Originally it was built for programmers and project managers to keep tabs on large website projects but once they re-launched it, the app became both simpler and more robust. It is now a great aid to any business owner who is looking to stay organized.

I like to think if it as a giant checklist that can be used by multiple people. These would surely be your employees but in some instances could also be your vendors or even customers. It keeps track of tasks or issues and alerts the right people at the right times when they need to do something.

It integrates with regular email so seamlessly that often people don’t even know they’re using it. However, you as the business owner have the satisfaction of knowing that the entire history of a project is being kept (so that you can refer to historical data whenever you need).

In the past these kinds of tools were hopelessly complicated and you needed a degree in rocket science just to install them. This doesn’t make much sense for tools that were supposed to simplify your life.

I have been lucky enough to meet and work along side some of the team that put this application together and just wanted to express my enthusiasm for this software. Kudos to knocking this one out of the park.

If you have any projects coming up (and as a business owner or manager I am sure you do) make sure to check out DoneDone.

They are open Monday – Friday from 7:30am – 5:30pm and are located at 5990 Tuckerman Lane. They offer a free shuttle service, free wi-fi and one of the finest waiting rooms I have ever seen at an auto repair shop.

While I could discuss what a great jog they do, it’s probably best to simply cut to the chase and let you know that 97% of their customers would recommend them to family and friends, check out their website to read some of their stunning reviews. So if you are looking for an auto repair shop near colorado springs, make sure to consider Your Import Car Doctor.

Quick side note, Tim (the owner) is an avid fisherman and has shown me some fantastic pictures of what he has caught over the years. If you meet him make sure he shows you some of those pictures, they are impressive!

I don’t want to point fingers because nearly every marketer is guilty of this at one time or another.

Often clients come to me frustrated by the fact that their “marketing” doesn’t seem to be working. When I take a look at what they have been doing I am met with vague claims such as “Best Prices In Town!” and “We’ve Got You Covered!”

Messages like these are often worse than no messages at all. They make prospective customers eyes glaze over with boredom and raise suspicions that your service writers might be equally vague and hard to deal with.

• Option 1) We can sweat and strain and try to reinvent the wheel with your marketing copy.
Or
• Option 2) We can outsource this work FOR FREE to your customers.

There’s always a little bit of elbo grease that goes into a “marketing revamp” but the easiest and most effective way to get amazing, business building content for your website is to get your customers to write it for you.

No matter how hard you try, it’s very hard for a business owner to see their shop through the eyes of their prospective customers. Yet 99% of your future sales hinges on being able to do exactly that (at least better than most of your competitors). However, you know SO much about your business it can sometimes become very hard to understand what your customers true needs are. Incorrectly guessing what they need (or what they think they need) can lead to some painful experiences.

Using customer testimonials and reviews as the basis for your marketing messages makes sure that you are in lock step with your market. It also cuts out A TON of time. Time spent by most companies guessing what they think their customers wants to hear.

Conducting these interviews and surveys in an efficient way is no small task. It has taken us many years of practice to hone in on exactly who to ask and what to ask them. The methods you use to gather this information makes all the difference in the world. Even the way the you ask the questions can lead to vastly different results.

Tons of great reviews on your Google Plus Page, Yelp, City Search and other local directories. As you know, this builds tons of trust and always helps to “close the deal” when someone is shopping for your service. These reviews will also greatly benefit your natural, organic search traffic.

Next Up: Learn The Absolute Easiest Way To Stay “Top Of Mind”, Turn Any Profitable Customer Into A Repeat Customer (and make you love them for it!).

At the end of February and into early March of 2012 Google underwent some major changes to it’s algorithm. These changes were aimed at enhancing the search results by making it harder to “Game The System”.

These changes are making it much harder for 99% of these amateur online marketers to successfully drive traffic to websites via Google’s natural / organic search engine. However, many innocent companies (who may have hired less than professional online marketers) got caught in the crossfire.

