Florida Keys Landscapers and Yard Care Professionals
The time is NOW to advertise on the Internet.

Small to Large Landscaping businesses in the Florida Keys can now provide the public with information about their business on the Internet at a reasonable cost and without having to maintain a complete Web Site.

You can see a Sample of what your Web Site will look like by clicking the button below.

Ready to add your Landscape/Yardcare Business?
Contact for more info.

---

Looking for billing & scheduling software for your lawn care or landscape business? Gopher 2003 Billing & Scheduling software was designed just for you.

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

Gopher simplifies the task of scheduling jobs and billing your customers. Simply set up your jobs at the beginning of each season and let Gopher handle the rest. With Gopher, you can print out a list of scheduled jobs for each day and then automatically print invoices after those jobs have been completed.

Exploring The Internet: Is The Web Site Worthwhile?

If you’re not on the web, then your business is in trouble?

At least, that’s what a lot of folks would have business people believe these days. Internet sites have exploded on the scene with hundreds of new ones being developed on a daily basis. In just a short time, it has become commonplace for television commercials and print advertisements to include the advertiser’s website address. Consumers have embraced the value of the Internet as a research tool and some people are willing to purchase products electronically today.

What potential does this Internet boom hold for the lawn care and landscape industry, however? Is there a way for contractors to benefit from having a website, or do you have be selling stock with the phrase “.com” in the name to make money off of the Internet? Many contractors have developed websites and they report real benefits.

TAKING THE PLUNGE. There is no lack of contractors with websites but that doesn’t necessarily mean that any of these sites are actually making money for the companies.

“I see the Internet as the future and I want to invest in it today,” noted Mark Sharkey, president, Sharkey & Sharkey Landscape Contractors, Parsippany, N.J. “I think it’s important to beat everybody to the punch and be a state-of-the-art company, just like by investing in new equipment.”

While Sharkey is optimistic that having a web presence will boost sales, he’s primarily focused on additional benefits of the site for now.

“A benefit to having a website is the impression of your company it gives other people,” he explained, comparing it to a membership in the Better Business Bureau. “This impresses upon potential customers that we’re more than a bunch of people cutting grass, especially commercial customers with websites of their own.”

“I was initially looking at our website as a public relations or educational type of service for our current customers,” recalled Connie Balint, president, Buckingham Greenery, Buckingham, Va. “But we have a retail flower shop as well and we’ve filled orders all over the country for materials that people have seen pictures of on our site.”

Clean Cut Lawn Care, Chapel Hill, N.C., has picked up some contracts that Randy Brown, owner, traced back to the company’s website.

“We got three contracts in one month from the website,” Brown noted. “We’re in an area that is booming with a technologically savvy customer base where everyone has a computer.”

David Morello, president, David Morello Garden Enterprises, Houston, Texas, places pictures of jobs his company has completed on his company’s website to give prospective clients design ideas or thoughts on how to manage their landscape before he even meets with them for the first time.

CREATING TRAFFIC JAMS. The undeniable key to building a successful website is creating a critical mass of user traffic.

“We have had our site up for more than two years, so the address is on our stationery, our trucks, our Yellow Pages advertising, our newsletter and a sticker we put on the back of envelopes we mail out,” Balint related.

“We created a monthly maintenance calendar that people find to be pretty nice and they come back to the site every month for,” Brown noted, adding that his traffic jumped from a couple dozen hits a day to more than 200 per day after registering the site with search engines. “The calendar tells them exactly what needs to be done on their property for every month of the year, and hopefully they’ll hire us to do it for them.”

“The real challenge is keeping the site updated and getting people to come back and visit again once they’ve already seen the site,” Balint added. “We highlight different plants and projects each month and have a Plant of the Month that is always changing.”

Most contractors’s websites also include an area designed to gather information from visitors in order to build up their prospective client database and follow up their website visit by mailing out marketing materials.

Contractors with websites said the cost to initially develop their sites ranged from $500 to a couple thousand dollars, which is followed by a lesser monthly maintenance fee to update the site and keep it operating.

Home