What are some things I can do to get this company leads?

I've used UGLY yellow signs at intersections for leads before and they work, this is probably the quickest method.

and then

You can start a referral system starting with the past customers - He's sending out post cards anyway so have them sent to his past customers and offer them a giftcard for a decent amount or some reward for referrals.

You don't mention his site. I assume he has one. Is it ranking well? Maybe you can work on getting that moved up as well as his Google Places. Aside from those, which I assume are covered, I highly recommend using proper video SEO. It will drive traffic to your site if done properly. You will need to get the video hosted (I use a company that charges a very reasonable amount and lots of features). You will then get SEO value out of the content and get traffic to the site beyond just sending people to Youtube.
Craigslist can't hurt. Local directories, even though not a whole lot of value there for backlinks, you never know when someone will be on the site and call and usually they are free. Those are just a few I use.

One of the best way to get leads fast is in fact adwords. You might want to check
how he's doing it... if it's well optimized.

Beyond direct mail, I'd say telemarketing would be another "quick" way to find
potential customers.


Thomas

Ok this is not something new in any way but he has gold nuggets lying around everywhere. You didn't mention this so I assume it hasn't been tried yet.

You mentioned no list. If he can afford a handsome ad budget I assume he is doing business all ready, and has done business in the past right?

I always say, "the best new client is an old client".

Every one of his old clients know people. Leverage this list for new clients or additional services. Does he have or ever considered an add on to his business? What goes hand in hand with his current service? Is it time for a new product to be added to the line? Then offer new product or service to his already satisfied customers.

Does he send a newsletter to past clients? The fastest way to get him some new business is hit the past customer list. I don't know what he does so I can't be more specific. A short newsletter (snail,email or both) can be leveraged to encourage past customers for referrals. How about a free check up of basement and while there ask for referrals. This is a subject in itself and I can only put so much into a post.

Does he offer a warranty personally covered by himself? Nice add on to initial service. Help him do the math. How many times does his sealing job fail? If not many add on an addition or extended warranty. Just don't offer it in a NJ flood plane. I have an exterminator that makes a considerable amount of revenue from such an offer for his service. And allmost never has a claim. Just ideas Red. I could go on for a long time as I'm sure others here on the forum could do also.

Please reply or let me know by PM if any of this works! If he has a large past customer list and they are satisfied customers, it should be able to produce a considerable increase in his business.

Bonus suggestion:
Sit down with him and some staff, if he has any, and do a Kaizen event. If you are not familiar Google it. Its a very effective type of think-tank and mastermind technique. It was formed by the Japanese and is one of the ways they kicked our butts in manufacturing 30-40 yrs. ago.

It could be a billable thing for you too. If you wanted or you could offer it as part of your "package"

Buy the way Warriors who are reading this, if this concept is new to you, look it up and if you have the right type of offline approach to your business and customers, you may want to add this kind of workshop to your bag of tricks. Learn to conduct a Kaizen event for "free" or "fee" and offer to small to mid-size businesses. Great door opener and prospecting approach. Add it to your marketing or training package.

Want a WSO offer? Learn Kaizen and offer it as a course or PLR it. What might that tip be worth to someone?

Red, if you did something like this, the event starts off with a problem to improve performance on. Kaizen means "performance improvement" or (continued improvement) The primary performance to improve would be, "How to utilize former customers to drive new business".

I've done this before and also do a personal variant (condensed form) of it with many clients and students and it always seems to dig up some good things. You can do it with two people easily. Remember it's a technique and a tool.

Hope some of this might be helpful.

Old Dog...

Businesses seem to forget all about their current customers / clients for some reason and until I joined this forum i did also. those are the ones we need to focus on more.

Kaizen Event eh... never hear of this... but this seems like some type of brainstorming session im going to research this.

I can bet $10 bucks, he is not doing his adwords as effective as he can be, negotiate to manage his PPC, get him more leads.

Say he is only getting 20 leads for his $1000 for adwords, and you make it 50 .. tell him for $1K to you and $1k to his adwords, you will get him more leads.

If he is paying $50 a lead now, and you can make it $20-$30 a lead, he would love you.

I am in the process of doing this right now with a client who pays me for SEO, and mentioned he wants PPC to. He had some roody poo company managing it and they were doing a terrible job, we agreed that he would pay me what he is spending. So to pay me to manage PPC, and he is spending $500/month, he also pays me $500, on top of the SEO I am already paid for.

He has a high value per client, so 1 client repays all of his advertising cost for a few months (my seo/ppc/his money into ppc).

I like the sound of this Kaizen *opens Google

I would also add a SMS component to grab leads on the post card "For more information text WORDHERE to SHORTCODE" , when that number is text, he receives an e-mail and text saying it has activity, and can immediately follow up. (my realtor loved me for this one).


Ryan

I am interested in helping you. Get in touch with me at help@manuelwashington.com and I'll get back.

There are leads, and there are leads... meaning there are people closer to buying and those just doing research.

I really like your video idea. Only I would start out with one quick video, made from a powerpoint with some appropriate music and go with something that would scare people into action like:

Do you have mold in your basement???

Make it today and then post in on youtube with a link to a squeeze page.

Then send an email out to all the existing clients (if he doesn't have his clients and leads on an email list, he needs to create one) that includes the youtube video with some big buttons to share it on facebook and twitter.

