Creating fresh, interesting content for your website can seem like a never-ending task.

Speak in terms to which your customers can relate.

Follow these rules to make sure you don’t fall into a social media trap.

Stand out from the competition with an effective newsletter.

Are you one of those contractors who believes if you service a customer once and do a great job, he’ll remember you forever? I wish it was true. Instead, studies show 55% of the customers you lose leave you because you paid them no attention.

Publicity is the most powerful form of marketing communication your plumbing company can possibly have. There is a wave of influence in your market, merely waiting to slosh one side or the other. Most watch. Some hope that it visits them.

Direct mail can be the most lucrative marketing tool you’ll ever use — if you use it correctly. Yet most plumbers waste wads of money on ineffective mailings because they don’t know how to do it right. Direct mail offers the advantage of laser-like targeting, where you can pick your list exactly.

Whoa — is the end of this year really around the corner? Maybe, maybe not. As Winston Churchill once said: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” I’m sure that explained everything very well.

It’s no secret I want to kill social media. I consider 72.3% of it a cocktail party with no end and even less point. Yet the remaining percentage has some viability for business. The more we experiment, the more we throw out the useless, the more I see a twinkle of marketing light at the end of the tunnel.

I’d hear, “This is going to hurt you worse than it hurts me,” just before getting my rearward region spanked into next week. Whenever I used to hear this phrase — which was shockingly regular — I used to think, “Then why do it?” I mean, can’t we spare some pain for both of us by overlooking that little melted-crayon-in-the-Easy-Bake Oven-incident?