The contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. Welcome to Hammer and Grind, the podcast built for contractors. Real contractors, true stories, real solutions. My name is Brad Hebner and I will be your guide on your journey to self-mastery of your construction business. You can connect with us on our social media platforms at Hammer and Grind Podcast. You can also check out our free Facebook group called The Contractor Profit Group, where we have free trainings and lots of great conversations to help you in your business. Or if you want to level up, you can join our paid coaching group called The Profit Club. You can find out more information about that at hammerandgrind. com forward slash The Profit Club. On today's episode, we're going to be talking about blogs. and how to use blogs to dominate your SEO. Now, if you don't know what SEO is, that's simply your search engine optimization, or the easier way of saying it is it's what Google uses to provide you with information. Okay? What we're going to be talking about today is based off of a book by Marcus Sheridan called They Ask, You Answer. This is a phenomenal book. If you haven't read it, I highly, highly, highly recommend that you buy it. We'll have a link to it in the show notes, but it's called They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. Now, Marcus Sheridan used to own a pool company. He may still own it. I'm not for sure. But in his time of owning this pool company, he realized that people were always asking the same question. Every time they would go out on a sales call, they had the same questions over and over and over again. How much does a pool cost? How long does it take to build it? What sizes are available? Like all these different questions that were being asked over and over and over again. And so he thought if we could answer these questions and then put them on our website, one, it would make it easier to be able to give that information out. But two, it would also help establish us as experts. And so that's what he did. And the book talks about this and how over the course of several years, he became the number one resource for pool builders in the world. And this is several years ago, so things have changed over time. But the premise is the same, and that's what we're going to dive into today. So with a blog, you want to basically write articles. And if you don't know what a blog is, I mean, it is the 21st century. You got to kind of get with the times here. No, I'm just teasing. A blog is simply just a place that you can organize articles, information, videos, posts, whatever. into one location. Now there's all types of blogs out there. There's daily blogs where they just literally talk about their life and what they do each day. There's, you know, specific blogs like industry specific blogs where they talk about different types of, you know, information relating to a specific industry. If you go to our website, hammerandgrind. com, our blog is actually just reposting of our podcast. So it's our podcast in a blog format, meaning it will list them in order and you can go in and search them. The benefit of this in any business, in any industry, is that it's a collected group of information, articles, if you will, or blog posts, whatever you want to call them. And it's all searchable by Google. So this information creates search engine optimization. creates content around the specific interest of whatever it is that you're talking about or whoever's talking about it for that matter. So how does this relate to contractors? Well, it's pretty simple actually. It doesn't matter what trade you're in. It doesn't matter if you're an electrician, a pool builder, a home builder, a landscaper, a remodeler. It does not matter what trade you're in. Every one of the trades out there There are questions that your customers are asking, and they may not be asking you directly, but they're wondering these in their head. They're thinking these questions. How much is this bathroom remodel going to cost? How long does it take to do a bathroom remodel? Is there specific things that I need to be aware of regarding my landscape that I do? What's the best type of stone for a patio walkway? What's the... proper voltage that you're supposed to be getting out of your receptacle? How many amps does this microwave take? I mean, it's endless. It goes on and on and on and on forever. And so if you can take this information, these questions, and you can put it into a written or a video format and put it on your website, what happens is when people search this information on Google, because that's what we do, the first thing when we have a question, We go straight to Google and we type in, how much does the bathroom remodel cost? Okay. And if you have an article that addresses this question, it's going to come up in that search. Now, a lot of people, it will be specific to your area, which is good. You don't want to, you know, obviously you don't want to get a customer from three states away calling you about your services because they found your article when they did a search, right? Now, this can happen if you're a very specific niche and you have a very specific question and there's nobody else answering this question. It could happen to where someone two or three states away finds you and calls you thinking that you can help them in that area. But for the most part, people search locally and Google over the years has figured this out. And they know that if someone in your town is searching for this question, that it's only going to show information regarding content that is local to them. So for the most part, you don't have to worry about this. But if someone searches for how much does a bathroom remodel cost in your town, how much does a bathroom remodel cost in Cincinnati, then if you have an article that you wrote answering this question, it's going to show that article in that search result. And so if the customer finds this article that you wrote and it answers their question, You now are seen as the experts in their eyes. You now have a leg up over all of the competition because