How can we advertise for cheap or free and get results?

We just started a capet cleaning business with very little advertisement money. We have been making up Flyers and passing them out ( so far 400 flyers). Any advice on how to get customers with little money to start with?

Get a professional set of business cards for next to nothing at www.vistaprint.com. Find stores that sell appliances, home decor , etc, and ask them if you clean their carpets for them for free, would they hand out your business cards for them. If you do a really good job, they will recommend you to their clients. On your card, have a referral discount, like 10% off for clients referred by ABCD Appliance store. Then tell the appliance store you will give them a free cleaning with every 15 new referrals or something.

Also, go to businesses in your town, and introduce yourself, and have a bi-monthly carpet cleaning service you do on weekends or evenings. They contract with you for a year, and get a discounted rate. You have automatically scheduled appointments every two months or so.

How are you distributing your flyers? Are you just handing them out randomly, or to a more targeted group of people? If you hand them out to senior citizens groups, busy moms with little kids, or in an allergy doctors office, you will get better results.

Every time you make a sale, get that person's name, address, phone and email address. On a quarterly basis, do mailings or emails to your previous customers, offering them the first appointments in holiday season, a free gift with a cleaning, or sell upholstery cleaning too. You can also give them your referral cards, where they send their friends to you, you give the friends a discount, and the person that referred them gets a $10.00 credit off their next cleaning.

Try to build your reputation in a small geographic area at first, with the businesses, and let their employees have a discount card too. Many busy working people don't have the time or energy to clean their carpets.

Another idea is to go to builders and home remodelers, and get a referral swap with them. If you give a discount on carpet cleaning after they get done with drywalling or adding an addition, you could have them selling for you, and it is a great way for them to come out "smelling like a rose" after a building job.

Try contacting apartment building managers to do carpets when they have someone move out.

I have a small marketing consulting business, and my own advertising budget is tiny. I use personal sales calls and referrals for most of my new business. Between that and using postcard mailings to sell promotional products, I can keep myself pretty busy, and I have only placed one traditional newspaper ad in three years, and that was a very small one. I have imprinted pens that I give to cashiers at checkout lines at local stores, and they eventually find their way into peoples hands. They are always happy to get them. My referral bonus for customers is that I bake them their favorite treat...I love to bake, and it has nothing to do with my business, but it always gets me remembered fondly.

As your business grows, classified ads will do you as well as display ads in the newspaper. Your one big expenditure should be going to a home show and demonstrating to people before and after, with photos of your work, testimonials from customers, and a little giveaway item for them to take home, like a refrigerator magnet. People respond best to seeing the difference.

Best wishes for you in your new venture!

pass out your business card to everyone you meet. Visit apartment complexes, builders offices, every place where they may need carpet cleaning.

make signs and put them on your vehicles ask your Friends to do the same if the car sits in a parking lot think about all the people would see it nothing is better than mobile advertising.

best of luck

-You can go to local forums like Craigslist or Yahoo Classifieds
-Like other people said, post ads
-Talk with other business' and ask them if you can post ads there

These are just some tips that you should think about.

Flyers or free classified advertisements if you are limited in cash resources. Advertising on newspapers are more expensive but usually more effective. You can also sent out mails to neighbourhoods, and write "GREAT DISCOUNTS AND GIFTS INSIDE" on the envelopes.

Put an ad in you local paper. It doesn't cost that much.

Flyers, are most economical way to reach House hold in your locality through news paper vendors in your city.
Another economical and effective way can be Ad Ribbon on VCR Channel through Cable Operator.

Hi - Here's a new site where you can advertise for FREE:

http://www.ultimatefamilyguide.com/advertise.php

(To check out the site alone go to http://www.ultimatefamilyguide.com)

There is a category for "carpet cleaning" but no ads in it!

You should definitely look into it :)

I would definitely be sure to use Craigslist.org to advertise your services as this is increasingly popular for local services. Fliers are cheap but can also be quite time-consuming.

As mentioned, I would recommend creating a website (if you haven't already) and making it very specific for your geographic area. You can then get some inexpensive advertising by signing up for pay-per-click services where you start up with some free credit, like from MSN and Yahoo:

http://startadcenter.com/HSTips-Tabbed/

http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/arp/sponsoredsearch_v2.php?o=US1809&cmp=YSB&ctv=MSnswltr&s=Y&s2=SB&s3=

Good luck,
Dave
--
http://www.familypulse.org

Since 85% of Internet users rely on search engines to find goods and services, it is essential that every business promote their business via a published domain named website on major search engines such as Google.com, Yahoo.com & MSN.com. These major search engines are the Yellow Pages for all business which can be reached by anyone having an Internet connection.

Begin by publishing your website's domain name for FREE at Google's search directory, visit "http://google.com/addurl/?continue=/add... and fill-in the form. In another way, Google, Yahoo or MSN provide a Yellow Pages kind of advertisement for every website according to a set of ranking protocols. And there's where web designers and search engine optimizers play an critical role in marketing websites which in turn, display goods and services to be discovered [via search directories] by the rest of the world. The greater the appearance or presence that one's website can generate on search directories, the greater number of customers will accordingly visitor one's website.

As for the cost to market one's website via the Internet and more particularly -- search directories, will depend initially with the proper design of webpages and the proper placement of metatags which are: <Title>, <Description> and <Keywords>.

A searchable <Title> would be "[name of the goods/services - a generic domain name is okay unless you own a well-know brand], [city], [state - postal abbreviation]" -- up to 65 characters and spaces. The <Description> would be up to 20 words comprising a complete readable sentence which promotes interest in your business, i.e., "We sell quality _____ at a reasonable price, etc." And <keywords> would consist of 12-15 compound plural words separated by commas, i.e., "cars, planes, transportation, etc."

In conclusion, webpages can either be rather straightforward using only HTML text or be crafted totally as a graphic Flash configuration. Either way, care should be taken to complete the Properties entries for Title, Description and Keywords so that there is something that search robots can index. The more one is educated in crafting effective webpages along with metatag placement, the less will be spent to hire third-party consultants to assist you in this matter.

To demonstrate how search engines/directories work, go to Yahoo.com and type in the following search query: "pizza downtown los angeles." [Note: do not include the quotes (").] Again, this is a very generic query which means you want to order a "pizza" from "downtown" and in what city -- "Los Angeles." Sounds fairly simple and then hit Enter. In a moment or two, there will appear some 1.3 million search results and among the top Five rankings will be a business called "Pizza Next Door, etc." The significance of this demonstration is to illustrate that most Interest shoppers will discover "Pizza Next Door," forthright because of its high web presence and ranking within the Top Five. So these shoppers are more or less likely to patronize this pizza establishment and hopefully in the long term; validate the owner and his family as having a profitable Internet enterprise.

To further illustrate how one can achieve a TOP 10 page ranking on Google.com, type in the following search query: "ecommerce tutorials seo." [Note: do not include the quotes (").] Again, this is a very generic query. Then hit Enter. In a moment or two, there will appear some 1.44 million search results and among the TOP 10 rankings will be a website called "Welcome to Downtown Los Angeles."

Good luck!

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