Hopefully this didn’t happen to you. Later on in this article we are going to cover the steps needed to make sure your business is not suffering from this update.

But first I’d like to get a little vocabulary straight…

Google often comments that they have no problem with Search Engine Optimization. In fact, they ENCOURAGE it when done correctly. “White Hat” is the term used to describe the SEO practices that fall within Google’s guidelines.

As you might guess, the term used to describe practices that Google does not agree with is called “Black Hat” or “Black Hat SEO”. This includes all kinds of tricks to get a website to show up in the Google results. One of the most common “Black Hat” SEO strategies is known as “blog comment spamming”. You may have seen this in blogs that you have visited in the past. “Blog comment spam” is seen at the bottom of a blog post, in the comments section. Spammers of this kind submit comments that have little to do with the content of the blog post and are typically “stuffed” with keywords around a specific product they are promoting.

There is no clear line between White and Black hat SEO. One well known expert said that “while Black Hat SEO is hard to define, you know it when you see it.”

Here’s how you can tell if your website has been hit by the recent updates to the Google Algorithm.

• 1) Take a look at your traffic. Has your organic traffic dropped recently? If you are currently working with an online marketing agency, make sure to bring this up at the next meeting and request to know more about how their long term strategy will address issues such as this.
• 2) Take a look at your leads. How has business been recently? Does this correlate with any drop in traffic on your site?
• 3) Take a look at your backlinks. Who is linking to your site? Do any of these backlinks look suspicious?

Immediately Apply My Unfailing “Triple T Attack Strategy” Directly To Your Auto Repair Business.

The mind of a good salesman couldn’t be more different from that of a computer programmer. Yet most companies hire computer programmers to handle their internet marketing. This is a costly mistake. This is also the reason that so many online marketing campaigns fail.

While these computer minded individuals (and the companies that employ them) are often good at creating code, organizing data and drawing up reports they have no idea what it’s like to transform a casual window shopper into a repeat customer.

Walking a prospective buyer through the various stages of the sales process is not something that most computer geeks have ever done.

The Automotive Website Consultant process is modeled after the same process you go through when selling a car or a service package.

1) Get In Front Of The Right People (Qualified Traffic)
2) Build Trust and Repore (Online Review Strategy + Social Strategy)
3) Close The Deal (Capture The Right Lead Information)
4) Get Referrals Without Being Intrusive (Email Follow Up)
5) Retain Customer As Long As Possible (Email Follow Up + Community Building Outreach)

Insuring that your online sales process is in lock-step with your offline process will provide long lasting, measurable and repeatable results.

Contact us today to get started!

Do I need an app? Do I need a separate website for iPhone, Android, iPad, Tablet etc? How should my mobile site differ from my regular site?

What this all boils down to is… What is your mobile strategy?

Fortunately there is now a very simple solution. It’s called “Responsive Design”. Responsive design is basically just a fancy way of saying that the website will automatically adjust itself to fit perfectly into whatever device it’s being viewed on.

Rather than having a site for iPhone, a site for iPad and a site for whatever else comes out, responsive design concentrates on building a site that will automatically look great on any emerging hardware or technology.

Lifesaving Mobile Checklist:

Clickable Phone Numbers – Let’s make it as easy as possible to get your phone ringing. That’s the beauty of the mobile world right? Make sure that when you click any phone number on your site from a mobile device you are immediately put on the line with your sales department. Hopefully it goes without saying that these phone numbers should be in very obvious locations on every page of the site (aka the top in large font and bold).

Intuitive Directions – Through the magic of google maps, it is now possible to give someone very detailed directions from where they are to your dealership or repair shop. With one click you can get your customer on their way to you. Don’t make them struggle to copy and paste this information etc… Get em in the door!

Reviews and Testimonials – Telling your clients that you are great doesn’t help much. Let your raving customers tell them for you. By having your great reviews easily visible and displayed in a believable way you can begin to gain trust and influence your prospects that you are the right choice for their auto needs.