you're the first one that answered that question for them. And then if you have multiple articles on your website and they see this, they may start reading the other articles as well. And maybe it's questions that they had and you answered them. Or maybe it's questions I didn't even think of, but they see the question and they go, oh, that's something I never thought of, but I also want to know the answer to that. And so if you've answered that question, again, it makes you the expert in said field. And so there's lots of reasons why you would want to write blog posts or create blog posts or articles or do videos. And a lot of people think that maybe this is dead. Like, oh, this is something that came out, you know, five,10 years ago and nobody really uses this anymore. And that's can't be further from the truth. There's, there's, I use blog posts, lots of contractors in the group that use blog posts and have great success with it. It is by no means like saturated or too late. You can very, very much jump in right now. If you've never done one, start creating blog posts. and see the benefits from it in as little as a few months. I mean, sometimes it's two to three months. Typically, it may take six months to a year to really start seeing some results from your articles. The hardest part, obviously, is writing the articles, right? Because it takes some time. So you really want to create a schedule that you can stick to that's realistic. Whether that's like one article a week or one a month or three a month or whatever it is, You want to create a schedule for creating these blog posts, and then you want to do that and stick to it. You want to do it as much as possible. Obviously, if you could write five blog posts a week, that would be even better. But you got to stick with something that's going to be reasonable, especially if you're a one-man show or if you're busy and you don't have that much time. So in order to help you guys out, I'm going to break it down into different categories that you should be focusing on as far as your blog posts go. So the first category, which is probably going to be the most important, and this is what the They Ask You Answer is about, is FAQs. That's simply going to be frequently asked questions. How much does X cost? How long does it take to build this item? What's the best type of materials? And the simplest way to find out which topics to talk about, and this is like top secret, so don't repeat this anywhere else, guys. But what you do is whenever a customer calls you and you're talking to them or you're standing in front of them and they ask you a question, you write that question down and then you answer it in the form of a blog. I know that's mind shattering. Like I shouldn't even be telling you this, but that's what you got to do. It's super easy, guys. You literally, you're just answering the questions that you're asked the most. If you have office staff or if you have salesmen, Even your techs out in the field, approach all of them and ask them, hey, we're going to start tracking down, tracking all of the questions that were asked. I would start with just asking them, what questions do you get asked the most? Your salesman may say, well, we get asked this question. Or your technician may say, well, we get asked this question. Or your office staff, whoever. These are the questions that we get asked the most. So you're going to go through and just make a list. I mean, that's the first thing you're going to do is make a list. And then you're going to start with the ones that you're asked the most. So maybe you're asked four questions repeatedly, but this one question is you get asked every single time on the phone. That's the first blog post you're going to write. The question that you're asked the most often is the one you're going to start with. And so whatever that question is, is what's going to be in the title. So if the question is, how much does a kitchen remodel cost? Then that's going to be the title of your blog post. For obvious reasons, which is if someone searches that, that's the keyword that you want to come up with. So FAQs, that's pretty self-explanatory. Start with the most frequent questions that you're asked. The next type of blog that you may want to consider doing is going to be processes. Now that's going to be more like what to expect on your first day of the remodel. If you're a landscaper, it could be something along the lines of what happens to your yard during the landscaping project. Things that have to do with your process. It's still questions that may come up, right? But it may not be questions that people ask on a regular basis. It may just be that you're documenting your process of how you do stuff so that your customers... have a better understanding of how you do things. And we're going to get back to that as to why that's important here in just a few minutes. In other words, it's going to be search terms. This is simply what people search for. It may not be a question per se. It may just be something that they're searching for. Could be like top landscaping contractors in Detroit. That could be the title of your article. And here's a trick that you can even do is that And Marcus Sheridan talks about this in his book is that he wrote an article of like, who's the best pool builders in his area? And he would write it out, but he would not include himself in that article. So he listed like, you know, what are the top 10 pool builders in your area? And he would list those out, but he would not put himself in there. And what this does is that now if someone searches for, let's say, you know, top 10 pool builders, his article is going to come up. Or if he's got their name in there, maybe it's, you know, West Illinois or West St. Louis Pool Builders or inner city pool builders, whatever. And you're in St. Louis and someone searches for that company and they find that article. They may look at that article and see all the different pool builders. But what they're going to realize is that it was written by a specific pool builder and they didn't put himself in there. So it's kind of like