Who could give you better advice than a contractor with 30 years of experience in the construction business? I was reading somewhere that it only takes 10 years to become an expert at something. With three decades of construction experience, I should be qualified to give expert advice on hiring contractors.

What Type of Contractor Are You Looking For?
Bathroom remodeling contractors usually remodeled bathrooms. Don't look for a roofing contractor to remodel your bathroom or plan on using a bathroom remodeling contractor to build a large shopping mall.

How Much Experience Does Your Contractor Have?
I already told you that I have 30 years in the business, but that's not going to do you any good, unless you're planning on hiring me. Ask this question, it's very important. Find out how much experience your contractor and their construction workers have working on similar projects.

Is Your Contractor Licensed and Bonded?
You can usually contact your state's Department of consumer affairs to find out if your contractor is licensed and bonded. The state of California has a Contractor State Licensing Board and can be found, by using the California state website. You can check your contractor's license by visiting a contractor's license checking webpage on the Internet.

Do You Get along with Your Contractor?
This is the most important item on the list for me. If I feel comfortable with my contractor, there's a good chance that I'm going to feel comfortable working with them. Now remember, sometimes you hire a contractor and they won't be doing any of the work. You'll be dealing with their construction workers, so try to get a little more information about the construction workers that will be working on your project, if the contractor isn't going to be working on your home.

Finding a good contractor isn't as hard as it seems, ask some good questions about their business, check some of their references and make sure that they're licensed. Good luck in finding a good contractor, because there are plenty of them out there.

If you're really interested in basement remodeling and repairs, you should click on this link Home Damage Repairs. Get some great home repair advice that can make a big difference on any of your home remodeling projects.
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If You You're Looking for a Great Contractor, Click on This Link House Remodeling Contractors


