The start of winter is the perfect time to check in with your past and current home inspection clients to share some useful winterization tips.

We’ve prepared this handy checklist that’s free for you to print, email to clients or share on your blog.

The text is below, or you can download a printable version by right clicking here and choosing ‘Save Link As…’.

We hope you’ll use it!

7 Steps to Get Your Home Winter-Ready

Cold weather is almost here, and along with the holiday cheer comes drafts, leaks and other not-so-fun issues that can wreak havoc for homeowners.

Follow our handy winterization checklist to make sure your home is ready for the cold snap.

1. Insulate windows.

If you don’t have double-paned windows, now is the perfect time to consider them! It’s a home upgrade that will quickly pay for itself.

If you’re not ready for all-new windows, ensure the edges of your existing ones are sealed. If there are gaps between the window and the frame, a new sealant may be in order.

2. Seal doors.

Doors are a common culprit for heat-stealing drafts. A weather strip costs less than $20 at most home improvement stores and will keep your heating bill down, not to mention keeping your doorway free from weather damage.

Most weather strips come with an adhesive backing for easy installation that only takes a few minutes.

3. Inspect your roof and attic.

Winter is one of the most taxing times of year for your roof. Find signs of wear and tear while the damage is still reparable by conducting a roof inspection or hiring one done.

4. Insulate your attic.

It may sound counterintuitive, but you want your attic to remain cold during the winter to prevent ice melt that can lead to damaging ice dams. To keep it chilly, make sure it’s properly insulated and there are no drafts sneaking in from the house.

5. Drain your sprinkler system.

Most of us pay attention to our home’s pipes, but it’s easy to forget the sprinkler system! Make sure it’s drained before the temperatures dip to prevent damage.

6. Change furnace filters.

This oh-so-simple fix can lead to major problems if it’s ignored. What’s more, a clean furnace filter will ensure your unit runs efficiently, saving money on your heating bill.

It’s also a great idea to have an annual furnace tune-up from a qualified professional to prolong the life of your unit and identify any problems before they become emergencies.

7. Adjust your thermostat.

No need to keep the house at a toasty 72 while you’re away. For those in cold-weather climates, the Department of Energy suggests keeping the thermostat set at 68 degrees and turning it down between 5 and 10 degrees when you leave the house.

By taking a few simple steps ahead of the cold, you’ll save money and lower the likelihood of emergencies that could trip up your holiday plans.

When Jonathan Zeissler of Evansdale, Iowa was laid off from his job at John Deere Tractor Cab Assembly, he saw it as a unique business opportunity.

Zeissler has recently had a home inspector come to check out his house, but to his dismay, the inspector did not get up on his roof because it was too tall.

It sparked an idea for Zeissler.

He invested $1,500 in a Phantom 3 drone with a camera on its belly and spent several months learning to use it. Then, he opened Illuminate Inspections LLC, the area’s first drone-assisted roof inspection service.

“The personal experience of having a home inspector inspecting a home I was buying, not being able to get a report on the roof was the number one driver, once I decided to go into business for myself as a home inspector,” Zeissler told the WCF Courier, who reported on the story.

“How can I not do that for my clients? That’s when I investigated the costs and how user-friendly it would be. This would work perfectly and take care of that problem.”

He even offers his clients a complementary aerial shot of their home, which he says most people love.

Zeissler’s certainly not the first to use drones in the home inspection business, but he’s evidence of a growing trend.

Do you or would you use a drone during your home inspections? Let us know on Twitter @Inspector_Pages.

The sky (or at least the tallest billboard) is the limit when it comes to marketing, and we’re always looking for new and creative ways to help you get your home inspection business out there.

If you’re just getting your business off the ground or have yet to devote much time to marketing, our post on 6 Marketing Strategies for Home Inspectors is a great place to start.

Ready for more? Great. Here are three more ideas to market your home inspection business.

1. Print Door Hangers

There’s a reason people still use direct mail advertising; sometimes old fashioned ideas still deliver results.

Door hangers are a minimal-effort way to reach a ton of customers quickly—especially if you target homes that are on the market and neighborhoods with a lot of real estate movement.

via VistaPrint.com

You don’t need to be a designer to create one; an online printing site like VistaPrint offers pre-made templates you can use to create your design.

For a clean look you should keep the text to a minimum, but be sure to include a few key elements:

• Company name
• Services
• Phone number
• Website

Once you’ve got a design, order them through the mail for around 10 cents apiece. Carry a pile with you in your vehicle and make a habit of hitting a few houses in between inspections each day.

2. Host a Workshop

This idea takes a bit more effort to put together, but can pay off big time in the form of realtor relationships.

First, you’ll need to put together a workshop topic.

What questions do people ask you over and over? Is there an issue you continually have to resolve for realtors or clients? These things make great ideas for classes.

Once you have your topic, build an outline of five or six different subtopics you’ll cover within the workshop.

For example, a workshop on historic homes might look like this:

• Introduction to Historic Homes
• Foundations and Roofs
• Inside the Home
• Preservation and Maintenance
• Common Problem Areas
• Audience Questions

A one-hour workshop is ideal for your first time, so shoot for spending about ten minutes on each topic.