Also, ask all your staff to share it on facebook and twitter and of course, have all those leads go to a dedicated squeeze page that has nothing on it but some information on how terrible mold can be, how to get rid of it and how great they are at getting rid of it and to sign up for more valuable information and a free consultation or something.

I got one of my clients a paying customer within a week's time using good ol' PPC. I dumped $100 into the campaign and created a website directory for his niche and listed his business as the "pick of the day". What got the customers calling fast was the coupon code I offered for a limited time (coincidentally, one week's time lol).

The key here is to track where the visitor came from. My coupon code was my business name, so the client immediately knew where the customer came from!

This method worked so well that I am actually implementing it for another client (with some new prototype techniques ).

Good luck, it's always the first impression that's the hardest.

If you don't mind doing telemarketing..it works well for this type of business. I have a lead generation business and I do telemarketing for insurance agents and roofing companies and it works well.

I (my telemarketer actually) simply calls residents and ask if they would be willing to have the company come out and give a free estimate. It is then on the company to close the deal, but I still get paid..so it's a win win situation for me lol

You could see if he would want to go with this idea. You don't have to charge up front like I do, but you could. You could only get paid when he does, but why would you want to do that? lol

This is just an idea that has been working for me in this type of industry.

Thanks guys tons of great ideas in here!

His website since people asked is:
New Jersey Home & Commercial Water Proofing, Mold Remediation, Structural Repair

I would love to do PPC but its the one thing I really haven't dove into yet. And seeing as though he is paying a guy in Cali (his company is in NJ) for his PPC I feel like it would be very difficult to do better than the person he's paying now.

Although on another hand the guy doesn't exactly get him a lot of leads as it is.

So I updated his googe places page and found a negative review about his company today and contacted him to let him know. He had no idea who the customer was so I wind up finding the customers info and we sent a letter to service magic to get the review removed. Its showing up right on his google places listing and I think was hurting his rank.

I read to get ranked in google places you need lots of backlinks. So I researched his competitor and noticed his biggest competitor in googe places has 15,000 backlinks, his lowest competitor showing on the first page only has 59 backlinks.

His company only has about 16 backlinks so he has very little to no SEO as it is.
I'm hoping this might be easy due to how some of his competitors are performing.

I have a few questions about this too.

More than half of his competitors listing on google places don't even have customer testimony. NONE of them have a video. So first thing I want to do is upload a video to his google places. Then I'll move over to youtube and do another 3-4.

My question is though how hard would it be to get him on page 1 in google places?
It really looks like it can be done like I said cause some of his competitors aren't in a much better spot than him. But they ARE showing up on page 1.

The main keywords I'm using to find his competitors are "basement waterproofing NJ" or "wet basement NJ". For anyone who might be curious.

I'm still trying to figure out how to get him a lot of backlinks and had no idea you have to actually pay a lot of these directories like yahoo just to get listed. $299 a year just for 1 link! I don't understand. So I did more research than found onlywire. Claims you can get 300 backlinks for free so I'm using that right now.

I absolutely want to do anything I possibly can as some of his weaker competition showing up on the first page with only 59 backlinks and no videos make me think if I just get him a few hundreds links and quality videos that maybe I can rank him on page 1 too.

This could very well become a new living for me since getting in with this company I absolutely love SEO and doing stuff like this and I think thats why he brought me on board. But how some of these companies get 15,000 backlinks is beyond me. I guess I just need to stick to it everyday and do as many as I possibly can. They must be dishing out tons of cash if you have to pay for all the high quality directories too. Is it even worth submitting to free directories? Should I be talking him into paying for things like yahoo directory?

I'm just doing as much random stuff as I can right now. If he gets on page 1 this guy would be SO HAPPY cause he's blowing a lot of money right now on PPC and not getting leads like I feel he should. I really just need to learn this stuff asap because I can see myself doing this type of service for other companies too. It just seems like one of the most valuable skills a person can have generating leads and all. So I really wanna do a great job for this guy as maybe I'll find more clients from him down the road.

He knew I was fairly new to IM but also knew I had lots of experience with the internet in general. Making videos, writing quality blogs, sound editing, html. And my understanding for SEO is basic at best. I will start by implementing as much as I can & am thinking a video on google places would be a great start. Thanks guys!

If he is using ValPak & His own Postcards then implement a Mobile strategy using SMS short Code & Keyword. We have done it with ValPak & MoneyMailer customers and increased response rates by 10X to 20X. It's EXTREMELY Effective...

AWESOME idea will absolutely do it!

I saw other people mentioning that but did not realize what it actually means for conversions. If he got as much as 2-3x response rate he'd be a VERY happy man.

The thing I don't understand about SMS is how the lead is set up. When they text that code does that code convert to an email and get sent to his company? Then we use it to build a list and call the customers back? I'm assuming thats how it works if I got it wrong please let me know.

This will be my #2 priority now learning how to use SMS code.

Now as far as software I'm seeing onlywire, social bookmark, stumble upon, delicious, and then I see scrapebox on BH forums.
Let me ask a simple question (or maybe not so simple) which is most powerful for ranking?
Scrapebox seems very capable from what I'm reading.

edit: Ok nevermind now I've read more and see how newbie that sounds. I need relevant links at high PR pages thats what I need. Seems scrapebox can be a waste of time for a lot of people so I'll do things the old fashioned way.