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If there is one big change in business advertising and marketing in recent years, it is social media marketing. The opportunities for utilizing social media to increase business are growing every day. The social media tips contained in this article will help your business thrive. Make it as easy as possible for your users to subscribe to your information. Used in tandem with social media marketing, the relatively age-old method of email marketing can be quite effective. Profiles in social media sites often allow you to add various buttons and an RSS feed.
You want them everywhere you can think of, your blog, email, website and anywhere else you can think of. Try to add your links to other profiles as well to encourage multiple sources of traffic for your site. You want to make it as simple as possible for potential customers to subscribe and sign up for your business's blog. Make sure people can see the button to subscribe to your feed. This will make it easier for followers to leave their information, follow your posts and share your content with friends. Keep it in mind that people still have Internet that is slow, so if the subscribe button can load first it's recommended to do that. When using social media marketing as a tool for your business, it is crucial that you pay attention to the content that is being posted since it represents your business.
Mistakes can go viral as easily as good information and quality content. While this may generate a lot of publicity for your business, oftentimes, it is not the publicity that you are seeking. Add a tag when you post on Twitter. Just add in a "#," followed by a relevant phrase, after you put updates up on your social media accounts. Consider carefully which tags to use and which groups your target audience will most likely subscribe to. When working with social media to promote your business, it's a great idea to offer some purchasing incentives, but you don't want to seem overly pushy. No one wants a forced sale. Let customers know about a weekly bonus or extra discount at an expected preset time. Thus, your customer base can get discounts, but will not feel as though they have been bombarded or tricked into something. Develop an honest online presence. You should present yourself as knowledgeable in your chosen field. Never publish any material of a questionable nature. Only post relevant and appropriate videos that are entertaining. This helps generate a great profile that will create lots of profits. Social media should be used as a way to inform readers of the information and services that your company offers. For example, you can post pictures of fund-raising events and interact with your community. Make sure you record what your workers are doing through pictures and writing.
Make use of all things that convey a positive image of your company. Make certain you update your social profiles often. Social network users have become used to regular updates, and a lack of updates could drive your customers away. Aim for updating your content several times weekly. Social media is all about being social, so be ready to speak with your customers. If they have a complaint or a suggestion, open a dialogue with them. It's common to look over a question or comment, so keep an eye out for them. Include a re-tweet option on every post to your blog. This will make it easy for visitors to share posts with their Twitter followers. This allows your followers to advertise for you without any extra monetary cost to you. Make sure you're mindful of what you say when you're on your social media page. You are responsible for everything you publish on these sites and the things you share could give a bad image of your business if you are not careful. In your website content, mention your social media efforts. This can be done with an article or a simple post on your Twitter account.
Thank your fans for showing an interest in your social media site. A post about the results of your social media marketing will be popular and highly-shared. Don't think results will come right away. It takes time to create a truly winning social media campaign. You have to work on increasing your popularity by having more people follow you on Facebook and Twitter. Once this happens, you will be able to launch some serious marketing campaigns. Talk about your social media marketing campaign via your other marketing tools. When a person or business subscribes to your Twitter feed, return the favor. This helps to maintain a level of credibility with your potential customers. Doing so shows your customers that you respect them and that you don't feel that you are superior to them. You're more likely to keep followers by tweeting them and following them back.
Remember what has happened to you in the past. Take advantage of this guidance in order to develop a strong marketing plan and generate more profits going forward. Learn from your mistakes and keep your marketing plan up-to-date by following the latest innovations. See how your competitors are making use of social media to promote their businesses. Find out what's working for them and what isn't. This will help your business to thrive and can shield you from falling behind your competition. Help people online and on social media websites so you can look like an expert. If you are able to do this, you can attract consistent business. Look around online for locations where people are asking questions regarding your industry, and help them by providing quality answers. If you continue to do this, it will noticeably increase your customer base over time. If you are the owner of an RSS feed, you should always link all of your sites to it. This will allow your readers and bloggers access to the information on your social media accounts. That makes it more simple for people who know you to follow you wherever you are. It's a good idea to include a vibrant headline in your content. Your reader makes a first impression based on your headline.
You have to catch them quickly and grab their attention so they will continue reading the entire post. Put some real effort into good headlines. Frequently, leave friendly posts and helpful comments on the pages of fellow blogger's sites. Remember, the key word in social media marketing is "social." If you're willing to be social, people are more likely to return the favour. A simple way to become more popular is by starting dialogues with others whose blogs are in the same niche as yours. This strategy can also lead to good networking benefits. Practice patience. You have to earn people's trust in your products. This will take time. Before long, you'll have a long list of clients. Get Facebook followers by using your email list to notify them. Perhaps you have already developed your mailing list. You should send them a link to your social media sites. This will enable existing customers easy and complete access to you. One popular social media method is to allow an experienced blogger, who writes about the same product or service you sell, to write guest posts on your blog. Either way, you can generate more traffic. If you are ever invited to guest blog somewhere else, make sure you can get a backlink out of the deal. You should also allow other bloggers to have their own backlinks as well. The followers of that blogger will be more likely to seek info about your site. There are very many ways that you can begin to incorporate social media and Instagram marketing strategy with your business. It is incredible how much social media can help you gain an online presence and find new customers. This article should help you make your business recommended.
Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Sylvester_Adam_Smith/2070440


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The only hope: let's go back to its roots.
The best thing that ever happened to social media marketing was the hacking of the 2016 US election of Donal Trump by the Russians. Why? Because it laid bare what many in social media marketing has known for a long, long time: that social media platforms are a joke, their valuations are based on imaginary users, and their integrity lies somewhere between Lucifer and that guy who eats people's faces in the movies.
For marketing consultants such as myself, recommending existing social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram has been increasingly difficult, because -quite frankly- many of us don't trust the metrics.
And why should we? Facebook doesn't.
This is from Facebook's 2017 SEC filing (emphasis mine):


The numbers for our key metrics, which include our daily active users (DAUs), monthly active users (MAUs), and average revenue per user (ARPU), are calculated using internal company data based on the activity of user accounts. While these numbers are based on what we believe to be reasonable estimates of our user base for the applicable period of measurement, there are inherent challenges in measuring usage of our products across large online and mobile populations around the world.

The largest data management company in the world says it doesn't really know if its numbers are accurate. Estimates? What marketing professional wants estimated results after the fact?
It gets worse. Emphasis mine:


In the fourth quarter of 2017, we estimate that duplicate accounts may have represented approximately 10% of our worldwide MAUs. We believe the percentage of duplicate accounts is meaningfully higher in developing markets such as India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, as compared to more developed markets. In the fourth quarter of 2017, we estimate that false accounts may have represented approximately 3-4% of our worldwide MAUs.

