Cabinet Makeover Course? The Idaho Painters cabinet course Chapter 1.

[Music] all right this is lesson number two and this is uh we're gonna try to answer the question should you have a website or not and in my opinion uh this is an absolute must and having a website is part of establishing and developing your brand and it's a place where you know customers can go and find out a lot of information about you and your company and establishing your brand is extremely important this is a place where you're going to house your logos you're going to house your colors and if you're not familiar a lot about branding and establishing your brand in your community i mean what you actually want is um when people are driving around town and they think about a painter or think about i'm hiring a painter what you want them to do is think about your company they you want them to see your logo your branding your colors all over town so they'll it'll just ring a bell when it comes to painting so having a website is just another place that you can help establish your brand along with a lot of other things that we're going to be talking you know about shortly and some other lessons now you know what goes on a website what should you put on a website so there's some key things that you should put on your website and we'll go over a few key key things right now all right so now we're going to talk a little bit about what should be on your website and one of the very first things is uh some company information and a little a little bit of the history about your company so they can go and learn a little bit about you and your business another thing you want to have is photos before and after photos of jobs that you've done so people can go see the work and get an idea of the quality work you do so and when you do put pictures you definitely want to put high quality professional quality photos you don't want stuff that doesn't represent your work well doesn't look good another thing you can put on your website is uh employee bios where people can go learn who's going to be on my job site working on my project and what is the experience they have this is an opportunity to really uh to show and um and brag about your employees and the work that they do and how great they're going to do on your the job site another thing you want to have on your website is contact information how how they can get a hold of you a phone number and an email address if you want to get jobs you want to give people the ability to get a hold of you and along with that you should have a form where people can go fill out and um and when they click a button it's going to go right to you asking or scheduling a bid a scheduling form is a great way to get bid so definitely have that on your website another thing i'll talk about is a blog and you should have a blog on your website and that's gonna help when it comes to seo or search engine optimization and that's the ability for people to find your website when they do searches so you have to have a lot of information on your website about painting and painting related stuff if it's going to show up in the google search engine on the first page and we'll probably get into a little bit more about search engine optimization uh in another lesson we won't get um in in that right now but it is important to uh put a blog so you're actually putting information on a weekly basis or a monthly basis and you can just write articles you can get information for other people to paste and put information on your website so it has relative keywords and relative terms and relative information about painting and that's just going to put your website higher up on search engines so have a blog and it's very simple and easy to do and to put on your website and it doesn't have to be necessarily seen it doesn't have to be a place where people are coming and chatting it's just a place where you're adding information to help search engine optimization so does the website really get you work i'll tell you for my painting company probably the first 15 years you know of our painting company or maybe even longer probably 15 to 18 years it was the number one source for uh getting leads painting and when somebody did a search for painters in boise or the painters in the treasure valley if you typed in anything like boise painters treasure valley painters idaho painters painters in idaho any of those keyword search terms we always showed up in the top three of the search engine and those people are going to sit there and pick you out and give you a call for an estimate it was our number one source before um something else actually took that over and i'm going to talk about next door not another lesson and how effective that is but a website is a key place to get leads and you can pay on people to optimize your website so you always show up on the first page of google or in the top three if you don't know how to do it yourself but it's it's important just to have the website itself you know for branding purposes and if you're utilizing it for leads it can be a very effective source if done right so another thing i want to talk about is that should be on the website is the services that you offer so when it comes to painting i was a full-service painting contractor and we offered not just painting but we offered epoxy floors which is a different type of surface we offered drywall repairs we offered carpentry carpentry repairs interior exterior painting commercial residential you want to kind of list those services out so people that are coming to your website they're trying to figure out well do you offer the service that i am looking for so make it very clear what you do on your website so people can determine whether you're the person that they want to call and ask for a bid so when it comes to the website also you don't have to have a large elaborate website you could have a website you know it could be just one page it could be two pages i think three pages is probably you know the optimal size website but you know have a web page that's going to be able to house the information and information that your customer is seeking and you know whatever that may be whether it's one two three pages five it could even be ten pages my website now it's i don't know it's probably uh 20 to 30 pages so whatever suits your needs but make sure it's branded very well make sure across the entire website it has your company colors it has your company logo and it just looks professional what you don't want to do is go out there and put a cheap website that doesn't look very good that's not branded very well because it's not going to be a good representation of your company and a lot of these things that people are going to be looking at like your websites of your bid packet and some other things that's how they develop in their mind or establish in your mind whether you're going to be a good painter or not if your website doesn't look good maybe the work that you do is not going to look good so make sure your website before you get it uploaded in live make sure it is dialed in and looks very professional you don't have to spend a lot of money there's a a lot of um you know apps that you can go out there and use to develop a website you know at low cost since this is an online course about cabinet painting i think it might be a little bit obvious but we'll talk a little bit about our website and putting uh cabinets as a service in your website so this would be an important place because cabinet painting kind of is a really big thing now i mean you might want to have a service uh just that is listed out as cabinet painting or a page in itself dedicated to just cabinet painting this is where you can show before and after photos of projects that you've done you can talk about your systems and processes that you use when it comes to cabinet painting and you can talk about those products that you use that you use high-end industrial 2k polys and this is where people can you'll learn about your systems and processes and decide maybe man this is the guy i want to hire uh for the job or at least ask for an estimate so you have a page that talks about that service of cabinet painting and on that page have some type of contact information whether it's a button to call for an estimate or whether it's a form to fill out to schedule an estimate that would be really really important so i'm just going to give you a few little resources i did talk about uh yo fiverr was one of the things that places that you can go and get a website built for free so i know there's probably a lot of painters out there that don't have your web building background or they're not very techy or they just don't have the time to build you know a website so you can just look in your um your local phone book or just look online google online uh website builders near me and you're gonna find some people locally that you can actually meet with if you want to actually work with somebody locally but websites are something that you don't have to actually meet with somebody locally you can have it done online it could be outsourced and you could go you know if you're not in the united states you can if i'm in the united states i can have somebody in canada build my website and unload it but there's that possibility but then also fiverr and it's spelled f-i-v-e-r-r so fiverr.com fiverr.com is is a resource where people will build logos so if you need help building your logo they'll um write biographies they'll build websites and they do all kinds of just graphic stuff and a lot of them are students that are offering their services online and they're doing it at a really low cost and it so it saves you a lot of money but they build some really cool stuff and in the past you know i've used fiverr to build websites i've used fiverr to do logos and a lot of other stuff if you need um ways to build um you know shirts logos for your shirts um logos for hats and stuff like that fiverr is a great resource so go check it out if you need any help after this lesson so to wrap this up you know once again i think i said in the very beginning having a website is an absolute must i think when you start a painting company i mean you should start you should have a business card right off the bat as soon as you start painting have a business card and another thing you should have is a website so get that done and get that built out and up and begin establishing your brand