What is Contractor’s General Liability Insurance?

Contractor’s general liability insurance helps protect businesses from claims that arise due to the normal operations of a business. Here’s a detailed description of what all does the insurance cover and how to do file a claim. 

What does contractor’s general liability insurance cover?

General Liability Insurance provides coverage to businesses for various things, including third-party medical payments, bodily injuries, property dame, advertising injuries, and more. However, it doesn’t cover faulty workmanship or any damages to the insured’s work. The idea of the coverage it to help protect small businesses from claims that arise from the regular business operations. The coverage includes :

Bodily Injury

The insurance covers all kinds of sickness, diseases or injuries sustained by an individual, including death.

Property Damage

Physical damage to any tangible property is covered by general liability insurance. It also includes all the resulting loss of use of the concerned property and can also include claim costs if your business leads to damaging someone’s else’s property.

Medical Payments

The insurance covers expenditure incurred from accidents that happen on your premises or are caused by your operations, totally regardless of fault. For instance, if a customer slips on wet floor, the insurance will cover all the medical expenses incurred for bodily injury caused during the policy period. Typically, such coverage is limited to 5,000 dollars.

Personal and Advertising Injury

It includes injury or losses arising out of false arrest, wrongful eviction, malicious prosecution, copyright infringement, copying someone else’s idea in an advertisement, or publication of material that libels, slanders or violates an individuals’s right to privacy. Although, this one is not that common with contractor’s general liability insurance claims, the insurance would cover the claims if you are sued for slander and libel.

Why does an independent contractor need general liability insurance?

Just like any small business owner, independent contractors are also at a risk of getting held liable for damages or even sued. Here’s why general liability insurance is crucial to contractors :

It Protects Your Business and You

The liability exposures and legal obligations for an independent contractor are the same as larger companies. They can be held accountable by for causing someone bodily harm, damaging client property, or advertising injury. General liability insurance helps you business by covering all the legal fees and losses caused by a lawsuit.

It Makes You More Credible to Your Clients

Many clients find it crucial for contractors to have general liability insurance before signing a contract with them. Without insurance, the clients could be held liable for any wrongdoing or accidents that may be caused by your business operations.

Specific Industries Require it By Law

Some fields of work, such as construction, have it mandatory for independent contractors to get a general liability contractor insurance. The best for you and your clients is to get separate general liability insurance policies.

How do claims work for General Liability Contractor Insurance?

There are two types of general liability contractor’s insurance determined by the claims that cover: occurrence and claims-made.

Occurrence policies work for claims that arise during the policy period and are independent of the time of claim filing. On the other hand, claims-made policies provide coverage for claims only when the resulting claim and the occurrence happen during the policy period. Claims-made policies are usually not accepted by third parties as a form of General Liability insurance coverage. Thus, contractors are recommended to carry occurrence coverage.

The claims process starts with an accident that must happen only during the policy period. The occurrence or accident also includes repeated or continuous exposure to the same general harmful or even hazardous conditions. The incident may come when the work is getting done or long after work has been finished. The occurrence can trigger a claim against the contractor – the aggrieved party or the insured contractor can report the claim to the insurance carrier.

Typically, a claim may be reported up to 10 years after an occurrence policy period. A sunset clause limits the period of reporting, thus decreasing the time frame in which one can report a claim. It is advised to have an occurrence insurance policy with the ten year tail for claim reporting.

It’s the duty of the insurance provider to defend the insured contractor but with discretion to settle any lawsuit. In case a claim is made, it’s the responsibility of the contractor to pay the deductible. At the same time, the insurance company will provide coverage for the medical payments and balance of damages up to the policy coverage limits.

How To Optimize your Contractor Company Website for Google

Ready to Optimize Your Bond Website for Google?

If you want the internet site for your  company to rank top in search engines and you’re in a large metropolitan area, you may face stiff competition, but there are many ways to succeed despite. You may find that it’s easier to rank high for search terms such as “kitchen update” and “room addition” than it is for “general contractor.”  Or for an electrician, the focus may be on “house rewire” rather than “electrician.” The electrician mighty has the longer term goal of ranking high on “electrician,” however in the meantime, he can gain perceptibility for his website with less strain-over keywords. The strategy he needs is just creating “landing pages.”

A California Contractor Bond company based out of San Diego has done a fantastic job of increasing their online exposure to you contracting company using the methods below…

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How to Create More Leads

1. Put your goals down on paper. You did this for your marketing plan, right? You need to take the same approach to your marketing efforts. If you don’t know where you are going, how do you know when you get there?

2. Can you be found easily? Sure, you have a contact us page, but be sure and include your company name and address information on each page.