saying, here's some free advice and I don't expect anything in return. But what happens is if they go and they see that article and they click on it, where does it take them? It takes them to your website where you're going to have a lot more articles about your business and your trade. And so after they read that first one that may give the top 10 that don't include you, they're going to see 15,20,30 other articles around pool building. And then they're going to start clicking on them, right? They're not just going to click one and that's it. They're going to see the others because most of these blog posts and blog websites at the end of the blog, it will say, here's three other articles you might be interested in. So they're going to see that and that now they're going to stay on your website and now they're going to start clicking on your articles. Again, you are the expert in this. So since you're the expert, then you're going to get all of that. You're putting all that value out there and then that's going to come back to you in the result of a potential lead, potential customer. So the next category is case studies. Now these are super strategic and they do a lot of good and you can use them in a lot of different ways. So case study is simply you've taken a job that you've done, a project, and you've written it out. Kind of the before, after, here's what we did, here's how much the project cost, here were some of the main concerns the customer had, here were some challenges that we had during the process and how we handled them, here was the timeframe, how long it took. You're putting all this information out in this article case study. So it's a complete, basically a summary of everything you did for that article or for that project rather. And so now you have a complete documentation of a specific project that you did. Let's say it was a bathroom remodel. And let's say it was a master bathroom that you did. In that project, you had a soaking tub and a walk-in tile shower and all the stuff that you would normally do. You're going to put pictures in there, of course, but you're going to label it out. And there's lots of different ways of doing this. You can go online and find all kinds of examples. But you're going to have that information in there. And then you're going to name it something like master bathroom remodel my town. So it's not a FAQ per se of, you know, a question. It's like, here's a project that we did. And here's the before and after and everything we did. So it, but it provides them with all the information, the timeframe, the dollar amount of what it costs. And now if your customers go to your website and they see that post, that article on that project, now they can have an idea and they can even pre-qualify themselves. So if you have enough of these different projects on your website, you can actually tell customers to go, let's say they call in and they go, you know, do you guys have any examples of a master bathroom remodel that you did with a soaking tub and a shower? You're like, yep, I sure do. I'll email it over to you right now. And you email the link to that article that you wrote. Now it gives them all the information and it's going to include the price. So now before they call you back or you call them back, like they already know kind of what to expect, right? So it's like homework. You can give your customers homework in that aspect. And so if you do a bunch of bathrooms. You may have one for a master bathroom. You may have one for a standard hall bathroom. You may have one for a Jack and Jill bathroom. You may have one for, you know, a custom tile shower. You may have one for a basic, you know, fiberglass shower. Like there's lots of different articles that you can write or case studies on just bathrooms alone. So you don't, but you don't really want to do like, here's a master bathroom. that we did. Here's a master bathroom we did. Here's a master bathroom we did. Here's a master bathroom we did. You don't really want to do that per se, but if you did them in different cities, maybe you did one in Evansville where I'm located at, or you did one in the next city over, you know, you may have one master bathroom remodel Evansville, Indiana, master bathroom remodel Newberg, Indiana, master bathroom remodel Henderson, Kentucky, like. You could do different cities if that's where those actual bathrooms took place. Now, obviously, you wouldn't want to lie. Say you did a bathroom in your city and then on the article write it in a different city. That would be unethical. But if you did multiple bathrooms in different cities, having those cities in the title are going to help you with SEO in those cities. So case studies. So we talked about FAQs, processes, search terms, and case studies. Those are the categories. that you're going to want to use for your blog posts. Now I want to talk about some uses of these blog posts other than people reading them through SEO. So one of the main uses for blogs is for pre-construction homework. What does that mean? Let's say I sell a job, I sell a kitchen remodel, and there's always things that we run across on every job. There's things that we need to tell the customer about on every job that we do. I can write a blog post, and this is more of a process, like I was saying earlier. And I've done this where it's what to expect on your first day of your remodel. And then I lay out, like, when we show up, we're going to talk to you to find out where we can park at. Where can we park our trucks and trailers so they're not in the way? Where can we park the trash trailer or the dumpster or whatever it might be? And then we're going to talk about the location of where the project is in the house and how we're going to get there. Are we going to go on the front door, the back door, the side door, through the garage, whatever. We're going to talk to you about that. We're going to go over that. And I just lay out this process in this blog post. Now, one thing I haven't covered yet is that blog posts can be video. And sometimes like the one I just told you about what to expect on the first day, that