do certain things. As FireSprint.com said above, most of it is describing what you have to offer in a descriptive way that gives people the most relevant information possible. Making sure images are tagged with a description about what's in the picture instead of just, "imag1.jpg" for example. But one of the most powerful tools is other pages linking to your site. When Google sees other websites linking to your page it sees you as more relevant. Especially links where the person clicks it and then interacts with your site in some way. When Google sees someone click on a link, and then do something at your site, it tells them that the person found what they were looking for and so your information must be more relevant than your competitor's and so will rank you higher.