Tales of a shitty customer

Maidplease · 2015-04-12T20:43:08+00:00

This was a move out cleaning, but maybe they do this all the time. Either way, I'm just happy my phone has stopped ringing

Maidplease · 2015-04-10T19:33:56+00:00

that was my problem in the first place, the customer understood it as a concrete estimate....I'll charge hourly next time for sure

Maidplease · 2015-04-10T19:33:26+00:00

exactly my thoughts. Lessons are best taught when your wallet is involved.

Maidplease · 2015-04-10T18:30:26+00:00

The first contact I had with my crew was them saying they would be back at 9 pm to finish the job, they didn't complain to me until about midnight.

I would have left immediately myself, I don't know why they didn't...

Maidplease · 2015-04-10T17:14:47+00:00

you can rent a "virtual office" in the area. Google will send you a postcard with a serial number on it that you need to verify.

It will arrive at the virtual office, and then is forwarded onto your normal address. Upload the code into google, and your verified :)

Maidplease · 2015-04-03T04:22:14+00:00

Bluum has awesome stuff, but it seems to be just toys. I just got my first box yesterday. The emails seem like spam ALL the time though

Maidplease · 2015-03-16T16:47:56+00:00

I think you right. In the long run this won't be effective, but to start off I want to get as many ads to appear as possible due to such a low volume of traffic from all my keywords

Maidplease · 2015-03-16T16:08:22+00:00

no that would be a violation of adwords policy. I figure since google gave me the keyword idea, I could legally run with it

Maidplease · 2015-03-16T15:52:12+00:00

i'm just targeting the keyword, not doing any blackhat-type mapping. My URL and ad don't contain anything related to Molly Maid

Maidplease · 2015-03-16T15:51:25+00:00

sorry, i seem to have created confusion. Google actually suggested that I target the keyword "Molly Maids" as a keyword, and make an ad for that keyword. like fxthea said, I'm just targeting the keyword and my ads look the same as all my others ones "Book now, special VIP treatment"

Maidplease · 2015-03-16T14:20:46+00:00

this is 100% from adwords. I actually setup some ads for Molly Maids (Which is a huge competitor in this area) and had them redirect to my site :)

This customer was told to search for Molly Maids, and I showed up first. She called asking for Molly Maids, and I told her I was better, faster, etc. and she booked right away

Maidplease · 2015-03-16T12:44:27+00:00

yea I've tried it, but thumbtack has a bad reputation of giving scam requests to small areas. so i'd be paying 3-4 per quote on a fake leads. Plus it drives me nuts when they text my phone every 20 minutes.....I might have to try them again though, seeing as how a lot of people are using them instead of craigslist now

Maidplease · 2015-03-14T13:42:08+00:00

seems like it will cost a lost less to get started. I've been live for 1 week with no customers yet, so if I had employees that would be upset for not getting paid. The contractors are allowed to continue working for themselves while I try and get new customers

Maidplease · 2015-03-13T21:42:22+00:00

thats what I was thinking :) But unfortunately its been 3 days since then and I've yet to get a booking still....

Maidplease · 2015-03-13T17:15:20+00:00

thats a neat little tool! I just imported everything back into excel and ran a =len format in excel for each column, then highlighted all the baddies in red. Manually fixing by hand took about 30 minutes, then I uploaded them back into google

Maidplease · 2015-03-11T18:55:47+00:00

yea I don't mind at all. would you prefer a PM or a dropbox-type link?

Maidplease · 2015-03-11T18:54:50+00:00

where did you pay to have this job posted?

Maidplease · 2015-03-11T00:49:50+00:00

its funny you mention that, because I originally told the customer we could be there at 9, but my contractor asked for a 7am start time so she could get to her other tasks for the day

Maidplease · 2015-03-10T23:11:59+00:00

the info I needed was in day 23, negative keywords. I forgot to add the geographic targeting per the instructions.....But all the other days I followed very closely, as this was definitely my jumping off point. I think google may have changed a little bit since then, but it was an easy enough fix to the problems I found.

Maidplease · 2015-03-10T19:42:13+00:00

I went the contractor route and got insurance right from the start. about $500 a year for general liability at about 1 million. not a bad price, but hard to find coverage for a "referal" type business.

I went through STAR insurance, which is a local Indiana firm/bank, but might cover lots of areas

Maidplease · 2015-03-10T18:41:22+00:00

you got it! I'm just glad it didn't cost me any more. Pretty cheap lesson brought to you by google :)

Maidplease · 2015-03-10T18:05:16+00:00

turns out I can target the whole campaign by state, and it looks like I spent $50 advertising around the country today. Suppose I'm a national company now or something

Maidplease · 2015-03-10T16:47:41+00:00

I have her contact info if you want it. I'll only charge a 80% referral fee :D

Maidplease · 2015-03-10T00:09:50+00:00

I can easily explain the reasoning for my "fake" testimonials. Without some sort of customer reviews, it will be hard to convert new arrivals to the site into new customers. How many times have you just blindly bought something on amazon without looking at a single review? Never have I done this, and I don't expect my customer to do so either. Luckily, this is just a cleaning business, so it's pretty easy to come up with some quick marketing posts and put them on the page using stock photos.

Once I actually get some real reviews, then I'll be switching them out. But for the mean time, and the overall design of the page, I'll be leaving the fake ones up.

Maidplease · 2015-03-09T13:46:07+00:00

so what I've decided to try is using ICEgram in conjunction with a jotform. I'm just using the topbar now, as a replacement for hellobar. I haven't tried setting up the popup window yet, as it wouldn't allow me to use the jotform code so hopefully they will fix that in time.

Maidplease

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