The Home Service Expert Podcast - Leveraging The Rule of 26 to Market Your Service-Based Business

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski is the CEO of Buzzworthy Integrated Marketing, a website marketing firm that specializes in providing profitable digital marketing solutions for service-based businesses. In May 2021, Michael released his book “The Rule of 26 For Service-Based Businesses”, where he talked about the path to doubling your website revenue using the Rule of 26. In this episode, we talked about digital marketing, SEO strategies, KPIs, traffic & conversion...

So I created the Rule 26 to help service-centric business owners understand website marketing and really break down what they need to focus on to start getting predictable revenue from their website. Because so many times we have folks who are great at providing service. They go into business to provide that service to as many people as they want, right? But they rely on referrals and word of mouth and think that's a predictable way to grow their business. And unfortunately, it's not. It's proven time and time again, it's not a predictable way to scale your business, right?

So I went in and I was really trying to figure out how can I explain how website marketing can significantly move the revenue needle. Because really, as business owners, that's all we care about. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.

All right, we are live. I've got Michael Bozbaczynski on the line here, and he's an expert at digital marketing, SEO strategy, search marketing, small business administration, and management. He's based in Springfield, Illinois. Buzzworthy Integrated Marketing, that's his company. Also, BuzzBiz Media and BuzzBiz Studios. Mike Buzzbizinski is the CEO of Buzzworthy Integrated marketing, a website marketing firm that specializes in providing profitable digital marketing solutions for service-based businesses. This is a division of BuzzBizMedia and an award-winning multimedia and marketing firm dedicated to the

needs of small business to medium-sized businesses and nonprofits. In May 2021, Michael released his book, The Rule of 26 for Service-Based Businesses, wherein he talked about the path for doubling your website revenue using the Rule of 26. Michael, pleasure to have you on today. Thanks for having me, Tommy. So what's the weather like there in Illinois? Today is actually not bad. It's in the mid-70s. So I just got back from Branson, Missouri, where it was a little's in the mid 70s so i just got back from branson missouri where it was a little warmer in the 80s the weather's been crazy lately yeah my cousin's going back

to colorado he said the weather's perfect today but it's going to be 40 on friday and i'm like 40 degrees in colorado springs on friday during the end of may. Wow. Yeah. I lived in Alaska for 17 years and up there it's been pretty crazy as well. They keep getting just this freeze thaw all the way through the spring, which it's normal all the way up into April, but to be in Maine still doing it is kind of crazy. This is going to be pretty cool because I love digital marketing. I'm obsessed with Google's algorithm, with the updates, with, I've always said, Google is God, searching and optimization, the GMB, the LSA, the PPC, the organic. I love this topic. I mean, I'm actually, I think it's the lifeblood of most

companies. So let's just jump into, tell us all about yourself. Tell us a little bit about Buzzworthy and everything you've done for the last 10 years and what you're going to be doing in the next 10 years. Sure. I was born in England to a pair of Air Force parents. I grew up in California. I ended up joining the Air Force, becoming a third-generation Air Corps guy myself for 10 years. StartedBiz Studios back in 2005. Over the first 15 years of my entrepreneur experience, I grew a little tiny recording studio into a multi-million dollar creative agency.

And then about 2018, I got kind of tired of where I was. And I had grown the business broke for all intents and purposes. And so I broke up the company into two divisions. And for the last three and a half years, I have been building out the buzzworthy integrated marketing wing of things for about 98% of my bandwidth. And what we focus on is building converting websites for service-centric businesses. And for the next 10 years, I am going to continue to build out this ecosystem to allow any size of business to take full advantage of all the tools that we have been basically curating for the last 18 years, almost to the beginning of digital marketing

itself. Interesting. So let's go and dive into the rule of 26. This is what the main podcast is all about, is taking a deep dive into the rule of 26 for your home service business. Sure. So I created the rule of 26 to help service-centric business owners understand website marketing and really break down what they need to focus on to start getting predictable revenue from their website. Because so many times we have folks who are great at providing service. They go into business to provide that service to as many people as they want, right? But they rely on referrals and word of mouth and think that's a predictable way to grow their business. And unfortunately, it's not.

It's proven time and time again, it's not a predictable way to scale your business, right? So I went in and I was really trying to figure out how can I explain how website marketing can significantly move the revenue needle? Because really as business owners, that's all we care about. How is our marketing reflecting the bottom line, right?

And so I boiled down, there's hundreds of KPIs that you can look at in digital marketing, literally. And so I finally boiled it down to three KPIs that directly move the revenue needle for any business. One is traffic, the other is a conversion rate, and the other is the average revenue per client coming from your website. And so the rule of 26 states clearly that if you increase your unique traffic by 26%, your conversion rate by 26%, and your average revenue per client by 26%, you will get a compounded effect of 100% more revenue coming from your website. Once you've done that, you now have a predictable gas pedal of growth for your company. And along the way,

every step of the way, you are still increasing revenue. Here's the thing. I know quite a bit about all three of these things. Two have to do a lot with digital. The third one, I think, has to do with a lot of other KPIs to increase your average revenue per client. So we can start there. So when I look at average revenue per client for a service-centric business, it's more off-site marketing, right?

It's the positioning of where and who you are talking to. So it's marketing to the affluent. It might be the affluent, or it might... Maybe you serve folks that only can afford $10. Everybody has a perfect client, right? And depending on what service you provide will dictate who you should be talking to, you know? And just because you're a dentist doesn't mean all of the people with teeth in the world are your perfect clients. Some people prefer pediatric dentistry. Others prefer oral

surgery. There's even others that are just orthodontics. And then they have generals out there. And generals usually are the ones that suffer the most because they lack focus on who they're trying to attract, right? So if you have a family dentist, yes, you can still do all the other cosmetic stuff and all that good stuff. But if you're trying to attract families, you just need to talk to what families need in their dentistry. And once they become clients, then you've got that eight to 15 year lifespan of that family to upsell, cross sell, and all that good stuff. And that's all of that right there is where your average revenue per client comes in. Because if