We’re willing to bet you could talk at length about most of these subjects, so you should have no problem coming up with talking points. Transpose these talking points into a Power Point presentation, and there you have your first workshop.

The next step—and probably the trickiest—is to find the right platform to hold it. You’ll need to identify the right contact person and may need to be a bit of a squeaky wheel, but remember: this is all about establishing a relationship that will benefit you over time.

Here are a few places to pitch your workshop:

• Realtor’s associations
• Large real estate offices
• Chambers of Commerce
• Neighborhood associations

If you can get ten people to sign up, you’re in great shape. Consider giving your first workshop or two free, then charging if you see people are responding well and they’re paying off.

The day of your workshop, provide light refreshments and leave a few minutes at the beginning and end to meet each attendee.

Be sure to collect business cards for each person attending so you can follow up. You could even raffle off a prize as an incentive for people to leave their cards.

As you can see, if you did one workshop per quarter, your list of contacts (AKA referral sources) would grow quickly.

3. Outdoor Advertising

No, we’re not talking about your face on a billboard (though that can work too). Outdoor advertising includes any form of outdoor signage that publicizes your business.

There are two we think work well for home inspectors: vehicle wraps and yard signs.

Vehicle wraps cover all or a portion of your work vehicle, advertising your business no matter where you go. If you have a dedicated work truck or fleet, it doesn’t make sense not to use vehicle wraps.

We cover more on the vehicle wrapping process and payoffs in this post.

You’ve probably seen plenty of yard signs for landscaping services; home inspectors can use them too, and once they’re printed you can use them again and again at no added cost until they wear out.

Here’s how to use yard signs for your business.

After you complete an inspection, follow up with the new homeowner a few weeks later (you should probably be doing this already to gather positive reviews!).

If they did in fact go through with their purchase, ask if you can place a yard sign at the edge of their property for a month. In exchange, offer them a small compensation like a Starbucks gift card or entry into a raffle drawing.

Many satisfied customers will be happy to oblige your request, and you’ve got yourself one month of free (or nearly free) advertising.

Want more ideas to market your home inspection business? Follow us on Twitter @Inspector_Pages, or sign up for our free weekly newsletter below.

All business websites look a little bit different, and many design elements of your home inspector site will come down to personal preference.

But there are a few design no-no’s you should almost always avoid, no matter your taste or your industry. Check your site today for these 5 critical errors.

1. Too many fonts.

Once you see all the font options available, it can be easy to get carried away.

“I’ll use this font for my headers, and this font for my menu, and this font for my text…”

A good rule of thumb is to stick to just two different fonts per site—one for headers/menu options, the other for body copy.

Not sure which two fonts to pair together? There’s an app for that.

FontPair.co is a free site that suggests great-looking font combinations hand-picked by designers.

While all home inspector websites will be a little bit different, there are some mistakes you should avoid no matter what your site’s layout or content looks like.

A nice font pair from FontPair.co

2. Patterned backgrounds

Patterned backgrounds on a website almost always make us cringe immediately.

In fact, we searched specifically for examples of “good” patterned backgrounds for use in this post, and couldn’t find a single one we felt confident enough to cite.

That right there should tell you—unless you’re working with a highly talented web designer, stay away from patterned backgrounds at all costs.

Instead, stick to a solid background in a subtle color. When in doubt, you can’t go wrong with a solid white background.

3. Broken links

A broken link is exactly what it sounds like: a link that takes the visitor to an error page instead of the page they’re expecting.

Broken links are bad because not only do they inconvenience the reader, they take away from your credibility.

There are many reasons broken links can happen, especially if you’ve had your site for a long time, have changed the titles of pages or have switched hosting providers.

Luckily, there’s an easy way to check your site for broken links that takes just a couple seconds.

Go to BrokenLinkCheck.com and type in your URL. It’ll return a list of all the broken links on your site—hopefully it’s not too long.

Clicking on the little link that says ‘url’ next to each broken link will show you the page of your site that contains it, so you can go in and correct it.

Good thing we checked–we had two broken links of our own!

4. Not optimizing for mobile

In 2014, mobile web traffic surpassed desktop web traffic for the first time.

This tells us something: approximately half (if not more) of your website visitors will be checking out your site from a mobile device. And if your site isn’t optimized, that’s half your traffic that will probably click away as fast as they came in!

The easiest way to optimize your site for mobile is to use a theme—Wordpress or otherwise—that’s mobile responsive. Most modern themes released within the last few years will have this feature.

If your site isn’t mobile responsive and you don’t want to change themes, we strongly recommend you invest in a web developer to produce a mobile-friendly version of your site.

5. Hard to find contact info

If the visitor wants to contact you, don’t make them search for a tiny contact link hidden in your footer!

We recommend having your phone number within your site’s header, so it’s displayed on every page of the site. Another great option is to include a contact form on all or most of your pages, either at the bottom of the content or within the sidebar.

Want more free website tips and tactics delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter below. 

Last week we talked about email marketing (it’s not dead—far from it) and introduced you to some of our favorite email clients for managing your list.

