Online training

You can get certificates from CCNA and A+ as well as Cisco that will help with your credentials although its not very important to get them as long as you have lots of experience. I recommend training up from ProfessorMessor.com to get more knowledge surrounding all hardware from their CCNA A+ training.
Learning consists of sitting in watching youtube videos of the professor talk about each section including hardware like motherboards, cpus, ram, graphics cards, ports, bios, and more. I highly recommend taking notes and watching at the same time. Each video is 5 mins to 20 mins in length. You can get a lot done in a short amount of time.
2012
03/16
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Building up your clientelle

You should then start driving out to your clients and repairing their computers, either onsite or offsite, by bringing them back to your home or office. A job could cost anywhere from $60-120 or more. If you go out to a persons site you might want to bring some tools like USB drives loaded with tools for repairing Windows XP and Windows 7. Other than that you might want to bring disks for Windows installations, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 are required. You should be friendly with people at the door. It would help to be wearing khaki or nice clothing, especially nice shoes. Its important to always be assertive with people because you need to know what you are doing and make first moves. I always let people lead me into their house but I like to open the business deals and conversations up first.

 

A good offline marketing tactic is referalls. Referalls are when you get your business clients to bring other prospects in for you. You can pay your affiliates anywhere from 10 to 20 percent (or more, some people might even go as high as 50-90%) per sale. That way you get more clients and it’s a win-win situation for your previous clients.

 

You can also buy good business cards for very cheap from Vistaprint. Its healthy to pass around your business cards to all people when you see them. You can even go to a business meetings like chamber of commerce meetings and pass out your business cards to people while making social contacts. It’s easy to get 1000+ cards so its impossible to run out.

 

I have a sticker from Vistaprint that sits on my car and people can view my phone number as I drive. I have gotten a client or two just from parking lots trying this method out. You might want to use their previously made designs instead of designing your own.. I think they are very professional. You can also buy small magnets to hand on out to your clients so they can put them on their monitors or fridges and they will always have a contact number of yours, just in case they need more computers fixed.

2012
03/16
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Search engine optimization

The next step is performing search engine optimization for your website. I have written a nice guide on search engine optimization at my Squidoo lens Computer tips and tricks.

 

Another strategy for marketing online is local business marketing Local business marketing is submitting your website to various business directories. Listing your businesses in various directories spreads out your listing to the internet. As long as you have the same phone number listed on every directory you will make your online presence more known. The most popular business directories are Google local places and Yahoo local listings. Google places is the most important listing to sign up for because local advertisements are displayed above the search results on Google.

 

Doing onsite search engine optimization is about fixing your main page, setting up meta tags and title tags. Thesis has it’s built in SEO options under every post and page.

 

If you go to Google and type in “local city computer repair” you will most likely get a 10box or a listing of 10 different businesses. These listings are important to rank for.

 

Search engine optimization is a mixture of both link building and and onsite factors. First you build a website with great content and something that is attractive to visitors, then you go out and build links to that website by doing article marketing, building links with other website owners, and getting your website on social bookmarking sites. If you like you can also fully outsource all your SEO services to me.

2012
03/16
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Website setup

A fast way to set up your website is to register a domain name at a domain name registrar like Namecheap or Godaddy. Both of them have cPanel for all their domains which means they allow for fast installation of WordPress. (On hostgator you go to Fantastico –> Install WordPress from cPanel). WordPress is a great platform for creating websites because you can use Thesis to create high quality business pages. Thesis is just a highly customizable theme that allows you to use pages to create full-page designed websites. For an example of this type of website you can visit my company Santa Clarita Computer Repair. To get thesis please purchase it here.
A little more on WordPress –> WordPress allows you to make pages into fully designed HTML and CSS pages. It includes what is known as a WSYIWYG editor which basically means you can have the same skillset from Microsoft Office to create fully functional webpages. (If you can type a document in Microsoft Word you can create a website.). Including, theres many plugins in Thesis that will speed up the productivity of your website. One of them is Google XML sitemap, in which you can allow for Google to crawl your website faster.
Creating an email account. cPanel also allows you to create email accounts. You can create an unlimited amount of email accounts that you can set up a professional email account with. It is better to attract customers with an email that is hosted on your own domain name than using a free email service like Yahoo or Hotmail. A handy tip to use is setting up a forwarder from your new domain name to your private email account. That way you can check your private email for your business emails also.
2012
03/16
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Starting your own computer repair company

To start a computer repair company you are going to need a few things. The first thing you’ll need is a website. A website can be a huge source of incoming clientelle. A website with a phone number is a major business aspect. After you have a website created, you need to get it listed on Google (the most used web search engine) before people start visiting it randomly. If you can get to the top of the search engines you can build a steady stream of incoming clients. The amount is determined by the amount of people in your city. You will want to rank for the keyword phrases “Computer repair your city” and other related phrases.
The next thing you’ll need is some experience. It is best to learn from your own computer and your family so you can develop skills toward becoming strong at your trade. You will want to learn about fixing Windows and also all about Spyware and Viruses. The best tools to get used to are defragmenting tools, cleaning tools, and program removal utilities. Its best to know about Windows: the start menu, the backbones of the operating system, how to get around files and folders… you should be adequate at using regedit (registry editor), you should be good at tweaking Windows for performance.
For either windows XP or windows 7 the best tools to get used to are Defraggler, Ccleaner, and Speccy. They are all from an organization called Piriform. They are small programs designed to speed up computers. Defragging takes anywhere from 45 minutes to 1 hour and CCleaner only takes a minute or two.
2012
03/16
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