Videos and Animation – This one gets screwed up all the time. Without getting too technical, most mobile devices use a different website browser than your computer and the software used to run mobile devices doesn’t display fancy animations and videos very well. There are now some VERY easy ways around this. Use them.

These are just a few of the basics, contact us today to learn about how easy it is to convert your current site into a magic mobile machine!

Day after day they battle to attract new visitors to their website using Google AdWords, SEO, online review sites, social media, blog posts, banner ads and many other strategies. This is time-consuming work that hinges on narrow margins to be successful (if they can track it at all). As more competitors enter the market the cost of these activities continues to become greater and greater.

There is a new strategy for attracting more traffic born every day. Don’t be fooled, many of these are just smoke and mirrors. They sound good but once you put them into practice they do nothing.

Where the real advantage lies is getting the most revenue out of each person that you get in front of. By maximizing the “Total Customer Value” you can reap significant returns on your investment and you can then reinvest a portion of these returns into completely dominating your market.

A while ago I went to a friend’s house for a BBQ. I was running late and didn’t have time to get to the store, so I stopped off and picked up a bucket of fried chicken.

I hadn’t seen this friend in a few months so we were eager to catch up. His toddler was hungry and the burgers weren’t quite ready so we handed the youngster the bucket of fried chicken.
About twenty minutes past as we were catching up and the kid came back saying he was still hungry. We asked about the chicken and he said he had finished it.

WHAT!?!? A six year old finishing an entire bucket of KFC’s finest? We went in to check it out…

We found that this little guy had simply taken a bite out of each piece of chicken and then discarded it. Every piece had a baby sized bit in it with 95% of the meat still on the bone.

In the auto repair industry most marketers are leaving a ton of “Meat On The Bone”. They fight, scratch and claw to get in front of new customers each day and then forget about them the next day and move on.

They may have someone follow up and they go into a database but this info is very often there is no real strategy for handling this data. Worse yet, clumsy sales offer emails are sent that further alienate prospective buyers.

If we spend 20% of the time dedicated to getting in front of new customers on getting the most out of the people that have already expressed an interest in our services we can see some DRAMATIC differences in our return on investment.

These custom strategies get all the meat off the bone by systematically creating more purchases, referrals and repeat business. Furthermore this is done in a way that actually positions your business as a local community leader. We build good karma around your business so that your customers actually LOOK FORWARD to hearing from you. Click Here To Listen To A Radio Interview I Did On That Subject. (HINT: This is not done by simply sending out sales / offer messages.)


Click Here To Find Out What Sneaky Tricks Your Local Competitors Using To Steal Your Customers And How To Fight This.

The phone rings. It’s someone claiming they can help with your marketing. They are touting some fancy new service, promising you the world.

Imagine politely explaining that you have everything covered… but this time you REALLY MEAN IT.

Our Three-Prong Approach

Most websites fail because they lack true salesmanship. Our process was born out of years of sales strategy. We took what works in the real world of face-to-face selling and translated it into a digital process.

Your potential customers are looking for you in all sorts of places online. Obviously the grand daddy of these “buyer hubs” is Google and that is #1 on our radar as well. However, as Google continues to expand their algorithm it’s becoming more and more important to be listed in every possible place your customers might be looking.

Local links from your chamber of commerce, local directories and other businesses are now more important than ever.

Critical Lesson – Not all customers are equal. Some are honest, understanding and PROFITABLE while others cause you to loose money, sleep and piece of mind. But this difference is not often thought about when shop owners put together their marketing strategies.

WARNING – Discount coupons and free oil change mailers may be attracting the “cheap-skate” customers you are trying to avoid.

What your past customers are saying about you is the #1 thing future customers look at. You can talk about your services all day but it’s what your past customers say that carries the most weight.

However, most customers only go online to create reviews when they are upset about something. It’s just human nature.