you position yourself to attract everybody, you, one, don't connect with anybody. So you have a very poor performing website. And if we're attracting the wrong type of clients, we're actually bleeding profits on the other end when we do get less than profitable clients for our service, right? So if we're really good and focused on who provides the most rewards, both emotionally and financially, and we focus on talking to them and reaching out to them and connecting with them through our website, we will effectively attract pretty much only that type of client. And therefore, we will be more profitable when we get those clients. And that's why ARPC is so important. So it's pretty easy to say, find your perfect avatar market to those people. It's like,

it's easy to say that, but what I would say is Ken Goodrich, the owner of Gettle, Tommy, he's like, my average client is not a rich person in Scottsdale, Arizona. Right. He said, I'm pretty wealthy is what he said about himself. And he said, we don't use my company. I've got house managers that actually picked the company and it's just, I don't even deal with it. He's like, it's just, I don't have time. He goes, I don't need my guys coming to my own house anyway. So he goes, here's how we run it. He goes, the perfect avatar for me is 120,000 dual income, three bedroom house. It's a basic five ton unit, no variable speeds. And he did 23 million in EBITDA last year. So you look at that.

My question to you, just go a little bit more deeper into the conversation is everybody that's listening. We had a record month last month of downloads, 42,000. So it was amazing. Thank you guys that are listening. How do we identify the perfect avatar? Well, there's an exercise in doing that. I mean, somebody who has a history like that understands where the majority of their revenue comes from. Now, sometimes where the most of your revenue comes from doesn't mean that that's the most profitable type of business either.

So there are things in the background that they're looking at. But for that person, it sounds like he's really happy with handling the $120,000 dual income three bedroom house in his service area, which is great. So if he was to be looking at that and going, how do I increase that by 26%? Now we get more into not what we're charging, but how can we get more engagement from the clients we already have? And then how do we fill that in our marketing so that when we're remarketing to those people who have done business with us, then bleeds into our new clients because now we have a process of, okay, once you've gotten a, say, a repair, then we have

these things in our marketing. And digital marketing is part of that. Email marketing, maybe social media. It could be a bunch of stuff that goes along with that. But how do we get them maybe cross-sell? Is there a way we can get it in a maintenance plan? Well, all of those things that go along with that. And so once we've increased that by 26%, and then put that into our sales funnels, which is a website is a sales funnel for anybody who

doesn't know. And then we can take a look at the other metrics. Okay. So we've got the three rules here, basically three KPIs, traffic, conversion, average revenue per client. Tell me a little bit about, which one do you want to dive into? So I'd like to go to the conversion right after that, because how you are writing is directly reflected about who you're trying to talk to and who you're targeting. And that's why we started with ARPC, because you're now clear of who you want to serve, why they should be interested in you, and how you can connect with them. As a service-centric business, you only do one of two things. You solve a problem or you help attain a dream. It's the only two things you can do. So as a service provider, we're usually solving a problem. So you need to identify those problems

at the top of your homepage to let the visitor know that you understand what they're going through. And then you can present a solution to that problem because you're the problem solver, right? And the more you can be a problem solver, the more valuable you are. And then from there, you go, this is what it's going to look like after we've solved that problem for you, right? And in home services, that's a really fast, almost transactional conversation. But if you do that out of order and you start talking about yourself before you talk about their pain and their problems,

you're not going to connect with them. And they're probably will go to the next person who they feel that they can trust and like better. So tell me a little bit more about this homepage. And it would be awesome to lead somebody into a page that you'd recommend for like a template i don't know if that's something you everyone's a little bit different because really good service companies say something commoditized like hvac you want to stick out like a sore thumb and so we really don't like to utilize like we'll take a look at their competitors and see what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong but we've got to make sure that that company that we're serving sticks out like a sore thumb compared to their competitors. So the format is in the content, not necessarily in the layout, right? I don't have one off the top of my head,

but I don't have one off the top of my head that's done it, like, listened all the way through to say, yeah, this is how you do it every time. Because a lot of folks, they're still old school. They're still I, me, us on their website. And we have to flip it to you and your. You have this problem. Your solution is us. Your life will look like this after we've done what we do. So that's just let the client be the hero.

Let them, you know, I always say let the client be the hero. Let them, you know, I always say, diagnose the person before the problem. Right. And it's not like open 24 seven. We're your neighborhood superstars, drug test,

background checks. That's all about us. Yeah. Need to talk about can't get out of your garage. I'm a garage company. So can't get out of your garage. There you go. You miss your daughter's play.

You know, don't miss those important times and less mess less stress right well i mean in plumbers right it's like how damaged do you want your home you know waiting too long can you know ruin a lot of your home if you have a plumbing problem right and so if you're an emergency plumber it is going to be about like showing flooding rooms and you know are you knee deep in your sewage? Give us a call right now. I mean, that's just immediate stuff. And those folks are going to have more call to action is much higher. But say you're putting in a new heating for that part of the country, probably

looking at maybe it's your plumbing for your swimming pool or something like that, right? Well, that's something that you can plan out, right? And you can paint the picture of how you can do better with your irrigation in the front. Whatever you are focused on, you need to figure out what problem does that service solve? And what does it look like for the person that you serve after you've done your service? So you go in there and so now you've identified your avatar. You've got higher conversion rate. This is a fun piece for me is driving traffic. Right. A lot of ways to drive traffic, but are we just going to be talking about organic?

In the book, I talk about paid and unpaid. And that's a matter of your timeframe and your budget, right? So usually earned traffic is going to be the long game and paid traffic is your fast game. If you're a young company, you might not have the money to properly advertise online for your services. And so now you have more time than money. So you have to go the long game and get your earned online traffic. As you get the cash flow, then you can speed that up. And I always tell people, speed costs money.

That's just the way it goes. And you either have more money than time or more time than money. And so when you have enough money, I always say, you can make more money. You can never buy more time. And so when we talk about traffic, we actually talk about the value of the traffic, the quality of the traffic, if you will. It's not enough to just push a bunch of everybody to your website and then let the website filter itself out. You're wasting your time and your money if you're not very specific about who you are driving to your website, plain and simple. And that's why we start with who do you want to serve? And that's why we then step into discuss and talk like and to the people you want to serve, and then only serve

those people to your website. Yeah. For example, if you're a local service in Arizona, you don't want to be serving people up in other states or even other, like Tucson, if you're in Phoenix, it doesn't make sense. Right. Yeah. And let's talk about, like, if you're doing paid traffic during the winter, you're probably not talking much about your HVAC. If you're heating and cooling, you're talking about heating during the winter and HVAC during the summer, right? And so your messaging to lead traffic to your website needs to be seasonal if you have a seasonal service.

