I could not let the grass go without being mowed another day.  I had been waiting for a cooler day to mow the lawn, but that day has not come.

So today, I got out early and fired up the lawnmower and took care of business.  I have always enjoyed mowing the lawn, not so much the work, but making it look good. Nobody can seem to do it the way I like to have it look.

I have even been able to keep it green, despite the drought and watering restrictions now down to 2 days per week.

Want to know the secret?

2 things that have helped.

First, I read that if you mow without the bag and allow the trimmings to remain on the lawn that it will act as mulch and help to keep the water from evaporating.

Second, I raised the height on my mower at least a full inch, if not more, to allow the grass to grow much taller.  Again, to help keep the water from evaporating.

While most of my neighbors keep their lawns very short, they are mostly yellowing. They ask me and I tell them the 2 things I have done, but most of them have a lawn company so they don’t have any control over this.

Now aside from having to do a little grocery shopping, I have the day to myself….. Which I will probably spend, as I am now, in my home office getting my marketing done for the week so when I am at work Monday thru Friday I can focus on my clients.

A Great Window Cleaning Company

I should mention that yesterday, Saturday, I had a window cleaning company come out to clean our windows.  They did a great job and wanted to give them a mention here. The company I used is See Spot Go Window Cleaning.  They have a great Facebook presence and while I did not need them for the last few months, they were top of mind when I needed my windows cleaned.  Here is their number. (661) 295-3967. I also wrote a quick review on Facebook.

 

And I am flying solo again this week.  My wife is traveling out of town again for work. Our kids mostly take care of themselves, but I do have to take my son to school and to tutoring every day which really cuts into my work schedule.  Knowing this in advance, I did go in and work for a few hours on SaturdayBut nothing really changes other than that.  I do most of the cooking around here, breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Have a good Sunday.

Tim

I had to laugh. I met with a client the other day in my office and as I always ask, “how did you hear about us?”

He says, ” I saw you everywhere!”

So here is how he explained it.

He said he was first referred to us by a friend who had used our service.  Then he looked us up online and said he found us everywhere.  He found our blog, videos, podcast, awesome reviews and even read several of my articles.

I have to admit that it is pretty cool to do this whole online marketing thing.  Online marketing really provided freedom in advertising.

What I tell my wife is that writing all the articles and recording all the videos and podcasts does two things.

It either makes you like me or hate me.

Why would I say that?

Well, you know that we all make assumptions about people before we ever meet them. And we can’t help it.

For instance, I can look at someone and know everything about them and whether I will like them or hate them.

Of course, I am wrong every time.  But you get what I am talking about here.

When people read my articles, watch my videos or listen to my podcast, they make a decision.

The decide if they like me or hate me.

The people who, in that split second, decide they don’t like me, will never call me.

And I am okay with that!

Why? Because they won’t waste my time by calling me.

Now, on the other hand. The people who do like me, call me, and we have instant rapport.

See where I am going with this.

Try to get that from some written magazine article.

Tim

 

 

The last 2 weeks have been super crazy busy for new business.  It happens every year after the kids have gone back to school.  I wrote an article about this in the past.

This is why you are seeing about 2 weeks since I have last wrote.

I have been so busy, I have been working morning to night and even on the weekends. Holidays mean nothing anymore.  In fact, I was working just this past labor day.  Clients even commented on email saying they received an email from my on Monday.

In fact, I am writing this very post on a Saturday afternoon.

What I wanted to write about here is about how great it is to know how to advertise on the internet. I am not talking about paid advertising, but just the fact of having the ability to write a blog post, record my voice on a podcast or record a video.

This last 2 weeks, while meeting clients, my blog, videos and podcast came up.  People kept commenting that they had read an article, watched a video or listened to my podcast.

While I know that I gain clients by the information I post, I sometimes cringe when people say they read, watched or listened to a particular piece of information I posted.

I mean I know people consume the information I create, it is just interesting to hear when people comment on it in the flesh.

When I write or record my videos or audio, I do so with the mentality that nobody is going to read or watch them.  I guess this is my way of being able to just turn on the camera, hit record and say what comes out of my mouth.

I mean I do have a plan of what I want to say, I just don’t write a script or practice.  Everything is just one take. And if I make a mistake, I will actually correct myself on the video and just keep going.

I think people like the rawness of what I do.

Anyways, the other point I wanted to make is that by having learned how to market my business online through a variety of different ways, It also gives me the freedom to get rid of unnecessary offline marketing methods.

