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Last year I began a new business, Your Fresh Start cleaning Service, here in Tucson. I had used Craigslist exclusively to market an organic plant nursery. So it was natural that I would again use it to market my cleaning business.
However, I quickly, realized these shoppers for cleaning service on Craigslist didn’t seem to much care about quality. No, these people were mostly purchasing the lowest cost vendor. I was not going to be that vendor. So how could I command a higher price in this market? I figured the answer was a website. So good quality site that stood heads and shoulders above the competition.
So I entered a barter agreement with a web designer. I provided house cleaning weekly for a website. I quickly realized that I would never want him to manage my website, if it ever got built, at all! So I took things into my own hands and begin to study SEO. I would work my cleaning jobs during the day. Then I would spend 8-10 hours a day studying website, marketing, SEO, and website management.
I knew nothing when I started the process. This was all new to me and at 50 plus it definitely was a challenge. In the beginning, of this learning curve the designer told me that I could never expect to get onto the first page of Google results, and if so it would take 6 months. Now, mind you, this guy is a self taught designer, and he was telling me I could not do this. That’s all I needed to hear.
Now, the website, yourfreshstart.us, is a static site. Ounce I have told visitors what I do and how it is done, well, that’s that, right? Or so I thought. That was until I discovered that a blog could provide the fresh content that would help keep the site high in the SERP’s.
So I blogged every 2 to 3 day for about 2 months and never gave it much thought because the site was on the first page of Google. The blog was doing what it was supposed to do. Then, one day, I decided to check on the blogs ranking. Wow, I was #5 on Google for “house cleaning tips blog.” So I started blogging everyday and quickly moved up to the #1 position.
I later decided to focus on green, eco, earth, and environmentally friendly house cleaning tips. The blog now holds down anywhere from 6-8 number 1 positions on Google for related searches. The website where the blog is located rules the Tucson market for cleaning service searches on all the major search engines.
This success lead me to create another business, an SEO Consulting Service. The service, Tucson SEO Solutions can be reached at tucsonseosolutions.com. The down side of the site is that I used free template software to build it. That software does not allow me to have a blog. So I have done what other so called blogs do, I have created an industry update page. This serves the same purpose of providing fresh content.
The downside of success is that I often lack the time needed to run two businesses, two websites, and two blogs. However, busy isn’t such a bad thing! Oh, yes, there is that book writing thing. “Going from scrubbing toilets to cleaning websites, all in a year!”
That’s my story and I’m sticking with it!
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