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A Guide To Using Sitemaps

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How Your Driving Habits Affect Your Pet Business Success

traffic jam
All it takes is just one car to hold everyone up!
If you had to rate your own driving ability on a scale of 1 – 10, where would you land?

There are two kinds of drivers in the world: Good drivers and bad drivers.

We all know what the bad drivers are like: they hardly ever signal and change lanes without warning. They speed out in front of you and then go 16 miles per hour. They hold up traffic without a care in the world.

I happen to love driving and consider myself a good driver. I’m aware, I’m defensive, and I’m considerate to those around me.

I do also like driving a bit on the faster side. I’ll always choose the left lane when possible. I do not believe that makes me any less of a good driver. I just like to speed along.

My wife, however, will disagree. She happens to hate my driving! She would prefer I slow it down a bit even though I feel I am safe as can be.

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If You Do Not Find Excitement and Inspiration from this Video, Something Is Wrong

Google Hangout screenshot
Watch us on this Google Hangout chatting about how to grow your pet sitting business.

Every successful business owner understands that they need to learn from others.

Whether it’s in the form of following their journey and reading their work, or having a mentor, success rarely happens without some influence of others.

Marcus Sheridan is someone outside of our industry who I personally follow, learn from and admire.

More importantly, the main reason I’m so excited to bring Marcus into our industry is because the way he succeeded is something that pet sitters can replicate.

Marcus began as a pool guy. He owned a pool company that installed fiberglass pools to his local community. He’s a local small business provider.

And so are pet sitters. While looking bankruptcy in the face, Marcus changed directions and used his website as his biggest form of marketing and now his pool company makes over $4 million a year!

The nuggets he provides in this insightful video can and should be used by pet sitters starting today.

Grab a pen and paper and take notes. He discussed things you can take action on right now to make huge progress. (Some pet sitters already have!)

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What’s Worse Than An Email Submission Landing in Spam and Not Knowing It? This is How to Prevent That.

file folder
Prevent important website contact submissions from landing in Spam.
What’s worse than finally getting a potential new client on the phone and hearing her say, “Did you get my email? I sent it in last week?”

How embarrassing and disappointing is that?

Especially if you never received it…

Knowing how hard you work to keep all your ducks in a row, the last thing you need is technology getting in the way.

At this point, you sheepishly (and frustratingly) check your email spam folder and, wouldn’t you know it, the woman’s email is right there.

Not good.

So outside of driving yourself crazy and remembering to check your spam folder every 2 hours, how can you prevent this from happening in the first place?

This is how!

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How To Create A Visual Service Area Map for Your Pet Website [Video]

service area map
Create a custom service area map for your website
Since you run a pet sitting business, you know that defining your service area is one important element.

While it’s advisable and recommended to have a “Service Area” page that lists the towns, neighborhoods, zip codes and/or areas you serve, it can also be helpful to include a visual reference for your visitors.

Did you know that Google Maps makes it simple enough to create your own custom map that defines your own service area?

Side Note: I made a video like this over a year ago, but since that time, Google has updated the maps method so that video is no longer relevant.

Google is always keeping us on our toes and you can be sure I’m always keeping up.

Create A Defined Service Area To Embed On Your Website

Watch this short video to create a custom map for your pet sitting business.

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Google Maps (Local) Set of Rules for Pet Sitters (and No UPS Stores Allowed!)

set of rules
There’s a set of rules for everything!
We all know that Google has a peculiar set of “rules” that you must follow in order to rank well in their search results.

You may also know that getting your pet sitting website listing to show up in the Maps section is a whole other ball of wax.

First, a quick overview of these Map listings.

Whenever you do a search on Google for any local service (restaurant, electronic store, pet sitter…) Google will present you with a list of results local to you above the regular search results.

In order to have a chance to show up in these local results, you’ll need to submit your business through your Google Places for Business account.

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