I agree with that. We built a lot of custom landing pages out for the specific search that they're searching for. Do you recommend doing that? Yes. If you're doing paid ads, I always do suggest having some landing pages that are specific to the service you're advertising for. And even in organic, you can create some subpages on your website that act as funnels, if you will, but they link back out to your main site if they want to know more about the company. Because there's nothing more annoying than not being able to link back out. And I have to go figure it out out of your URL, who you are, so I can see if I like and trust you.

You might say all the right things in your sales page, but I also want to see who you are. What's your track record? I'm going to go look at your Google. I'm going to look at your social media. And if you give me the website that has all that on there, I'm going to go look at your Google. I'm going to look at your social media. And if you give me the website that has all that on there, I'm going to be more apt to do the research rather than if you just gave me a landing page, the only thing I can do is contact you and I'm not quite ready to make that decision yet. And now I'm like, well, maybe I'll just go to the next person

makes it easy for me to figure it out. So is that usually both in the site map? Yeah. And your footers. It's very easy to make a landing page with a footer that mimics the rest of your website. If your footer is done correctly, you have a sitemap at the bottom there that links out to everything. It has your social media, it has the rest of your website, it has your phone numbers, it has everything that they would want. There's a lot of e-commerce and online marketers that they only do online marketing and they don't understand the fact

that people don't just go to a landing page all the time and just buy. They don't just automatically like, oh yeah, I automatically like this person, right? If you're in an emergency, yeah, sure. But you're going to put that phone number at the top anyway, because those people want to click to call and get their problem solved if it's an emergency, right? So if you have fire mediation or flood mediation stuff like that they're just looking for the first person who's got a bbb rating at the top of their website and a phone number that they can contact and get something done now right yeah it's a completely different that's a transactional interaction right but if you're talking about say you are like you what you're

saying like with your garage doors right maybe you are focused on you're saying, like with your garage doors, right? Maybe you are focused on not necessarily the emergency maintenance, but maybe it's the luxury garage doors. Maybe it's a quieter garage door opener so that you don't wake up the baby at night. All those things right there are not knee-jerk. Now you have to create a relationship with that visitor to let them know that you understand their problems. Like, hey, I don't want to hear the garage door every time it opens because maybe my wife works at night and I work during the day.

And so we pass in the middle when each other is sleeping, dot, dot, dot, right? Own a problem, solve it, and niche on that problem. Don't try to be the garage door person for everyone be the garage person for someone you know it's interesting because i had marcus shared on the show marcus shared in i don't know a few years ago and he wrote the book they ask you answer right and he basically talked about hub spot building landing pages and how for river pools he get questions and faqs all day, every day. And all he did every night was write a thousand page article on the questions that people are asking.

And all of a sudden, there's only two websites I know that rank better than me in the home service space. 1-800-GOT-JUNK and River Pools. And I think that's a great strategy is go in and say, what is everybody asking about? Are they asking about types of insulation on a garage or do they want to know more about wood or how much maintenance goes into this? And like, you know, what are the openers? So my next strategy that I'm going to deploy is all about LiftMaster versus Genie Openers. Different brands versus another because... Yeah. You're now looking at people who are further down in the sales funnel, right?

In the sales funnel. They are. They're further down in the sales funnel, but they're also doing an R&D. Right. What I love about this is when you search for Roger Repair, the city name, most of the time I got the LSA. Then I've got the P i got the lsa then i've got the pbc like the second one then hopefully i'm on the gmb and the three pack and then the sponsor gmb and then hopefully i got the next three organic so i'm on there like eight times but what i don't like is i don't like to have to go through all that so much paid and so much crap when you type in

liftmaster versus genie most likely there's not a lot of pvc popping up when it's versus and you're doing the research google says i'm gonna they're trying to get educated so luckily google has not just took it over the whole page of these and then get a really good article just do an interview with a couple of your your experienced technicians transpose it and then you can syndicate it all over the place and put it on your site first. Those are some easy tips I'd recommend. What other tips do you recommend on the organic side? So on the organic side, especially something like what you're talking about,

where there's a lot of competition, the local has actually got the upper hand over the national brands. And Google knows that. And you have different types of search. You have informational search and commercial search. So informational searches are usually really high up on the sales funnel. So they're just looking for information. They don't even know who they're looking for. They're just trying to figure out what they're looking for. Sometimes they're trying to find the solution to the symptoms they have. So they don't even know what the solution is.

Okay. Then as you get further down the sales funnel, now you have intent, buying intent. That buying intent is a commercial search. And those are different types of keywords that you're using. And those keywords are actually keyword phrases. They're usually longer, three words or more. The longer the search, the more buying intent that person has. Done, right? So if you can find keywords that have commercial intent that are three words or more and have

volume, those are the ones you want to get yourself ranked for. Now, if you've done all of the blogs, you've done the podcast to talk about it and you link back there. Now you need to bring in a pro who can do all the backlinking to bring your domain authority up so that you can now compete with anybody in your market that's been there longer than you, right? Especially their website. Because a young website has a very low domain authority. And all a DA is, is just Google's rating of how much they think your website is trustworthy. And so when you, if somebody has a higher trustworthy website, according to Google and is linking back to your lower DA ranking, Google says, well, we trust them and they trust you. So, okay, we're going to give you

a little more Google juice. And so if you've done all the SEO on your site, now that offsite SEO starts to boost your rankings for those keywords. And so that right there, there's a lot of ways to do it really bad. And it's not necessarily cheap if you're going to do it right, long lasting, because there's a lot of bad links that you can put on there, which can actually hurt you. You want to do it professionally. So that's like the next level stuff if you've already done all your onsite SEO. Yeah. Some tips too for that is obviously there's a lot of things you can do, like get involved with the community, get involved with.gov.edu. And then on top of that,

