By the time you read this article the season will be winding down for many of you - but your work isn't done. In fact, this can be the best time of year to get some of your most essential work done. Of course you're going to know how your year came out financially, but now is the time to try to examine why, and to watch all of those boring financial shows that predict what the economy is going to be like for 2011.
It's especially a great time to go over your website statistics. All good web hosts have programs that will tell you how many visitors came to your site, how many of those were first time visitors, which pages they visited, how long they stayed on those pages, and even how they found your website. The winter months can be the best time to work on your website for next year.
Let's say that you do paving, sealcoating, and striping and that most of your profit comes from sealcoating (even though you make more gross income from paving). A look at your website statistics shows your paving page has been doing very well (Use the amount of time it would take the average person to read the page. If the page takes 2 minutes to read and they're only staying 30 seconds then that page isn't working). But the sealcoating page isn't doing as well - so that's where you really need to do some work. (After all, gross income is not nearly as important as the bottom line; so if you make more profit sealcoating it would be wise to try to increase that service.) So this is a great time to go over your 2010 marketing efforts to see how well they worked and to come up with a plan for 2011. Study those web statistics carefully. They will give stats by month and even by day on when visitors came and what they did - so you can "tweak" getting visitors to the pages that generate the most profit. As of September, NPCA has had a higher search volume on its "Member Search" page than ever before. We can only attribute this to people wanting to find the best value and the best quality contractor for their money. Our Board of Directors lowered our membership dues for 2010 because the economy was so poor early this year. These rates are still in effect and will be at least through the end of the year. So if you're not an NPCA member you might want to make that a part of your marketing efforts for 2011, while membership dues are still at the lower 2010 rate.
For more about NPCA and its benefits visit www.PavementPro.com.
