Friday, January 28, 2011

Plan Prices are Reduced!



We believe that our pergola plans, deck plans and fence plans are far superior than all the rest and we want to prove it!. We have cut our prices across the board 10-80% permanently. We will sell our pergola plans for the same price as fence plans and deck plans because we want to be the most popular outdoor DIY plans site in the world.

Downloadable Plans are all  $12.99 each
         and       Printed plans  are all $19.99 with free mail delivery

We will keep our prices as low as possible forever--It is our Vow to our Clients.

We are also streamlining the system and migrating content to a new section on the website so that you get the basic instructions like how to set posts and footings and basic woodwork techniques etc. right on the website.

So you can learn the very basics from the website and develop your skills for free--and then order the plans with details with critical dimensions from the website inexpensively as you need them.

There is also No Tax on US orders!

Monday, January 24, 2011

Did you buy your website from the yellow pages group?

Did you hire the Yellow Pages to create your website? Yes you did... and your website looks like this. On first glance, that's OK, you have to have somebody create your website...but be advised-- This kind of website isn't going to supply endless leads the way the Yellow Pages did 20 years ago. You will be lucky to get a couple of calls a year in most areas.



You will notice that there are many thousands of websites that all look like they were created by 1940's Germany. different colors, but all the same.That means that they will all be clustered together in a glut of under-performing websites.

 


How do I know?  Did I hire Bell Canada-er- Yellow Pages Group to build my website? 
No, I discovered this when I started seeing a lot of ads showing up on our website. You see, Bell Canada - Yellow Pages Group doesn't get much traffic to their on-line directory (website). They either can't figure out how to do it, or they are penalized because they are competing with Google.

So these days, since the Yellow Pages don't have eyes and they want to continue making the same money they did before the decline of their media, the game has changed. 
So, you hire Bell - BCE- Er, Yellow Pages Group.

They Pay Google for Advertising

Google pays us for Advertising--and I block the ads if they compete with our people.

The trouble with this arrangement is that you have a great big middleman in the picture... Yellow Pages. 

The point of the story here is that the Yellow Pages Group is incredibly expensive for what you get. They have no natural traffic so they have to pay for traffic. What they create for you is poor quality and won't get you the traffic you want or need to get for the money you pay them. (The most you can expect is to find your name in Google if you type that in with the Town you live in--not sure about City, depends on competition and your chosen name).

The point is that if you have done this you can always change your phone numbers and shut it down, however don't trust me. Go right now to google. Type in Google Analytics and follow the instructions to generate code.

Now get that to your webmaster (Bell Canada - Yellow Pages Group), or whatever webmaster you can find that they will grant editing access to the yellow pages created site. Without accurate statistics you are driving blind. You need to know how many VISITS, where they came from and how they found you. (For more about Website Traffic Terms like Visits, Hits and Page views...click here)

Install the code from Google and very soon you will find out how much the wonderful website by the "Yellow Pages" is doing for you.

You will quickly discover that ALL of your traffic is coming from Google and most is from Adwords.
Google has a wonderful system for buying advertising called Adwords. 

Now, if you are in the Deck and Fence, Landscape Architecture or Design or Landscaping Business... you can go right to the source and get a listing on our site. Because we see 1,000,000 eyes every year, we get targeted traffic that is looking for what you sell. For about the price of a dinner out you can get listed on GardenStructure.com. (click for info). 

We don't charge per click and being part of a large high quality web presence means legitimacy. 
We will make your phone ring. You can even upgrade to being one of our "Accredited" Builders or designers and have an exclusive area without any other competition.

There was a time when the Yellow Pages were the only game in town.

If you had a business that sold to customers of any kind, you could get a Yellow Pages listing and be immediately in the game. With the advent of the internet that has changed in a horrific way for the Yellow Pages. They went from supplying 77% of the home improvement prospective customers or better, to roughly 5% and mostly retired.



I personally don't know where our phone book is--When is the last time you used yours?

On-Line Yellow Pages.ca simply are not a factor. There are 30,000,000 people in Canada, 100,000 visits to Yellow Pages website a month (and traffic is sinking fast). At minimum, 50,000 of those visits would be from advertisers checking their sites/ads... That leaves 50,000 eyes a month. For perspective, from March till August GardenStructure.com gets 100,000 to 150,000 unique visitors per month and we are just one company in a niche market. Our humble little company gets more visitors than YellowPages.ca gets

Google is the new Yellow Pages, and GardenStructure.com supplies thousands of targeted referrals because
Google sees us as a source of good information and inspiring photos.

Get in touch with Lawrence to find out more about getting involved!

888 293 8938


Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Best Places to Start a Deck and Pergola Business With GardenStructure.com

Hot Spots for Builders of Decks and Pergolas in the United States



People are making money in this recovering economy--Those are your potential clients.

Our typical jobs range between $5,000 and $100,000. It is not uncommon to have jobs worth upwards of $70,000, so adding a couple of jobs a year through our program even in areas without high populations still makes sense. You could potentially pay for involvement from a fraction of the profit from 2 jobs.

Ford is pumping millions into a plant in the St. Louis Missouri area which means new jobs. New technology in the automotive industry should breathe life into many manufacturing States. We are hearing news stories daily about

All the banks and investment companies have been making money, so if you are in an area that has that as part of its Economy, things should be brisk, like in Connecticut, New Jersey or Long Island.