is actually a video that I recorded. And I put it on the website as a blog post. And the trick with video for blogs, of course, you can just have a video player embedded in the article and it will play when they click on it. But what you can do is take that video and either do it yourself or send it off to a third party app that will transcribe the video. And you take that transcription and you put it in the article below the video written out. And what that allows two things to happen is one, some people just like to read versus watch video. So they may actually read the article, but two, obviously is going to be SEO because those terms and words that you use are going to come up in search terms in Google. So you want that for the SEO. If you're doing video, I would recommend posting the videos on YouTube, create a YouTube channel for your business, post the videos on YouTube. And then embed those videos onto your article, your blog posts that way. Also, YouTube has SEO built into that as well. That's why a lot of times if you search for things, you'll get some of the responses in Google or videos because it will find that information out. So transcribe your videos, put them in blog with the video. You know, just put the transcription right below it. And a lot of times with my videos. when I transcribe them, I won't, I'll go through and cut out some of the words, especially if I'm saying um, or, you know, pausing like, or saying things like I just did there. I'll remove that information. It's not going to matter if the transcription doesn't perfectly match the video. Sometimes when we talk on video, it doesn't completely come across in written text, you know, perfectly the same. So I may make some changes there. So you can use that for pre-construction homework. Okay. So before I start the job, maybe a week before the actual start date, I will email over the customer and I'll say, Hey, you know, Mr. Mr. Mrs. Customer, I have some homework for you. If you wouldn't mind, you know, watch these videos or read these articles or whatever it might be prior to us starting the job. It just helps to make things go a lot smoother. And then, of course, if you put those links in there in your email, you're going to want to put the links to your blog posts. And the reason is because if they click on that link and it takes them to your website, guess what Google thinks? Oh, this is a popular article. I need to show more of it. It's more relevant because more and more people are clicking on it. So every time you feed someone back to your website via a link, you're building SEO within your website. Google tracks all this stuff. So you use the email that you sent out a week or so before and say, here's these three articles or here's five posts or whatever. We just ask you to watch these prior to us coming next week. Now, this is great, too, to actually create a user experience, right? Because you can put things in there that maybe you don't think about on the phone call or when you're talking with them, things that may come up like dealing with pets. You can have that in an article that you always send to every customer and it helps address these things. It just makes you look that much more professional because you've created this process. My favorite article to send over is called, What You Need to Do to Prepare for Your Remodel. And this is me telling them what they need to do to prepare for the remodel. And some of those topics are personal items. You need to get your personal items out of there. Items to be saved. If there's anything that we're saving in this, you're a light fixture, plumbing fixtures, cabinets, whatever it is, and we need to save that, I actually have a link in my blog to a Word document titled Items to be Saved. I tell them to fill that out so that when we show up, we actually have a document that says these are the things that we're saving. And I give instructions in this article. I also have in the article a pro tip of things that we don't really think about is like removing paintings and stuff off the wall of the rooms next to where we're working. Because if we're banging on a wall, it may knock off a really expensive painting. I mean, we, of course, do that ourselves. But if I can tell the customer to do that ahead of time, it saves us some time. And they're going to be a lot more diligent about doing that than we are. I talk about clearing the path. It's better to have a clear pathway to where we're working at. And I use the example of if you have your grandmother's old vase or a special knick-knack, and it's in that hallway, and we're going to be going through this hallway 50 to 100 times during the remodel process, we may just want to move that item out of the way. We may be working in a bathroom in the back of the house. But we got to go down this long hallway and there's a hutch there with a vase, a really expensive vase, and we're carrying things in and out. It's just an opportunity to knock that vase off, right? So again, I'm teaching my customers in the article what to do. We talk about animals, what to deal with animals. We talk about making space for us in the area that we're working. Also talk about contact information. I have another article linked in there that they fill out with all of their contact information. If the wife works during the day, this is her place of employment. If the husband works, this is his place of employment. And here's the next door neighbors in case of his emergency, blah, blah, blah. I'm getting that information as well. And then one thing I like to do in the article, and this is to really see if they're paying attention, like if they actually did the homework, I have it in here as an extra. Pro tip. I put home baked goodies is the secret to make sure your contractor is going to give that extra special attention to your project. Think I'm joking? Try it and see for yourself. I can't tell you how many times we've shown up to a job site and there's cookies or baked goods on the counter waiting for us. Now, some people naturally do this, but it's also because they've read this article and I've even