When I first started this business 5 years ago, it was purely via blog posts and video that I marketed myself.  And I did well.

Then, after about a year, I started doing more traditional marketing by adverting in magazines and mailers.

But what I found is that the return on investment was just not the same with offline marketing.

When i first started, I would literally write 10 articles a day on my blog and record as many videos as I could and upload them to my blog and Youtube.

This cost me nothing but my time. (which of course is valuable) but not when you don’t have clients.

But over the years, I realized I was spending about $5,000 per month on offline advertising.  It started with just one magazine and then another, but somehow that became $5,000 per month in advertising costs.

The problem with this is that I was not getting at least $5,000 in return for the marketing dollars I was spending.

So this month, I cancelled all my offline advertising.

And I went back to the grass roots marketing that worked early on.  Online marketing.

Guess how much I spend on online advertising? (aside from google adwords)

ZERO.  Yep, zero, all it costs is my time, because I am the one that creates, uploads, records and does all the work. Yes, it took reading and learning how to do this over a period of several years, but it is now the most cost effective marketing strategy.

Besides the money issue, I also wanted to talk about the freedom online advertising gives you.

But instead of making this a super long post, I am going to write a separate article all together about this issue.

Talk to you tomorrow. (or in about 15 minutes)

Tim

Yes, my wife was right, again.  As usual.

She had been on me for the last few months, telling me that I have great information about divorce on my blog, but that I need to come across as a person and not just a website that has information on it.

So a few weeks ago I started a new category on my blog which is called, “Tim’s Personal Blog” which is just a tab on my blog that takes you to the posts where I just write about myself and family.

The point of this is that the other day I received a call from a potential client who lived in Los Angeles.  He was a super nice guy, but they had some concerns about doing business “online”.

But what was it that put him at ease?  Not my kind, helpful voice.  Not the fact that we have great reviews.  Not the fact that the phones were answered every time by our receptionist.  The list goes on.

What put him at ease?  The fact that I had some articles and posts about my family and the last camping trip.  The fact that I wrote an article about a divorce attorney in Santa Clarita named Steven Chroman that didn’t treat us all that nice.  That is what put him at ease.

Yes, again, my wife was right.

But don’t get me wrong. I love the idea of just writing about personal things.  I love to write and sometimes I get tired about writing about divorce. But it pays the bills.

It just reminds me that this business of divorce is a personal one.  People want to deal with people.  And they want to deal with good people.

That said, I was glad that this (now a client) did his due diligence and homework to make sure we were legitimate.  People don’t do this regularly and there are people out there that will take advantage of you.

In fact, I really hate getting the calls from people who were taken advantage of, maybe they took their money and didn’t do the work, and now they have a bad idea of what our industry stands for.

And for those of you who read my personal blog, I apologize for the last couple of weeks.  I have not posted very often.

We have gotten very busy and that whole camping trip really put me behind being out of the office for a few days.

I do have another article i have to write this week.  This is one is about how the Santa Clarita Magazine allowed a divorce attorney to write a negative article about me.  And when I wrote a response for the Santa Clarita Magazine,they refused to allow in the magazine.

The publisher of the magazine said they made a mistake allowing that article to be published, but they came far short of apologizing.  Look for the article soon.

 

I swear, when you have a business and try to take a few days off, it is like when you were a kid going to school and you miss a few days of school.

What they say is that you have to double the amount of time you miss because not only do you miss those days, but you fall behind on top of having to do the new work.

That sure has happened to me.

And I only took 2 days off. I suppose this is a good problem to have, having a lot of work to do seeing as that is what i do for income.

I returned lest Wednesday and am still playing catch up. Between the current case load and the new cases we take on, it is keeping me very busy.

This week we started 5 new divorce cases and it is only Tuesday.

I talked about the “divorce season” starting when the kids go back to school. and I sure was correct as this week has been very busy.

Okay, I have to talk a little bit about the camping trip I went on.  I talked a lot about going camping at 9,500 feet and how I was concerned about getting altitude sickness.  Well, after all that talk and worry, our campsite was at only 6,000 feet.  So we were fine.

The site we had was nice, had a stream right behind the motorhome and we fished, hiked and had a great time.  I will see if I can slip some pictures in here.

Just a short post today.  Kids are back in school, work is humming and Thanksgiving is right around the corner.

Oh, speaking of which, has anyone ever deep fried a turkey?  I really want to try it this year. I just need to order the deep fryer early because home depot, Lowe’s and Wal-Mart sell out every year very fast.

Until next time.