We had 3000 unique visits from St. Louis last year and nobody on our list to help people build.

New York State, Southern New Jersey, Texas, Washington and California our heaviest States for traffic presently.  When you click on Locations and go through to the State it will tell you how many visitors from that State came to our site last year.

How it works… As we gain builders in areas, traffic picks up, so it is a good idea to try us out with a directory listing to gauge how many leads come about by being on our list. As you do projects worthy of feature pages and share photography of them, those will increase our rank in those areas--which means more traffic for you.

Here are the top 10 cities in the US for traffic where we don't already have a builder
(NYC and Los Angeles are #1 and #2--however we have builders there).

•    Houston
•    Seattle
•    Atlanta
•    Portland
•    Dallas
•    San Francisco
•    Chicago
•    Denver
•    Washington
•    Minneapolis

For more information about Becoming a Builder from $29/month click here or call 888 293-8938.

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Spring Marketing Season is Here!

People are shopping for outdoor ideas right now--yes, the majority will call you on the first warm day in March, however traffic to our main site has doubled since the weeks before Christmas already and traffic builds steadily from now until March.

December sees 30,000 visits, January it jumps to 45000, February sees 55,000 people and by March 1 we are well over 100,000 visits every month. It often takes Google 2 months or more to find new listings and content and assign it a value. That's how long it takes for your information on our sites to get on the search engine page. Waiting until February is a dramatic mistake. You will miss out on more than 100,000 visitors.

 Deck Renovation, (new tempered glass rails and post dress in The Beach Toronto, Designed and Built by Yours Truly)

Joining our team in the spring will see you missing out on about 1/3 of the leads. People are looking for ideas while the snow is covering their yard. They hit print... They bookmark. They Copy and Paste. Just because people are not calling doesn't mean your marketing materials are hitting the mark.

You also need to consider that the larger projects for spring have been--and are being planned presently. It can take months for outdoor kitchen areas and furniture grade decks to go through the design, engineering and permitting process.

Paul Corsetti (Our Landscape Designer in Toronto Canada-see his Landscape Design Blog), is working on his first project of the year from a lead he received Jan 3. Just because everything is covered with snow in Toronto doesn't mean people are not planning their projects!


(Prefinished Red Cedar Fence- Designed by Lawrence Winterburn, Masterfully installed by Luke Simonovski-Our builder in Toronto East)

The photos above show projects done late last summer and both will need some landscaping come spring. Our Builders will be referring projects to other related trades through the winter.

This year we have 2 magazine articles coming out in April-- These will also make things pop when things warm up.

Get ready for spring--Get Listed and Get Busy!  

More information please click Join Us

L

Monday, January 03, 2011

I built a website for my Deck Company-- Now why won't my phone ring?

You have built a few decks, took a few photos and now you have paid a webmaster to create a website for you. You did what the webmaster said and submitted it to every directory you could find and all the search engines... 3 months later. Nothing.

Your webmaster said he does SEO and could make you rank...

He said it might take a couple of months...

You won't like hearing this, but, it takes YEARS to get traffic on line and that is only if you did EVERYTHING right.

If you hired your phone company to do your website... start again. Sites hosted within domains owned by the phone company do notoriously badly. Google is competing with the yellow pages so they get penalized. Besides... they don't have a clue how to make a web page rank.

If your site is Flash, (A programming language that is invisible to google that features brilliant graphics), you also will need to start again.

If your site is only 5 pages and doesn't change monthly... you better give out thousands of business cards and flyers because nobody will ever find you on line.

Getting web traffic is at minimum a part time job. It takes research, some basic knowledge and you had better be a good communicator and do beautiful work or you are simply wasting your time. 

So you have already built your website and you may as well keep it up and running and make the changes you need to do to get some traffic. You need to set a bar to decide if you are making headway.

Have your webmaster install Google Analytics on your website and give you access to your stats. That way you can find out what they are typing in and where they are finding you from. There will be a wealth of information to be found within the stats. Even if you have a phone company site--install Google Analytics. The best way to discover how to make a site rank is to look at the sites that rank now. Keep in mind though, that the rules change nearly daily and sites will rise and fall at the whim of the internet gods!

I've noticed something disturbing of late when it comes to advertisers on Google Adwords. Would you believe that the phone company has taken to buying adwords to bring traffic to the sites that they created for their clients? So, you go to the phone company, they charge you more so that they can pay google, and Google pays me to help you get traffic in your local area. (You can click on any of the ads on this blog or go to http://www.gardenstructure.com and check the ads below and on the right hand side).

You might be better off just paying GardenStructure.com or Google Adwords and cut the middleman out of the picture. It will definitely be cheaper!

Put simply, GardenStructure.com gets a million visitors a year because we have GREAT content, the most beautiful projects and photography, and insightful information you simply can't find anywhere else. And it doesn't hurt that we have been on line for about 12 years now.

To learn how to become one of our Builders... Go here!    Join Us

Drop by the locations page to see how much traffic we get where you live.

Please don't fall for big claims by many sites that don't actually get traffic. Check this article out to understand how people exaggerate their traffic    Web site traffic explained

L