some of the things I recommend is even though there are no follow now, they still are kind of follow like I write for ink.com. I've written for Forbes. I've written for Office and Post. It's a mix of follow and don't follow, but they're still all following. I mean, they still count. Yeah. The follow don't follow really it's comes down to the anchor text and where does that link go to so if your keyword in your anchor text doesn't match the page that it's going to then you're not getting a lot of juice anyway right so if you have garage doors is the page that you're trying to link to and they talk about garage floors the little hyperlink is the anchor text, whatever's said in that hyperlink there that goes back to your website. Or say you have, it does say garage doors,

but it's linked back to your About Us page where you talk more about your pedigree than you do about a garage door. So now Google says there's a disconnect here, and now that link doesn't have as much juice as it should you know what's interesting is this is what i do to describe to people seo and this is a really archaic way of explaining it but the five gallon bucket is your home page right when you've got paint size one gallon buckets underneath those are your state pages if you're a site like you know we're 19 states 29 markets then you've got your local city pages that are pretty decent sized cups you've got the small shot glasses that sometimes are neighborhoods right and if we fill up that

five gallon bucket it could fill up these gallons and it all of a sudden everything underneath it starts to rank pretty well especially especially for the major keywords. And here's what's interesting. If you do the background on what people are searching, a lot of people in these 55 plus communities are searching their neighborhood instead of searching the city name. Right. And there's a lot of hidden treasures out there that people don't really know about. Right. And I think that's what you're talking about is on those long tailed keywords.

They're easy to rank for it because they're very specific. really know about. And I think that's what you're talking about is on those long-tailed keywords, they're easy to rank for it because they're very specific. And if you build a few links for those and you got great content, 1,500 words, great pictures, I don't think this stuff matters as much as it used to, but doing geotags on the picture, stuff like that. Oh, they do. All of it counts now because the competition's higher. So the more commoditized SEO becomes, the more easier it is to do, then that means that those small things start counting because it's all those little things that add up to make you, there's a big difference in traffic, click-through traffic between ranking number one and ranking number two, and another big dip down to number three and then a huge cliff when you get

to four and then nobody's going past like there's 0.02 there's no no two percent of all traffic gets past the first page on google and then if you're a service based it's all about your mobile right so it's really about your google maps when you have an emergency service comparative to a planned service, right? Because on an emergency service, they're not going to their desktop. They're grabbing their phone going, I need help now. And whoever's number one is usually the one, especially if their name says what they do, that's the one they're clicking on. They're not doing a lot of research. They're just like, hey, can you help me? Yes, you will. Okay, good. They don't care what the price is. They just care how fast it comes. You're absolutely right on that. Most of us, we want something right now. We want a tree cut.

We want pest control. It's because of something. We want to go with the ones that are near the top, especially if they got good reviews. We'll talk about Google My Business in a minute. One of the things about SEO, there's so many different things like your hosting account and how long do you have it paid for some guys only have it paid for the year that it expires google likes to see all these different things that you're a serious business i mean what's interesting is is that one of the things we've used to do was search for businesses that went out of business to do a 301 businesses that went out of business and do a 301 redirect that they had domain authority and just rebuild their pages up. A lot of little

things that we used to do. And I had multiple websites. We just 301 them back to one page. But a lot of people don't pay attention to organic anymore. I'd like to ask your question on this. How important is just organic under the map pack? How important is it? Do you still think it's super important or not? It's huge. 68% of all consumers start their buying journey with a search query.

So over two-thirds of all buyers are going to a search engine and doing a search to start the journey. Yeah, but I'm saying, I guess, you know, like you've got that local service ads, which is a Google guarantee. Yeah, but that's not, everybody has that. All services have an LSA.

Okay, so then they're going to hit either the PPC up top, but now they got four and then they got the three pack. Right. So now you're still over halfway down before organic happens. But your click-throughs on PPC

are lower than your click-throughs on maps. And depending on the service, your maps versus your SERP is what you're talking about. Your search engine result page was the 10 organic actual listings. Sure. After all that, that's your SERP results, technically, is what I call them. Those are your SEO results. Those right there, depending on your service. So if you have a transactional service, a map is going to be higher click-through rate.

But if you have a relationships type service... Like a pest control or a landscaping... Yeah. I mean, something that you need fast, right? Like my HVAC went out. First day, it got over 90 here in Springfield, Illinois, and the darn compressor went out, right? I went to the first person.

They couldn't get in till tomorrow, and it was going to be a time I couldn't be there. So to the first person. They couldn't get in till tomorrow. And it was going to be like a time I couldn't be there. So then the second person, they couldn't get there. I was just looking for the first person who can get there. And I just started at the top of the maps and worked my way down until somebody said, yeah, I can get in a time where that's convenient for you. Make it happen.

Boom, they came out. They did a good job. And that's the way that goes, right? But if I was looking to get in a Find a whole company, like a whole company. Let's just use the same example. Now I'm looking at it, he's like, oh man, that thing's on its last leg. Okay, great.

If I didn't like that person, I would probably do some research on the SERPs to find, do some research on what air conditioning compressors are good right now. Do I get credits on stuff? So I'm going to do some other searches and if there's a local provider that installs the new and improved condenser out there, that's eco-friendly,

I get a tax credit for blah, blah, blah, and that's the person's website that I land on, guess who I'm going to go with? Boom, because it's a relationship. They're giving me more than what I'm asking for. I love it. So let's, let's jump into this topic of the three pack because it used to be a seven pack. It sounds like we're talking about some really great beer right now. But you know, the three pack to me, I've actually done a lot of research on this and I figured out a way to, to get into the three pack pretty fast. And there's a lot of factors, you know, the citation sites, getting great reviews, user generated content. There's a lot of factors, you know, the citation sites, getting great reviews, user generated content. There's a lot of things you can do on there like geotag and, and just Google posts content.

It doesn't need to be every day. But once a week, what else is posting on there? Yeah. So now it's called Google business profile. So Google, my business is being rebranded as Google business profile and the Google post, they stay up for seven days and they should disappear. They don't always, but they should disappear after seven days. So we always tell our clients that we'll be posting on that at least once a week.