3. Enlist the service of the local search engine listings like Yahoo Local, Google Local, Bing Local, Ask City, Yelp, and City search to name a few.

4. Research your keywords. Think like a consumer, better yet, get consumer input. Too often we as business owners get tunnel vision and think we know what our customers are searching for. More often than not, they search in a manner that is contrary to what we would have expected.

5. From the research above, pick about five of your most valued keywords for which you want to optimize your website.

6. Analyze the completion for your selected keywords. Find out who holds the rankings of the first page of Google, and see what they are doing effectively to gain the search engine trust and occupy the coveted first ten slots.

7. Create a list of the competition so you can track your progress against them. Then use Yahoo’s site explore to discover and analyze their backlink strategy.

8. Make sure your site is indexed. Using the site command in Google, enter for search site:yourdomain.com to see what pages are indexed. If no pages are found you need to research why Google has not indexed your website.

9. Engage the use of the search engine online webmaster tools. Google has Analytics and Webmaster Tools, and Bing has Webmaster Central.

10. Set up Analytics and let it run for a couple of weeks to gather statistics about your website traffic.

11. Evaluate your site design. Have you checked it for compatibility with all the major browsers like IE, Firefox, and Safari? Double check your HTML for onsite factors relating to SEO.

12. Write a guest post on a construction related website about the contractor bond industry.

This list should be enough to keep you busy for a while, but unfortunately, it only scratches the surface. There is more information than you can possible imagine about how to accomplish all these tasks, and the opinions of the best ways are endless. With contractor business SEO expert things can be much easier.

Best Practices For Marketing Your Contractor Bond Business Online

Many agencies practice online marketing. There are some tips that you can get from these professionals, which you can apply to your business. Especially when a business is new and funds are not enough to hire a professional, it’s beneficial to know how marketing experts think and work to achieve their goals.

Master Your Bond Products

This may make you go, “Of course!” But very few business owners take this to heart, at least those who are struggling with their sales. Being an expert contractor bond California provider consists of mastering your product not only means knowing its parts and functions. You also have to know how in-demand your product is or how it can potentially become in-demand in the market.

Writing articles about your product compels you to research more, and in effect, you learn even more about it. Plus, your articles become an additional source of information for your customers. When written well, your market views you as very credible and highly knowledgeable in what you do. Check out this great resource or here for more info on contractor bonds.

Know your customers

Once you know your product like the back of your hand, it’s time to know your customers. It’s not as simple as knowing their names and birthdays. Knowing your customer is about finding out things like their lifestyle, their spending habits, and purchasing power. This will ensure your bond resources are able to connect on a personal level with your clientele.

When you get into online marketing, reaching the right customers is easy if you know them well. For instance, you know your market is gadget people, so they check e-mails and everything else online through their phones or tablets like their iPad.

Having this information, you will then format your email or ads in such a way that it will load right on mobile devices so your customers can read it the way you intended them to.

Keep customers engaged

Keeping a customer interested in your business is much trickier than persuading one to try you out. Through online marketing, you can maintain a relationship with your clients and keep them engaged to your business.

Social networking sites are just one of the many tools online that can help your customers stay engaged. Other marketing methods like online videos, e-mail marketing, and article writing keep your customers interested, too.

Specialize on technique – It’s good for business owners to concentrate and specialize on one online marketing technique first. When you have too many methods at once, you just have way too many results to track, and all other things you have to think about. Focusing on just one helps you become more equipped in that area. Once you’ve got that all set-up, working, and generating results, you can move on to another online marketing tool.

Internet Marketing Specialists for Family Lawyers

It’s no secret that technology is becoming more and more advanced every day. The internet is becoming more user focused, and the competition across technology is increasing. Everyone wants their site to pop up first for family lawyer San Diego and beat out their competitors. In 2017, the internet will have more users and will see the most growth in content. Right now 90% of the world’s population is using the internet. People aren’t going out and searching anymore; it is now done all online. Your company needs to be caught up with the times to keep succeeding in the world.

Every year, competition in the lawyer world is becoming more and more aggressive. There are about 1.3 million lawyers in just America alone. Think of all the different lawyers fighting to get clients and cases. Family Lawyer Internet Marketing Specialists are up and coming believe it or not. Yes, you can now find tons of family lawyers online thanks to specialists. Lots of firms are now doing this meaning their forcing each other to build their marketing strategies even stronger to get solid results. It is often hard to find family lawyers; they aren’t ones that are often sought out and have trouble getting traffic to their websites because of the weak SEO content out there about them.

Our marketing specialists can do wonders for your family law firm. They will understand your needs and customize a strategic plan specifically for you. They will implement all of the essentials and necessities of your company into the marketing plans. Everything from social media, email, newsletters and much more. Law firm marketing can be hard, especially dealing with social media, since there are multiple applications out there now to use. You don’t have extra time on your plate to worry about the marketing of your firm, or you just don’t know where to begin with, it all.

