Hardwood Flooring February March 2018

Allan Jerman, owner of A-Max Hardwood Floors and BizMilk relies heavily on marketing.

By Katrina Olson

Seizing an opportunity

don’t have the time or resources to create the content they need on their websites to drive traffic,” explains Jerman. According to Jerman, website content drives SEO. “Everything is pointing toward getting content on companies’ websites. And it’s not just about the content itself, but about how it’s organized. You have to put it in an order that makes sense to the user and to Google. We focus our efforts on explaining that to people.” “Right now, our niche is hardwood. We know the market, so there’s little research involved. We can hit the ground running. For example, we work with an Indianapolis company that went from getting no calls with HomeAdvisor, to getting daily calls with us. They were pretty excited. Recently, we set them up with a website and collateral – logo, business cards, handouts – plus a plan of what to do and how to do it. I gave them the spreadsheet we use for A-Max, which tracks marketing cost by job. Now they have the full business marketing package – content, website, collateral, and tracking.” While Jerman and Carden enjoy working with non-competing hardwood flooring companies, they recognize a need for BizMilk’s services in other industries

About two years after buying A-Max, Jerman started thinking about how he could build another business by sharing his plan and process with other wood flooring companies. Thus, BizMilk, a search engine optimization and content marketing company, was born. Jerman handles the back-end including operations, website and content development, and search engine optimization (SEO); his partner, Rich Carden, handles sales. Jerman recalled the start of their business relationship. “Rich used to sell me radio advertising and had asked about internet advertising. I told him I was thinking about starting a business and he said he wanted to be involved. I said, ‘OK, you do sales, and I’ll do the back-end.’ Then one day he called and said, ‘I quit my job. I’m ready to go full time into SEO.’ We only had one client, but Rich got to work, and within six months we had enough clients to pay him and me.” Although much of what they do is about maximizing SEO, BizMilk doesn’t really market it as a service. “People don’t understand SEO, but they get content creation and content marketing. But they

“Everything is pointing toward getting content on companies’ websites. And it’s not just about the content itself, but about how it’s organized.”

and are actively looking to expand their business. “We can create a system for any industry, then scale it in the market so everyone can use it. We already know it’s going to work.” Katrina Olson is a freelance writer and Principal of Katrina Olson Strategic Communications. Reach her at katrina@katrinaolson.com.

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