Yet at the same time it can be difficult to know when and how to approach the customers in order to grow your positive reviews. On top of that, there are some technical barriers to ensuring that your reviews land in the most impactful places.

Critical Lesson – The future of your service center depends on your ability to consistently earn good online reviews.

WARNING – Failure to get positive reviews formatted in the right ways can mean great hardship ahead. Statics show that shops with the best online reviews can win the vast majority of local business. Even if they are only in the lead by a few reviews.

I like to call this part of the strategy the “Digital Refrigerator Magnet”. This is where even great marketers tend to fall flat on their faces. Many businesses spend thousands and thousands of dollars to get in front of the right customer only to leave money on the table by not following up with them in an intelligent way.

By implementing handcrafted follow up sequences that resonate with your local community you can position yourself as a community leader. Once this is achieved, you will have built up massive trust and your customers who view you as an asset to the community won’t go anywhere else. In fact, they will be continuously telling their friends all about the great things you and your team are up to.

This final step maximizes your investment by making sure you don’t leave any money on the table and get as much as we can out of every lead generated in phase 1. This step also saves tons of money in the long run by ensuring that you never have to pay to get in front of the same person twice.

Critical Lesson – Put processes into place to stay in touch with your best customers in ways that they enjoy hearing from you. This means more that tweeting about a sale. I have found that if you promote people in your community (perhaps customers of yours) who are doing great things (charity workers, successful entrepreneurs, artists) your messages will be more welcome and you will be able to stay “Top-Of-Mind” whenever someone needs your service.

Each prong of this strategy can yield dramatic increases in your bottom line. However by chaining them together your entire business will be transformed leaving your competitors scratching their heads. So much of this goes on behind the scenes they will find it impossible to copy.

Click Here To Learn 3 Simple Tactics To Quickly Build Trust With Potential Clients

On a whim I decided to look at their website analytics and see how many people are actually trying to view their current site on a mobile device. How many people really are looking at mobile websites for car repair?

The statistics showed that nearly 1 in 5 people were accessing my client’s site via a mobile device. Here’s a screen shot:

The automotive industry (more than any other) cannot continue to ignore the fact that the world is looking for them on mobile devices.

Once we dug a little deeper with some customer surveys, we found that these mobile users were actually our ideal clients… They tended to be higher income, higher education and all around better customers.

So not only were we ignoring 1 out of 5, but we were probably ignoring some of the wealthiest visitors to our site.

• Responsive Design – A “Responsive” site differs from a “Mobile” in that it can “Respond” to whatever kind of device it is on. While a “Mobile” site may look good on a smart phone it might not look so good on an iPad and it surely won’t look good on an iPad in landscape mode (tilted sideways). A “Responsive” site is built to automatically adjust to any shape or size of the device. When you look at all the different smart phone sizes and off brand tablets it becomes impossible to build a site for each. So we build a “Responsive” website that can adjust to any size of device that exists now or may exist in the future.




• Click To Call – Many websites make it nearly impossible to call the shop. This defeats the whole function of your online marketing strategy. Why not make it as simple as possible for your customer to reach you. With “Click To Call” all they have to do is touch your phone number to be immediately connected with your sales associate.




• Google Map Directions – Make it easy for your customers to find you. Integrating your new responsive site with Google Maps will generate a custom set of directions from wherever they may be… directly to your doorstep. By immediately generating these directions with one simple click they don’t even have to think about it. They are already on their way to your shop!




• Mobile Friendly Videos – It’s no secret that people would prefer to watch a video rather than read about your services. Let’s make sure that your website can serve up these videos on any mobile device. Responsive design will allow your videos to show on your potential customers websites and a user friendly way that you have to interact with to fully appreciate.
  
  
  This is especially crucial if you have great testimonial videos on your site.

Let’s start paying attention to all those wealthy potential clients.

Contact us today to go over how we can convert your existing website into a responsive website.