Now, if you're having an event, maybe you're having a sale, maybe there's a new offer, because those are the three types of posts, events, offers, and news. So if you hire somebody, go ahead and put it in there. Update your pictures when you have new projects that came out. If you're in something that has graphical or aesthetic outcomes and stuff like that. For definite. All the citations you talked about, huge. Your Google reviews, huge. Getting as many reviews as possible to get you to the top of that page.

But that's got to be high reviews, fours and better. So you need to have some type of strategy that makes sure that people who are going to give you less than a four don't end up there. They end up in your lap so that you can make it better for them. So they will give you a four when you make good on your customer service. Because it's easy to give good customer service when everything's going right. Your customer service is tested when things go wrong. And that's where your reputation management really becomes key. So there's a couple other things. The way your website ranks and the content you have on your page and the way you link

into your GMB matters. And then you also have the NAPs, not the maps, the NAPs, name, address, phone number. And then you've got a products page that you should fill out. It's easy wins let's just go into a little bit of that stuff so talk to me a little bit about name address phone number and why that's important so google wants to make sure that they're giving the user the most accurate information possible so all of your citations if you don't know what citation is citation is just when your name address and phone and phone number are listed on, say, a directory. If there are discrepancies on directories out

there, then Google looks at that and goes, oh, this is inconsistent. It's not trustworthy information. Therefore, you get demerits for it. Everywhere you're listed, you want to have the same phone numbers as much as possible, the same addresses as much as possible, unless you have multiple locations. And that's a completely different conversation we can have later. Another thing that goes along with that is the photos that you're putting up there. Geotargeting those is great and making sure that your photos are up to date. If you change your signage, pull down your old signage and put up the new signage. Because a lot of times when people are looking for you, as far as your address go,

your pictures will come up there. And if your premier picture is your old signage and they're looking for the old sign and they can't find you, that's frustrating. That weakens your relationship right off the bat and they haven't even met you yet. So there's a lot of traditional marketing that goes into your map pack for sure.

But making sure everything is up to date and correct always. And don't set it and forget it. Look at it at least once a quarter. Go back to all the citations you have and make sure there wasn't somebody who went there and tried to update it to a competitor's phone number. I've seen all sorts of nasty black hat stuff out there. Oh yeah, yeah, they just claim their listing.

What about this one? This one's a great one. This is going to be one of the best questions you've ever had. No, I'm kidding. But I think a lot of times people just look, they say, we're going to get,

I'll use my city Phoenix. They just said, I'm going to go somewhere where rent's cheap. That's the biggest mistake I think you could possibly do. How do you pick, you've identified your avatar what i would probably recommend and this is just i'd like you to kind of maybe talk about this is don't pick where there's a bunch of other garage door companies or whatever your service is densely

populated because now you're competing for those eyeballs but you want to make sure you're not somewhere completely all industrial where the nearest residential home is 30 miles away because I've seen areas like that. So the Google My Business, you see a lot of people don't understand that LSAs run on top of GMBs. Right. You need to have a Google My Business page to do LSAs. And if you have several GMBs because you have people coming into your showroom, you can do more LSA ads. So I know these acronyms are like, people are like, what the hell is going on here? But we talk about this stuff a lot.

So talk to me about picking a spot for my Google My Business, which is the main place where reviews, hours of operation, your products page, all that stuff resides. All right. So there's two ways you can list on your Google Business Profile. One is by location, where you will verify your location, right? And so when you're talking about where you're located, that's going to be completely up to what real estate you can afford, right? So some people can't afford to be on the one-way road that goes into the residential areas that has 34,000 cars going by in a day, right?

So yeah, you do get pushed into those industrial areas. But you also can have a Google business profile that has a service area and doesn't highlight your address. And the reason you would do that is that if you don't have somebody coming to your business, so you go to your clients 90% of the time, then you don't need to highlight where you're located. You need to highlight where you serve. And so picking service area will help you really alleviate that issue. Because if your service area is, say, Phoenix, but you are right outside the city limits of Phoenix, Google's not going to put you in the middle of the mix when it comes to your map pack when you're competing for ranking. But if you put the service area and you have really good reviews and you have photos and you have all the things that people like to see on their map pack,

then you have a better chance. Well, this is a tough one for me because all of us want to rank and there's things like local Viking. There's several other tools I use. Local Viking is not the most accurate, but you want to find out it. Usually, even if you pick the service area, you pick 30 miles away from that, your location, you're all red. Oh yeah. So I do think proximity matters, even if you pick the service area. Well, it depends. If you talk about the neighborhoods you want to serve in your content, it creates that geo-targeting without being on a geo-map. Right. And you can build maps to those areas and everything else. You can put maps from local restaurants there.

You can do stuff like that. You can get backlinks from those local restaurants as a sponsor to one of their events. There's all sorts of things you can do. I've seen people basically utilize the local schools to the neighborhoods they want to be serving, and they'll sponsor the school football team or something like that. And so they'll have their banners of the games, but they'll also be on the website for their sponsorship. They'll be listed in directories for trusted whatever for the school, however they're promoting them for their sponsorships and stuff like that. So there's other ways to say you're local without actually having

a tag on the map itself. Let's just talk. I think Mitch had a great question of getting a real location with a real sign out front versus using your home. And let's face it, Google doesn't mind homes if you really work out of your home. Otherwise, I've done research of garage door companies. The majority of them are working out of their home, and that's what their GMB is. Some of them are working out of their apartment. And Google lets that happen. I don't think it's the right way to do things. I like a showroom. I like clients to be able to see my signage. But talk to me a little bit about residential property versus getting a commercial building. So that becomes a topic of comfort. I'm in my home. I have a home

office. I also happen to have a co-working space downtown. I list my co-working space downtown because I don't want anybody ever coming to my home for business. It's something that me and my wife had just decided we're not going to have clients at the house. So you really have to make that decision. We just went over three different ways to make you as local as possible without having to list your home. So that's up to you. There's many different ways around that. So if you want people to be able to come knock on your door, that's up to you. You've listed, but you don't have to do it anymore. There's probably only been about three or four years since they allowed for service area. And it's because of the local product providers,