Let that sink in. Facebook is admitting that "approximately" 10% of its monthly active users are fake. Interestingly, they don't mention what percentage of their daily active users are fake.
And that's the problem with social media. You don't know what's real and what's fake anymore.
Social media hasn't been real for a while.
As marketers and advertisers, we pride ourselves on accuracy. In the olden times of marketing and advertising, we obsessed over rating numbers of tv shows, readership for print promotions, and delivery success rates for direct mail.
In all cases, the platforms of the day were heavily audited. You knew, with fair certainty, was the audiences were for any particular medium or channel because there was usually a point of review somewhere for the numbers.
Traditional media such as radio, TV, and print had been around long enough that there were thousands of case studies one could study the success or failures of individual campaigns. Because these mediums were part of the public record, it was easy to work backward to see what mix of media and budget worked and what didn't.
As an industry, we could quickly establish benchmarks for success - not just based on our personal experiences- but in the collective experiences of very clear strategies laid bare for everyone to dissect.
Well, that all went out the window with social media.
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram's numbers were always a joke.
In days of yore, company valuation was based on revenues, assets, and human capital, and performance.
That all changed when someone came up with the concept of "daily active users."
The race to gain users became the driving force for social media platforms in a way that we've never seen before. Now, the obsession with user growth opened the door to advertising and marketing fraud on a scale that just wasn't possible previously.
Let's get something clear: any platform that allows for people to create thousands of fake profiles so others can buy likes, followers, retweets, or shares is toxic to advertisers and brands alike.
Now, I understand that the word "allows" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, so let me expand a bit what I mean.
I don't think I'll get many arguments when I say that -regardless of what I think of them- the most successful social media platforms on the planet are also some of the most sophisticated technological enterprises on the planet. They have -arguably- some of the best AI around, as their entire business models revolve around being able to crunch numbers, facts, and obscure pieces of data millions of times a second.
They are also massive corporations, with an army of lawyers and IP bulldogs waiting to protect their brand against any hostile outside forces.
So explain to me, how is it, that even after all we have seen in the news people can still buy Facebook likes, or Twitter followers, or Instagram fans?
The reason: it was always a scam. And we got conned along with everyone else.
If your company is valued on your number of users and the activity of those users on your platform, what do you care if they are fake or not? If you did, you'd hire an armada of auditors to ensure the integrity of your userbase. I don't believe they ever did and will never do this.
Social platforms deploy their honey trap.
Initially, social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter lured brands and companies onto their platforms with promises of free marketing and advertising. The ability to quickly grow a fanbase and follower base, without the need of hiring marketing shmucks like me. Why waste time on hiring a professional when you can do it all yourself for nothing?
At first, I was a supporter of this. I believed that marketing and advertising was often something that only larger companies could afford, and that small business marketing was being left behind. Social media marketing allowed for even a mom and pop shop to compete online.
So many businesses spent countless hours and thousands of dollars in human resources to grow their followers online.
Having lured them into their honey trap, social media companies then held followers and fans hostages. You had to pay to have access to the userbase that you built up and cultivated.
Suddenly the numbers didn't make any sense. You had to pay to promote or boost posts when previously it was free. The result was disastrous for many businesses. The ROI's didn't add up, but with so many of their customers on these platforms, they had little choice but to continue to try and get whatever value they could for them.
Moreover, the move to such promotions opened up the Pandora's box to further abuses. The drive for revenue seemingly caused social platforms to continue to look the other way on fake profiles and social media bots because they drove ad sales. Personal data was harvested and manipulated in ways that users could not fathom and did not agree to.
Mostly, it did something to marketing that I'm not sure we can recover. For many digital marketing firms and marketing agencies, it forced us to down the Kool-aid with everyone else. People that should have known better doubled down on social media marketing for our clients when we knew -for most of them- it was unnecessary.
Marketing and advertising agencies became accomplices after the fact.
Like I said earlier, marketing and advertising agencies and consultants are supposed to obsess with accuracy. We want our clients to have the very best ROI available.
However, like professionals in any business vertical, we're self-serving.
One of my favourite examples of how people who would know better will say anything for a buck is real estate agents.
Have you EVER heard a real estate agent tell you it's a wrong time to buy a house? In all of my days, I have never read an article by a real estate agent saying that people should hold off on a purchase. House prices going up? A great time to buy; you'll make your money back immediately! House prices going down? It's a buyers market! Lock in your savings now!
