The Regina to Las Vegas Direct Flight Blunder

It looks like Westjet is set to announce a direct flight from Saskatoon to Las Vegas. The Regina Airport Authority seems stunned that they weren't allowed to put a bid together to get this flight to originate from Regina.

I don't know who is at fault, but I think we already burned that bridge. Remember last year when Westjet tried to get a direct flight from Regina to Las Vegas? The powers that be said that the times wouldn't work because the customs officers don't work early enough to handle the incoming flight from Sin City.

In business, you take the path of least resistance. If someone shuts a door in your face, you don't stand there waiting for it to open again, you look down the street to see if anyone else has their door open.

Hello there, Saskatoon.

I'm not sure if it's the Federal government, the Regina Airport Authority, or someone else, but somebody definitely dropped the ball here.

Westjet seems committed to Regina after announcing a direct flight to Toronto, but if we aren't interested in helping them out with customs officers, they won't be looking to expand direct flights to the U.S. anytime soon.

An Apology And A Case Study

My apologies for a lack of posts lately. We're busy launching a new service - Sprinkler Daddy - and it's taking most of my time these days.

What the whole process has done is allow us to conduct a little case study on all the internet marketing strategies that we've talked about using with small businesses. What we've found just verifies what we've always thought. This stuff works when you put it to work for you.

Let's backtrack for a moment. Sprinkler Daddy is a service we launched to sell professionally designed do-it-yourself sprinkler systems. Through the Sprinkler Daddy website (http://www.sprinklerdaddy.ca/) you can request a quote from us. Using our CRM software, we've created an auto-responder email that goes out automatically to everyone that requests a quote. That email contains the information people need to measure up their yards and provideus with a plan of their yard. People can then send in their yard designs and we'll rough out a design for a sprinkler system, allowing us to get an estimate for the job.

We have also used our CRM to create a questionnaire for people to fill out, answering most of the questions we need to know. The software is great for helping us automate a good portion of the business.

Online video has also been a very effective tool for Sprinkler Daddy. We've got very positive reactions about all the videos we've created that explain a bit about the process of installing your own sprinkler system. They also help walk people through the process of getting a quote. It keeps us from answering the same questions over and over again, and it makes things easy on our customers. It's a win-win.

Actually, it's a win-win-win because when we upload those videos to a bunch of different video hosting sites, we get a ton of quality backlinks to our website and we have numerous opportunities to turn up in search engine results.

We've also found that search engine optimization is much easier in an industry that isn't full of internet marketing and seo professionals. This is actually the case for numerous industries, especially those dominated by small businesses. Within a matter of days our website was listed on the first page of some key search terms. This led to our first quote coming only 3 days after our domain went live, without doing any sort of marketing. We also managed to close our first sale within a ten day window and receive a few new quote requests everyday.

We're not talking about early retirement here, but it is amazing how an idea can turn into a business in a matter of weeks with the help of the Internet.

P.S. If you are thinking about installing underground sprinklers, just enter your info at http://www.sprinklerdaddy.ca/ to get started.