small manufacturers and stuff like that, that they work out of their garage, but they never have people at their home for service. You know, me personally, if I had in a city like Phoenix or Houston or Dallas or Detroit, I would go and I'd have two locations for several reasons. Number one, is that all my guys having to drive pure across the city. Number two, I'm going to have signage up. I'm going to have that local presence. Number three, is that all my guys having to drive pure across the city? Number two, I'm going to have signage up. I'm going to have that local presence. Number three, I'm going to have a place for the customer to come. Number four, as I do think that Google and my businesses rank better locally, at least

without a ton of work. And it's tough when there's a lot of competition doing the stuff right. You see, it really does depend on the service that you're and your service area, right? If you're in a small town and there's only two of you, it really doesn't matter just as long as you're there because you've got a 50-50 chance, right? But if you have been around for a couple years and you get people that will give you good reviews, those reviews are going to outrank anything on your geo-targeting. I've seen people who are a mile away from me versus people who are 10 miles away from me when I ask for XYZ near me. And the reason is because the person who has a four and a half star rating or average rating

with 50 reviews is outranking the guy who has three reviews of the four. Yeah. And then the consistency of reviews and then responding to the reviews and user-generated content. Right. And we have a really easy platform called Dizio Local, which actually walks you through all of that. So if you're a micro-business,

a solopreneur working out of your garage and you can't afford an SEO, you can just go to Dizio Local, get that, that'll show you what to do. How do you spell that? D-I-Z-Y-O. It's on our website at buzzworthy.biz. And then just go over to the SEO part and it's the DIY local SEO. DIY, yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's all DIY. The great thing is you have a digital marketing firm that's backing you up,

though. You don't have a software firm doing the support. You have actual marketers who will answer your questions and actually set up your account for you. So they'll point you in the right direction, show you how to get the most out of it, and let you get going. And if you ever get stuck, well, there's lots of on-site video helps for each of the pages and each of the tools we have there. Plus we have a technical support on there and all that good stuff. So that way, if somebody wants to get into that, because it's time, right? The longer you wait, the more disadvantaged you are to your competitors, your local competitors specifically, right? So I always tell people, get in, start it.

Even if you don't have the money to have a platform help you right away, just go claim it and put some pictures up there. Put your information in there, make sure it's accurate, and then go in there and post something at least once a week. Now with our program, you can actually schedule out posts. So you can work on it once a month and have all those posts automatically do it for you. Boom, boom, boom, done, done, done. It tells you what citations you have. Somebody actually asked about citations. It has a list of all the citations. You can take a look at your competitor's citations. There's all sorts of stuff. And then on top of that, it has a task list. So the algorithm actually looks and says, hey, if you have this much time, do these things first, and these will have the biggest impact on your maps rating for the time that you have.

This is all really, really great information. We didn't really go... I don't know if we want to get too deep in the quality scores and everything for PPC, but let's talk a little bit about... Maybe I'm to the size now where I've done all the DIY stuff, I could afford an agency. What are some of the questions I should be asking? So you really want to take a look at what you are actually trying to do. A lot of people will go into an agency that's maybe a generalist, right? And they don't know what the problem they're trying to solve, right? So somebody came in here and said, GMBs are very weighted by radius. We see it at very large scales. And that's Jonathan Cunningham. For garage doors, definitely, especially in larger cities, right?

HVAC is huge. We work with a lot of service companies that have that. Mediation companies, huge, right? And so you want to find people who have a track record in working with those types of services. We only do service-centric, and I've been doing marketing for service-based businesses for 18 years now. You want to look at people who are not one-trick ponies. So don't just go to a GMB person because that's all you need right now. Because now you're going to have that great relationship and then they're going to peter out of what they can offer you when you need more than just the Google business profile optimization. Those are the big ones for

me. Go and take a look at their case studies, look at their Google reviews, all of those things. Look at their testimonies, make sure their testimonies look trustworthy. Go to their social media, see how they are in the community. If you're looking for a relationship with somebody, that's what you should be doing anyway. You know, this is the time where you remind me to do a plug because the same thing happens with podcasts right and if you guys are liking this and i don't ask for this very often but when i remember to you say this is the best home service keywords matter you just click a link on there for a review for the podcast and if you're loving it right now it really helps me out if you got a great piece of content ever from me or Michael the Buzz Bozinski. Do me a favor real quick. Write a few sentences and save for home service businesses. What should they say, Michael,

that would help me out the most in the podcast review? In the podcast review, if you're there looking to build your service-based business and your podcast is always talking about that, then that's the nuggets that you get by listening to this show should be reflected in your review because that's what people are going to go. Oh, I learned about this. You know, I was able to do this now that I listened to it. I now understand this about my business. Tell them the outcomes you're getting from being an avid listener because that's what's going to help the most. And then make sure you obviously give them the highest ratings if you love the show. So for example, we learned how to book more phone calls. We learned how to get more average revenue per client, higher conversion

rate, more traffic. That's a lot of stuff from you, but I'm not one of those guys that's like, leave me a review, leave me a review, leave me a review. I just think sometimes you just got to remind people how to do it. Your ask is, hey, my call to action for you is if you found value, can you please go and do a review and repeat that value to other people who might be looking for a show like this? That's your ask right there. And ask it over and over again. And don't be afraid to ask for it. Don't be ashamed to ask for it, right? No, I don't think about it enough. We're sitting here talking about how to find...

Put a sticky note on your screen every time you record your podcast that says, ask for reviews. And only ask for one thing. Don't say, go like me here, then do this, then do that. Have one call to actions at the end of every show until you have enough of that call to action done that satisfies that goal. And then have one call to actions at the end of every show until you have enough of that call to

action done that satisfies that goal. And then have another call to action because you'd be, there's repeat listeners. And you know, once they've done that once, they don't can only do it once. Right. But then the next time you have a new call to action, they're like, Oh, I'll do that too, because I'm an avid listener and I want to support the show. I want him to be here. I want his audience to get bigger because you're going to have more resources, the bigger you get and all those things right there. So that's my two cents for you. I appreciate that. And here's a little secret sauce that the listeners might not understand. But for me, the way I get guys like Michael on the podcast is we've got a pretty big listenership. And you know, this is why Michael

Gerber came on because they're getting in front of an audience and the more the people could find us the bigger the listenership don't worry guys i'm not going to sell like joe rogan did that was going to be fun we're going to kick ass for a long long time so i get just as much value out of it than anybody i get to ask all the questions i want i want want to ask you, Michael, you work with a lot of companies and you deal with a lot of different owners, managers, mentors, coaches. What are the biggest things you see from high, high success to the amateur level? Where is it that you see when you get great clients? I think probably the speed of implementation and also they're always a student. They're always willing to try new things.