Marketing and advertising professionals did something similar with social media marketing.
We saw the platforms' rise in popularity and didn't want to get caught in a lurch. The buzz was building behind them, and clients were often demanding us to help them. So -even though Facebook and Twitter were mostly unproven with little to no actual case studies to speak of- many firms told their clients to throw money into the black hole of social.
What was the result? The majority of social media campaigns are disasters. I only know of a fraction of companies that continue with any seriousness on social media compared to the rates companies did with traditional advertising or even SEO and non-social digital ads.
You see it in the positioning. When digital marketers talk about social media, they discuss it regarding "reach," "exposure," "presence," "awareness." That's code word for "throw your money away." Do an online search of the effectiveness of social media, and you will find the results filled with SEO and social media marketers praising the platforms and the strategies.
Real marketers talk about ROI. Impact on sales, and impact on lead generation. You can't pay the rent on brand awareness. I'm saying this as someone who builds brands for a living.
And it's not just me saying this. One of the largest brands in the world, Proctor & Gamble, gutted their ad budget and walked away from a host of agencies because of digital advertising and marketing fraud.
Social sharing has been automated to death:
According to Buzzsumo, average social shares per article had declined by 50 percent in 2017 in comparison to 2015. Their data also shows how fast most hot topics become saturated with articles, leading to only a relatively few winners getting the majority of the societal shares and hyperlinks.
Another found that, that bots automate nearly two-thirds -66%- of all HTML links posted on Twitter.
Again, if social media platforms truly valued their user-experience and cared about social being social, they would have banned such practices years ago. No more social automation. If you want to engage with your fans and followers, you have to be there for them. You have to be live, online, ready to connect.
However, bots are good for business. They boost their daily active user accounts; they make their platforms look more popular than they are. Bots post content, bots like content, bots share content, bots follow people, bots message people -it's endless.
Bots account for an ungodly 52% of internet traffic in 2017. That number is only set to rise further as social media continues to be an arms race. Caught in the middle of all of this are businesses who think their digital marketing metrics have any meaning.
Your Influencer isn't that influential.
I'm a firm believer in influencer marketing because I believe it is a natural extension of relationship marketing. People will buy from people they trust and will accept the suggestions of people they like.
However, with the growth of online influencers, things have taken a turn for the surreal.
First off, many fans and followers of social media influencers are as fake as anything. Social media bots follow celebrities as a means to spam their pages and/or a means to scrape a list of people to spam later with content.
Secondly, as marketers and advertisers, we are supposed to care about accuracy. But the ability to verify the fan base of an influencer is almost impossible within the platforms. You have to go to third-party apps to try and get any real understanding of the legitimacy. Moreover, even then, you are at the mercy of the third-party to provide you with accurate data. Should Instagram decide to shut down the API to these applications, you will have no idea how popular your influencer is.
The future of social media: live, direct, and transparent.
The way to solve the social media problem we're facing today is simple: social media was great when it was social and personal. A return to the basics is needed.
No more automation
If you don't have the time or the energy or the interest actually to ENGAGE with human beings, then social media is not for you. What's more, you're not for social media.
Automation should stop. Period. Let's return to a more natural engagement between brands, companies, customers and leads. Human interaction is the most powerful driver of revenue and sales, as is the best metric for the real value of a platform.
See and be seen
The use of live video to establish authenticity in an age where everything is anonymous will be a dominant driver of change in the next five years. Instead of hiding behind memes, and curated content, companies should leverage influencers and their employees to champion their brands. Reconnect with the basics: one-to-one or one-to-many communications.
The revolt of investors
I genuinely believe that the majority of social media firms have fudged the books when it comes to their userbase, activity, and popularity. It's time for investors to demand third-party audits of the data before the entire house of card falls on people's heads.
Look, I'm a marketing consultant. I enjoy using social media. It allows me to stay in touch with the people and the brands I care about most in the world. But at the heart of it is a flaw -a glitch in the Matrix- that needs to be sorted out.
There's a bubble out there, and social media firms that allow for fake profiles and anonymous users are at the heart of it.
Yusuf Gad is a marketing and branding strategist and executive with over 15-years' experience. He is the Chief Marketing Officer for TRYBL and President of Ronin Multimedia Inc -a consulting firm that provides strategic advice for brands and corporations as well as content development for film, TV and digital media. You can find him as a marketing consultant hired-gun at Toronto Marketing Consultant.
Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Yusuf_Gad/2555371