Name of your website?Tarrillion's Firewood - Mulch and Driveway Sealing
Your name?
Rick Tarrillion
Your Location (city, etc)
St. Louis
Please give us a short summary of your website?
Our company website offers pictures of our landscaping ideas, firewood, mulch and driveway sealing projects. It also offers useful related tips and information.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
Of course we want native Saint Louis people to learn about our great services and products. We have been running on word of mouth advertising for over 20 years now and thought it was time to let everyone know what we have to offer. And with our website we can show them too.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
We officially launched our landscaping website September 18, 2007 You can view it at http://www.best-firewood-mulch-delivery.com/
How did you decide on a name for your website?
We wanted a name that accurately depicted what we earned our reputation for (best firewood and mulch delivery). It also helps with the SEO optimization. More people will search for "firewood" or "mulch" than they will "Tarrillion", right?
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
Well, for landscaping, there are thousands of websites out there, but not many with unique ideas (like our 'give landscaping the boot idea') See http://www.best-firewood-mulch-delivery.com/landscaping-photos/landscaping-idea-2.jpg
But also it is refreshing for visitors to run into a website that is honest and straight forward. A big plus for our firewood and mulch part of our business, is that not many selling those items even have websites, and if they do, surfers can't find them. so this gives us a great marketing advantage, for the St. Louis area anyway. :>)
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
We will always keep the site because it is for our company. But we do have a goal to make it an article repository for related topics, in the near future.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
Well, it is a new website, but considering it took mostly only time, the 1 sales lead a week we are seeing now, is a great ROI. After all, it has only been up and running a couple weeks.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
I would make the website a one-stop shop for outside home improvement. I would make the useful content far outweigh our sells copy of our products and services. there would be a great blog like this one, articles, calculators, tips, pictures, instructions, and a massive amount of information.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Yes, we would outsource what we needed to to keep the visitors and customers happy.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
Listing locally in St. Louis has been a pain. There are not many sites, and most of them want a arm and a leg just to be berried in their site on a page with no Google PR rank. It seams that most local listing sites have opted for few advertisers paying a large sum, instead of many advertisers paying a reasonable sum. The results, St. Louis has very little presence on the internet and St. Louis and Missouri residents as a whole turn to the internet very little for their needs, in comparison to other states and major cities. They hear the hype "you can find anything on the internet". But when they try to find something on a St. Louis Missouri site, all they find is the big money advertisers, no really good deals from the small business owners. (Other small Missouri companies like us, have very little presence on the internet. Because popular websites like the Saint Louis ones, want to charge $500 and up per year.)
So finding great local sites like classifieds1000.com is, well it's a headache. :>)
What has been your biggest challenge?
Establishing a local internet presence for Saint Louis has been the biggest challenge. Secondly is how to write the copy for our page that sells firewood. You see, the paradox is that the average buyer of firewood is confused by the measurement terminology like "Cords" of wood. It is much simpler to talk in laymen's terms, you will get a 3X8 neatly stacked firewood. They can visualize that. The paradox is that Missouri law requires we use "Cord" measurements when dealing with customers. Probably some lobbyist created that law so big business could confuse their customers and get more money for less product. (I know some wood haulers are using that same strategy.)
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
SEO optimization and main stream search engines like Google.
What is your website address?
Tarrillion's Firewood - Mulch and Driveway Sealing