But if you had to really think about that question and internalize it, what are some of the attributes of somebody who's just, they're at a level of excellence? Level of excellence is not always in correlation with size or age of a business. Level of excellence comes from an openness to understand that you don't know what you don't know, and there's always somebody who knows more than you. And if you can keep an open mind with the people that you ask for help from and don't fight them, work with them to make yourself better and always be working on getting better, you will always become more elite than the guy who won't.

Because there's people out there who think they know everything, and those are the people who shrink over time because the world's passing them by while everybody else is learning the new. Because the new is coming every day, especially in the digital age. I love that.

And I think it's so important. Somebody asked me today during my orientation, they said, what do you think your best attribute is? And I said, I think it's 2008. My CPA said, Tommy, what's the last book you really read from beginning to end? I said, The Lord of the Flies. And it was in high school.

And it was The Kill a Mockingbird, right? Right. And he goes, listen, take this book. It's called The E-Myth Revisited. Read it. Oh my gosh. Love that book. Yes. So I read it two days later, came back to Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes two days later, The Richest Man in Babylon. This went on. And then I just got obsessed with reading. And then I got obsessed with learning. And then I got obsessed with going to visiting shops that are better than me. Not better, but bigger and more accomplished. And then it's just like success leaves clues and

asking a lot of questions then i started the podcast i got to ask great questions from professionals that are experts in their trade and then i got to be able to share it so people are always like man he shares a lot with me i might as well give him this tip right and the more i share the more i want to share the more i want to read the more i want to educate myself and it's almost like it's crazy how it works but but this thirst for knowledge, I hope it never burns out because it's so much fun and I get a lot out of it. I think that the next thing

is the action because knowledge on its own, information on its own is useless. Action creates that next step of success, right? You can read all that implementation. We learned about failure to implement. People learn so much and they take all these notes, they put it under their pillow and

they say, please, not very come make these things come true. Right. Right. And life hits you in the face. Sometimes, sometimes it punched you in the gut, right? And you got every great intention of starting and doing these things. And I know a lot of times what I have, especially in my events is I give a little bit of information overload, but I think the main thing is that we've run a couple of events. We're going to keep running massive, massive, massive events, right?

And the more people come to it, the more we're going to help them prioritize and come up with a game plan on how to implement. And I got a lot of notes from you today. I got, I want to look up that, you know, the digital,

I want to look up. If you guys, yeah, we have free tours of all of our software as a service. And we also have software with a service. So you can either do it yourself with us, you can do it with us.

And we also have DFY folks. So if you're in a position where you want to work on your business because you've grown past working in your business, we have those solutions to just leverage the 30 years experience that I have along with all the tools that we have at our disposal and the experience we have in the industry. But it's all about giving for us. Our whole focus is helping people avoid entrepreneurial

poverty for the small folks. And the folks that have grown... I grew a multi-million dollar company and I was not paying myself very well a few years back. And now I read a book called Profit First by Mike Michalowicz. And if you're in the first few years of your business, it's a great book to get in early, just like E-Myth. And if you are past that seven-figure mark, but you don't feel like you're getting paid as much as you should for all the efforts that you're creating, then Profit Force is a great book to take a look and see how you're handling your finances for your business. Because more is not always better, right? And that goes for everything in business. Yeah, it was cool.

And I know everyone on here is going to know what I'm about to say. He was at our event on Saturday, and he was killer. talked about get different oh i get different it's a great book too i actually helped him sell it i'll be actually at mike's place on saturday we're going to be celebrating that launch so on time he says hi and all the people that came out this time we had about 280 people i think at the event so event. So here's a question. How do we get a hold of you? There's two things here, your company and you, separate questions.

Of course, like every other business owner, I have my company right now. So my company is buzzworthy.biz and my email is buzz at buzzworthy.biz. And if you're interested in the Rule of 26, you can go to rule of 26.com i just ordered a bunch of them on amazon so oops thank you appreciate that and i'll make sure to leave you a review once i appreciate that you can't leave the review before they get in that's right you can't talk about three successful books that were in your life and i'll take the first one is profit

first great book uh so is the pumpkin plan and everything else he goes through so let's go Talk about three successful books that were in your life. And I'll take the first one is Profit First. Great book. So is the pumpkin plant and everything else he goes through. So let's go through what are two other books that moved you in a really positive way? So the first book you've already mentioned is E-Myth. I used to give that to people before I let them hire me. When I was reorganizing my company, Profit First was the next book. Way back when, the one that got me into self-realization and always learning, because I was kind of like you, I didn't really read too

many books in high school. I read just enough to get through the report and get a passing grade and be done with it, right? But it was seven habits of highly effective people. If I could give only three books to an entrepreneur, those are the three I'd make them read. Yeah, those are all great. Then there's the eighth habit. And then if you get it, there's all sorts of books. Yeah. But if you only can have three, yeah, you're right. Cause everything wraps around that. You got to read this book. It's called how to double your profits in six months or less. There you i want you to read that one yeah bob pfeiffer and it's a book from the 90s okay but i love these books because they're still valuable oh and of course mitch had how to win friends and influence people and napoleon oh good to great oh i got a

bunch back here yeah there's great evergreen get scrappy truth delusion. A little blue book of marketing. Truth or delusion. That's a new one for me. Oh yeah. Truth or delusion. I can't remember who wrote this, this one here. Meisner,

Ivan Meisner. This is about networking and leveraging your network and doing network marketing through givers gain. And so he said, how to double your revenue or income? Your book by Bob. How to double your profits in six months or less. Profits.