They take their time out to get to know your company and represent you well. You want to have authority when it comes to your family law firm. You want to beat out your competitors with grace and we will do that all of that for you.

Hiring us is something that you won’t regret. They ultimately make you more money, and you will have more satisfaction in your work. You aren’t taking out time in your day to make sure your companies marketing is doing alright; you’re focusing on your work and clients. You will be surprised about how many more clients and cases you get coming from online. The internet marketing specialists will bring you more audience and more exposure. Technology can do wonders for your law firm.

We will improve your law firm no matter what. There is always room for growth no matter how well you are/think you are doing. Everyone needs help now and again, and you need a smart way to generate more leads and in a unique way that your competitors aren’t doing.

Our services are ultimately the best thing for you, your employees, your reputation and your company.

Picking the Right Social Media Platform to Promote Your Business

Social media is now a fact of life and it is here to stay.  There are multiple platforms you can use to promote brand awareness and you can’t afford to let this opportunity pass you by.  However with so many different social networks to work with, do you set up a profile on all of them?  No, you pick and choose the ones that will work for you.  Social media is an investment in your time if you want it to work for you, too many profiles will take too much time for too little reward.

You need to find the social networks that work for you.  Where are your ideal customers hanging out.  Professionals will be found on LinkedIn while millennials are more likely to be found on Snapchat or Instagram.  If you’re still not sure which platforms you should be on, here is a little help.

Where is Your Competition?

You look at the websites of your competition and find out where they are sharing content.  What platforms is there content being shared on, how many followers do they have.  If they are getting a ton of shares on Facebook then your business needs to be there too.

Do You Know Your Market?

You need to have a firm definition of what your ideal client is.  How old are they?  Where are they located?  What do they do for a living?  Once you have the demographics down you have a head start on where to look.  Facebook and Twitter tend to be common to all, while professionals will be found on LinkedIn, and younger audiences will trend more towards Snapchat or Instagram.  If your business is depended on visuals, such as interior design, fashion or the food industry then Instagram and Pinterest are better choices.

Here is a video showing you how to figure out who your ideal customer is.

What Does Your Audience Want?

Do they want information, trivia or games?  You may have to do some testing to find out what your audience wants to see online.  Determine what will give you the best response and engagement and give it to them.

Manage Your Time

Social media can be a huge time suck if you let it, so don’t.  There are tools you can use like Hootsuite to help automate posting, and take advantage of them.  You can make posts for days or even weeks in advance depending on how keen you are.  Make the most of the channels you choose and post content regularly.  Be prepared to adapt your strategy and remember all of these social media channels all have advertising platforms that can help boost your brand.

Your Business Can’t Grow Without Online Marketing

If you run a business then you may be aware of online marketing but you may not understand the value of it or what it can do for your business.  If you marketing efforts have always been in the “offline” world then you’re being left behind.  The truth is your business can’t grow without online marketing.  Here are some of the differences and advantages of developing an online marketing plan.

Wider coverage

Traditional marketing, for example the 30-second commercial, only reaches a certain number of people within a defined locale, while online marketing covers a far wider scope. This global coverage usually helps the business to reach more audiences, which may ultimately lead to better results, more relevant leads, and higher conversion rate.

Speed

Everything happens in real-time online. You can post real-time videos on different platforms of things happening in your business right now.  You can connect with people immediately in the online world, that just isn’t the same offline.

Audience engagement

In traditional marketing, communication is usually one-way. The business is seen on TV or heard over the radio and that’s about it. As an advertiser, you would want to get feedback from your customers right away, thereby improving the quality of your ads as well as your products. Online marketing makes this possible quicker, cheaper, and faster.

Affordable costs

The budget that you will spend on your marketing campaign is much smaller, this is the main advantage of the internet marketing. A commercial on a radio or TV will cost you a vast fortune. Each marketing campaign will cost some money, but online marketing costs much less and you can see even bigger results. The web offers options for marketing that are so laser targeted to your ideal customer that nothing else really compares.

Receive feedback

The traffic online is huge, but you still can track your customers and receive the feedback about your service or products you provide. They can leave the questions, requests and with some additional tool you even can gather the statistics about your audience.  Online marketing is really interactive, there is a great option to receive an honest feedback about the promo campaign that you have.

You will receive a full range of comments, positive and negative, but this gives you the knowledge to change and advertise more effectively. Keep in touch with your active customers who are looking for your certain products or offered services by knowing very well their demands.  Online marketing is still really in its infancy but if you want your business to grow then you need to embrace what it can offer you.