said, oh. Somebody read the article and they're like, and they will respond with, yeah, you know, we definitely did or whatever. So this is just a little extra to see if they're paying attention. Plus who doesn't love, you know, having home baked goodies show up on your first day. I mean, my belly probably doesn't like it too much, but you know what I mean? So that's a pre-construction homework use. So you can do all kinds of videos, articles, whatever. And you use it to send out to your customers prior to starting the job. Another use for blog posts is post-discovery call. So you just got off the call with them talking about landscaping project that they want to do. Maybe they want to build a pond. And during the course of the call, they had a few questions about, you know, like what are the best types of koi fish for a pond? Well, you just so happen to have a blog post on the top five best koi fish. Right. So what do you do when you get off the call or towards the end of the call? You say, Mr. Prospect, would it be OK? You know, you mentioned about Koi Fish and I actually wrote an article. I have some information on that. Would it be OK if I just send that over to you in an email after we get off the call? Well, who's not? I mean, who's going to say, no, I don't want you to send me pertinent information to what I'm actually asking. Of course they are. So again, now, as soon as you get off the call. You send over an email, maybe you recap what you talked about, and then you add in there, here's three articles, you know, and you're going to handpick these, right? You're going to go in and save all these links and have them in a Word document or something to make it easy for you. But you're going to go in there and say, here's the article that talks about the different koi fish that you, you know, had a question about. And here's the article that talked about, you know, whatever, the different types of plants. that you can use. And here's one that we talked about, the lighting. Those were the three questions you have. And here's some information about that. Again, they're going to click on the link. It's going to go to your website. On top of the two or three or however many articles you send, they're going to look at other articles. People will naturally, if they're interested in something, are going to research it. So you send them one article and they will look at additional ones as well. Again, you're building your reputation with them. in their mind by being the expert. So post-discovery call is another great use. And then finally, email drips. So I've done it where you have like a, if you have like a monthly newsletter, you can put them in your monthly newsletter. You can blog posts in there. I've also done it where we've on our case studies, where we have a case study about here's a project we did. I may send that out as a email drip. Maybe I talk to a customer who is just getting information now for a project they want to do six months from now. Maybe that project is they want a new tile backsplash in their kitchen. Well, if I have case studies or information like that, I can drip that to them over the next six months to stay in front of mind. Maybe I'm right in the middle of doing a tile backsplash right now. and they're asking about it, well, in two weeks or three weeks or whatever, I can shoot them an email and say, hey, John Smith, we talked a few weeks ago about a project you had that you were going to plan on doing in a few months. And I just thought this might be interesting for you. It's a tile backsplash project that we did. And I email over that case study to them. Again, it's going to make you the expert. I don't know if you're seeing the reoccurring theme here. But all of this builds your reputation as being the professional and being the expert. So those are some uses on blog posts, right? How to use blog posts. Pre-construction, homework, post-discovery call, and then email drips. There's lots of other ways you can get creative with blog posts. Some of the websites, depending on how your website is built. Some of them have their own blog posts, plugins. Like if it's a WordPress, you know, WordPress is super easy for blogs. My website's built on Wix and it has its own blog posts, plugins. So some of those are super easy. If you don't have any idea how to do any of this, you're going to have to get with your webmaster or whoever handles your website. It will be well worth the investment. I promise you. You guys, you just got to start doing it. If you don't have any blogs, just start with the very basics. Start with the most frequently asked question. Most of your written blog posts need to be somewhere around 400 or 500 words long. It's going to give you the greatest return. Don't worry about keywords in there and all this sexy stuff that you can do to make it better. Don't overcomplicate it. Start with the basic stuff. Start writing blog posts. As you do more and more, you can always go back. and put in specific keywords. And there's lots of things you can do to make it even better. But I would say just start first. And then if you want to hire someone or yourself, you can always go back and change some of the wording or make the blog post better. But that's all I got on this. Blog posts are super important for SEO. Do not overlook them. If you don't have any blogs on your website, Start this week, make the plan to get it done, write an article and post it. I promise you if you do it and you do it frequently and you do it enough, it will give you a ton of value in return of investment. And even like I said, just for the pre-construction and email drips and the post-discovery call, that in and of itself is a benefit. Not even the SEO aspect, just being able to send that information to your clients is just a huge benefit. So I appreciate you guys for checking me out today, listening to the podcast. As always, you can find out more information about us on all of our social medias, Hammer and Grind podcast. And don't forget to check out The Profit Club, hammerandgrind. com forward slash The Profit Club. Until next time, guys, be your best you.