I like profits because a lot of people talk about double your sales, but then sales for sales sake and growth sake can grow you broke. Delusion. I'm not seeing that for some reason. Truth or delusion. Truth or or delusion and let me see here that's the ivan meisner it's actually written by three ivan meisner was the or is the founder of business network international he wrote another book called bni yeah yeah bni yeah so i was big in bni when i was smaller uh you knower business and brand new is a great way to

get out there into the community and work the referral side of things. But it also teaches you a lot about giver's gain. And so Truth or Delusion is one of his books that talks about giver's gain and the power of giving and leading with value. And in the digital age, that's really the key. Value in advance if in advance. If you can, if you're an expert at what you do and people do research on your service before they hire you, then give them that value upfront. And the more you give, the more you'll get. And it's just comes from that mindset of abundance and giving freely. And that doesn't mean you have to spend a lot of time doing it. It just means you have to find ways to leverage your knowledge

and get it into the people's hands that can use it that would be potential clients of yours. You know, I'm a big fan of John Rulon, Giftology. Oh, Giftology is great. I think I have that book too. I love that stuff, man. I love readers. So here's the last question I ask, Michael, and I'll let you go here.

We talked about a lot of stuff today, obviously. We covered a lot of ground today, Tommy. We did. And we don't talk about everything. We might've missed something. There might be something you want to say to the audience that we didn't get to cover, but I'd like to do is give you a few minutes, closing thoughts, maybe some takeaways, maybe some go do this now, but whatever you want, I'll give you a few minutes to closing thoughts, maybe some takeaways, maybe some go do this now, but whatever you want, I'll give you a few minutes to kind of close us out. So there's a saying called half-built bridges. So we covered a lot today and they're all great topics, but not all the topics we talked about should be the number one priority for everybody because a tool, a tactic, or a methodology is not necessarily for everybody

at any given time in their business cycle. So if you're just starting out, some of the advanced things that we talked about are still a year, two years away for you. And so be cognizant of that. If you don't have a lot of money sitting in the bank to invest in your company, that means you need to find DIY ways of getting things done so that you can grow into a company you can work on rather than work in. And I'm telling you right now, the books that we talked about today are great books to be reading at any stage. And that knowledge will carry for a very long time. I've given away more of those books than I probably have read myself because they're really good, timeless. I mean, Mike Michalowicz killed it with Toilet Paper Entrepreneurs.

That was one of his first books. But Profit First was probably his fifth book. It is the best book he has ever written. And it has changed my life. And it doesn't take anything else other than reading that book to change your life. So while we talk about these tactics in marketing, always be looking of ways to enrich yourself because the better leader you are, the faster you will grow your company and the happier business owner you will be. That's amazing, Michael. I have a comment about profit first. I talked about it today and I said, guys, the Lord has blessed me in a lot of ways.

But when I was 16, my cousin told me to start putting $300 into a Roth IRA and sometimes I barely made it to 300. But I never, ever not did it. And 10 years ago, I didn't qualify to put money into a Roth because the income was too high. I put it into a self-directed five years ago. I got a call two weeks ago that there's over 580,000, I think in that account for a Roth IRA. And I said, guys, that money, that was before I had, I was bouncing checks, trying to get $300 into that.

I had an automatically withdrawal from my account. I never ever took any money out of that account and the purpose of that is saying guys i was doing this when i was busting tables and washing dishes i'm not even kidding so they say sure you're all successful i say no no this is this is for a rainy day my future self this is for the time that i knew i owed it to myself because the first time to start is today and said, so revenue I made minus my investments equal my expenses. Because I was always putting that away. So some days I couldn't eat out to eat. Some days I couldn't take a girl on a date at the time in my early twenties. It just was what I wanted.

Didn't have enough money. Right. Although that's for businesses, it could actually be for individuals. And I talked about that today for like 15 minutes. So Mike talks about it already. And I talked about that today for like 15 minutes. So Mike talks about it already. And I'll tell you right now, I did. I started using it in my own personal finance as well. I pay myself first.

And I do a lot of the same style accounting that Profit First shows you for your business. And it works really, really well. And you can marry it with any of the other folks. David Clark, who's the other? Dave Ramsey. Ramsey, any of those guys, they talk about wallets or envelopes and stuff like that. Same concepts. It's pay yourself first. And as a business owner, paying yourself first is so important to you in your mental state. I did not pay myself for 15 years. 15 years.

I almost went and got a job after 15 years. You know, the percentage of multi seven figure businesses ever exist after four years, five years, 10 years, 15 years, almost hung it up because I was not paying myself for that long. And I didn't see that. And then I read that book and I paid myself 1%. And that grew quickly to the 15% that he prescribes for most businesses. And my life has completely changed. I was able to take my wife to Peru for her 40th birthday just last November,

then follow that up with a honeymoon to Belize, and then take my parents to Mexico in February. And I'm working with a fifth of the revenue that I used to when I had a big building and 22 employees in-house and all the other things that I thought made me successful. It's that ability to spend time with your family, your loved ones, that matters more than anything else.

And you cannot do that unless you pay yourself first. Well, they say revenue is for vanity and profit is for sanity. You're definitely a steward of Mike. Yeah, no, this is great, my friend. I appreciate you coming on. I think there's a lot of people that got a lot out of it. This is going to hit the main podcast here in a few weeks, I think. Awesome. And that's when really listeners listen to it on their timeline. So thank you. Thank you all for listening. I got to tell you guys, if you left me a review, I really, really, really appreciate it. And I really, really do from the bottom of my heart.

Thank you. And Michael, you're fantastic. I appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much. If you guys want to follow me on LinkedIn is usually where I'm at, Michael Baczynski on LinkedIn, or you can follow me on Instagram, Michael.Baczynski. But otherwise, buzzworthy.biz has all of those links and more. And you can get a hold of me at buzz at buzzworthy.biz. That's my direct email. So if you have any questions, I'm more than happy to help. Thanks, Michael.

Thanks, Tommy. Take care. Take care soon. Hey, guys. I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, heart means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff.

And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on. And do me a quick favor, leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review. Make it four or five sentences, tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company and we're just we're telling everybody our secrets basically and people say why do you give your secrets away all the time

and I'm like you know the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them so we also create a lot of accountability within this program so check it out it's home service million or calm for slash club it's cheap it's a monthly paymentillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your life season further.

So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.