To begin with  this book has covered every type of construction leads. Whether you are a contractor looking for  residential construction leads or home improvement construction leads the author has covered it all for you. It doesn’t matter whether you are a general construction guy, a concrete specialist or a plumber – this book has got great information on how to get more leads to your business, and more contracts on the books.

Now its important to know that this book isn’t written by some 20-year-old marketing “veteran” with a sharp suit and little else in the way of credibility or credentials. Instead the author is a guy who actually does flooring for a living. It all started for him when he started to get calls from out of the blue – asking him to quote on  flooring jobs. He did a little investigation – and this book is the result of that enquiring mind!

Basically this book tells you how to use the power of the Internet to connect people looking for your services in your town – with you and your bottom line! There are lots of different ways to use the Internet to connect to your potential customer – and  Get More Construction Leads covers most of them! Most construction businesses aren’t using the Internet efficiently – more and more of your potential customers are. This book will teach you how to bridge the gap! .

Here is the site :

http://freeconstructionsalesleads.com/recommends/ConstructionLeads

I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

Instead – contractors would get sales leads by paying a lead generation service. Whether these leads resulted in any actual sales for you though varied considerably. And these services did not come for free either. You can end up paying 25cents for every dollar of value for hte potential contract. And the key word here is “potential”.

So why can these leads be such a waste of time for the average construction firm? First off the leads are often not very targetted – you may be getting speicalist leads for work you don’t do. You may be getting leads on jobs which are at the earliest feasbility stage – these aren’t jobs their are pipedreams. And remember you are paying for all of this.Leads may be sold to  your competitiors too – not just you.

However there are good services out there – the tricky bit is finding them! The good leads finding services will really find you qualified leads who do want to buy and want to buy your service. You may pay more per a lead – but the leads will definintly be worth it!  In some cases you won’t pay a flat-fee but a percentage of the work done. You’ll have to decide for yourself if you are comfortable with this business model.

Paying for leads is a tricky thing – in the end you are always going to be dependent on the lead generation company – and you will never grow the skills you need to actually need to develop your own leads. Learning how to develop leads yourself may be  a bigger investment of time up front – but lets face it if times are slow you may have that time anyways! More importantly you will need to invest effort to get outside your own comfort zone. You may be comfortable building a home – but not a website? Trust me when I say that building a website is a lot lower amound of effort!

With pay per click advertising of your consturction lead site – you only pay when a visitor clicks on your ads. This makes it a lot more targeted than buying advertising in the local newspaper or paying for a banner ad on another website. The amount of money you pay will depend on what your competitors are paying -  programs such as Google Adwords operate on a auction system with clicks starting from 5cents and going all the way up from there.

You need to target your ads in a similar manner that we talked about with your  website for construction leads. You can and should restrict the area that your PPC ads run in to your local town or neighbourhood – the area that you want to find construction jobs in.

Second you want to be very specific about the keywords that you target – if you specialise in commercial construction in Baltimore – that’s what you need to be focussing your PPC campaign on. Check out how many searchers are made on the keyword you are considering before you run a campaign for it though – it might not be worth it if there are only a handful of queries a month!

You also need to spend some time planning out your ad on Adwords – lets for example say you are looking for resdiential construction jobs in Atlanta. You only have 3 lines to play with in your ad – so probably you first line would be something like:

Residential Construction Company in Atlanta

Next you need a “call for action” – something like – “call now for a free quote”. The third line is probably something  that makes the customer feel safe – “30 years in the business” maybe – if it happens to be true that is!

In this day and age if your business doesn’t have a website it really doesn’t have any credibility at all. Construction businesses have been slow at grasping this and many construction contractors still don’t have their own website. But  this is just not acceptable anymore. How often have clients said ” give me your web address” ?  A website doesn’t have to be sophisticated or fancy – in fact you can think of it as as online business card – and you can probably get one up and running for a lot less than a run of business cards  is going to cost you!

But why do I say that a website is essential for your business? Simple because it puts you way ahead of your opposition who don’t have a website. Say your client goes online and goes to Google and types in “construction contractor New Jersey” – if you don’t have a website they won’t find you will they?  They will find your opposition instead.  Building guys see websites as techie and difficult and expensive but they don’t have to be any of those. Here’s what you need to have an effective website in google.

You need a website which says what you are about and – this is critical – which geographic area you service. Lets say you are construction company in Seattle – you really don’t want sales leads from New York do you? so get yourself a website and build it around what you are and what you do – if you do  projects up to $2 million in the greater Seattle area – say so! This is what is called a “keyword”.

If you want some more ideas – go off to Google’s free keyword tool and type in what your main business is and your geographic idea then look at all the suggestions that Google will come up  these are the terms you should build your website around.

Try googling some of  the terms come up – you may well be surprised at how few results show up! Your site could be at the top of page 1 with hardly any effort at all!

So regardless of how small your advertising budget is – a cheap and simple website focused on your key words are essential for any one  looking for cheap construction sales leads.

Let me tell you why.  The  Internet is changing the way people find services – and you as a contractor are in the business of services.  Have you noticed recently how few people use the Yellow Pages – or even have a copy? If you were looking for a construction contractor it used to be the first place you looked was the Yellow Pages. But no more – most people under the age of 30 – don’t reach for a cumbersome and heavy pile of newsprint – the reach for their mouse and they “google it”!

The Internet is the New Source of Construction Sales Leads

The good news is that Internet is the single biggest cost reducer for marketing since printing was invented! It costs thousands and thousands of dollars a year to advertise in the Yellow Pages.  It can be free to advertise in the great world wide web (if you know what you are doing). Even paying someone could get you more construction sales lead than you dreamed possible – and far better targeted than you ever thought possible.

How does it work? Online there are basically three different ways to find construction marketing leads:

• you can start your own website and rank it well in the search engines using search engine optimization techniques or SEO for short;
• you can start your own website and use a “pay per click” campaign to get search engines such as Google to send you traffic – traffic for which you only pay if they click the ad;
• you can buy leads from construction lead gneration companies – this can be a short-cut short-term but it may cost more than the other options in the longer-term. These certainly won’t be  free construction sales leads – but some of the other methods can be.

But you say  my leads come from personal recommendations. That’s great – but remember the new generation doesn’t just chat dow nthe pub over a beer (though they still may do so) – they also connect using things such as twitter and facebook – perhaps you need to know a bit about the new social media (as these tools are called) so that you are aware of what is being said about your construction company online and can even add to the conversation.

Until next time!