This week we’ll lay out a step-by-step guide to launch your own email newsletter—along with an explanation of how it’ll work to generate more home inspections.

Why does email marketing work?

As we mentioned in our last post, email is the number one marketing tool for lead retention. Why is this? The key here is depth rather than width.

This means that rather than casting a net that’ll catch 20,000 mediocre leads, like with a newspaper ad, email marketing allows you to cast a small but powerful net that’ll catch a couple hundred awesome leads.

Marketing to a small group of highly targeted leads is much more effective than blasting your message out to thousands of people who couldn’t care less about you or your home inspections.

Building your list

Begin by compiling all the emails of friends, family members, neighbors you can think of, along with anyone you work with on a regular basis. You should be able to come up with a few dozen people right off the bat.

This is your list.

Using one of the platforms we outline here, add these folks to a new mailing list. Send out a short and sweet email blast to the entire list letting them know you’re launching a weekly (or bi-weekly, or monthly) newsletter.

MailChimp’s Creat List screen

Let them know you’d love to have them as a subscriber, but if their inbox is already packed to the brim there’ll be no hard feelings if they hit the ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom (depth, not width, remember? Don’t waste time marketing to people who aren’t buying what you’re selling).

Once this blast has gone out and a few people have inevitably unsubscribed, you have a solid list of contacts to start with.

Build on this list little by little by adding an email signup form to your website.

We recommend adding your signup for to your home page and your contact page at a minimum. If possible, it’s a great idea to add it to every page of your site, either in the header or sidebar.

If you use WordPress, you can do this by installing a plugin like JotForm or GravityForms. These plugins allow you to build a contact form, then paste it onto your site’s pages with a little bit of code.

Within the form’s settings, you can opt to have each new subscriber imported directly to your email client (if this sounds too technical, Inspector Pages’ Managed Package might be helpful for you).

Sending your blasts

Contrary to popular belief, the goal of your email list is not to sell, sell, sell!

It’s to build value to subscribers who will one day become your clients. Marketing giants Gary Vaynerchuk and Neil Patel are both big advocates of building value as the number one way to drive conversions over time.

One of Inspector Pages’ weekly newsletters

How can you do this? By providing content that’s highly relevant and useful to your subscribers. If you’re thinking hey, that’s the same thing you told me to do with my blog! You’re exactly right.

In fact, your blog posts make great content to share in your email newsletter. Here are 20 ideas for posts to spark your creativity.

Then, get to sending. Send out one email every week/every other week/every month filled with great information your client base will love.

Stories from your inspections.

Warning signs to watch out for.

Tips and tricks to save money on home maintenance.

The list goes on.

When you provide this much value to someone who’s not even your customer, who do you think they’re going to call the minute they or someone they know is in need of a home inspection?

You guessed it—you.

And when you do have a special offer or discount available? Absolutely use your email list to promote it!

That’s how email marketing can work for your home inspection business.

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What’s the most effective marketing platform to reach your customers? As a home inspector, you probably get a good deal of your new leads from word of mouth.

But what comes next? Social media? Paid search? You might be surprised to hear that the most effective digital marketing channel for customer retention year after year is email marketing, according to marketing research firm eMarketer.

If you want to turn your existing clients into repeat clients—and more importantly, lead generating machines—an email newsletter is an opportunity you shouldn’t pass up.

Below you’ll find three programs that make is easy to send your own subscription newsletter, little-to-no technical skills required.

1. MailChimp

Considered by many to be the gold standard for small business email marketing. MailChimp is easy, user friendly, and inexpensive; at the time of this post, Mailchimp allows you to send up to 12,000 emails per month to up to 2,000 subscribers completely free of charge.

You can import your list of contacts, then create a great-looking email filled with text and images using MailChimp’s darg-and-drop editor.

If you want to get fancy, upgrade to one of the platform’s paid plans to create drip campaigns (an automated chain of emails that go out to your subscribers on a pre-arranged schedule over several days, weeks or even months).

2. Vertical Response

Vertical Response is incredibly similar to MailChimp in terms of ease of use and features, with just a few less bells and whistles.

Vertical Response offers a free plan that’s more limited than MailChimp (up to 4,000 emails per month to 1,000 subscribers), but its monthly plans are slightly cheaper, starting around $17.

Vertical Response will get you a drag-and-drop editor, integration with your social channels, and a feature we especially like—phone support for both free and paid users for those times when you can’t quite figure it out on your own.

3. Sendy

Sendy is what we’d call a stripped-down version of an email platform, though it’s the favorite of some of the most effective marketers. This is likely because of its incredibly low cost—just a fraction of a penny per email sent after a one-time $59 setup fee.

If you prefer a cheap, no-frills but effective platform, Sendy is the way to go. You get all the basics you need, including an email editor that allows for text and images.

Our favorite Sendy feature is the ability to see exactly who has opened your email, so you can re-target them or follow up with those that left your message unopened.

Sendy does require you to have your own domain (www.yourname.com), and it’s not quite as turnkey as the first two; you’ll need to complete few extra steps in the beginning to get fully up and running.

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