This morning, my fridge malfunctioned. Like many of you out there, my first instinct was to turn to Google. Typing in “fridge repair Singapore”, I found a relevant service website, called him and met up with a fridge repair technician man - a one-man show.

My story just begins here. We were chatting and I asked him what he thought of leverage on search engines (SEO) for businesses like his. He told me he likes to surf the internet in his leisure time and this is how he got the idea.

He added, he used to get new businesses by advertising on newspapers with average spending of about S$2,000 every month which was around 20-30K a year. The amazing part is he was doing this for the past 13 years! The best thing he said is that the leads generated by newspapers are much lesser than search engines.

He told me he gets an average of 5-10 business leads daily from search engine (Google) and he is only spending less than half compared to newspaper advertisements. More leads with lower cost spent (higher ROI) also means his charges for his repairing services become much cheaper than before.

Lastly, he added, he sometimes gets up to 10 enquiries in a day (but because he is a one-man show, he is unable to serve too many customers; thus he has to refer the customers to his friends).

My conclusion is simple: If a traditional businessman can succeed by utilizing the SEO and Internet, it is time for you to start!