What is a good way to advertise enexpensively for a small business? It is handyman work.?

Flyers are your best option for now. Put together a simply little flyer listing your most common services. Then spend a week and handout a few thousand to common middle-income neighborhoods. That should cost you about $100 to $200 if you distribute them yourself. Then if it works well, you can hire someone else to distribute them for you.

If you distribute them yourself, call your local city and county offices to make sure you do not need a permit to handout flyers. You DO NEED a permit to sell door to door, but handing out flyers is different. Be sure to tell them that you are just distributing some flyers and not doing door to door sales. However, if the permit is cheap, you may want to go ahead and pick one up anyway.

Run a half-page flyer printed on 20 lbs light yellow pastel colored paper, but print it in black print. Through some clipart of a hand planner, a hammer, etc. and list common services such as installing children play sets, fixing fences, installing lights and fans, building decks, install flooring (laminated wood is pretty popular), installing shrubs, etc. Add a small 10% coupon with a dashed-lined box. Make it expire about 60-days from the date you expect to hand them out.

If you can find an HOA newsletter or something similar, have them add your flyer to their distribution. If not, consider running an ad in their newsletter if the cost is not more than hiring someone to handout a flyer for you. That is your best option to start. Then as you build up your business you can expand into other areas like the web, newspaper, etc.

Some of the other responses are funny. They don't even know exactly what you do, but have great ways to market you. One even suggested that you buy an ad on his site that gets 300 visitors a week. Where are these visitors? Are they people that are in your service area? Maybe you should consider advertising on a website that people from your local area are visiting. I would suggest that you stay away from anyone that claims to know marketing while they have to sell ads in the Yahoo Forum!

The AdSense idea is a good idea, but unless you are up to speed on web technologies, that may not be a good opportunity for you at this time. It is a good idea, but that guy has a whole website of information and uses marketing to make $120,000 a year… and his business is not home handyman. His business is marketing. So if you want to do what he did, you need to hang up your tools and start learning marketing, web development, etc. So I don’t think that’s the best option for your handyman business.

By the way, a business that only generates $120K a year is pretty small. The guy probably pays about $48K a year in taxes alone... and that assumes it's a 100% profitable business. So just because he grosses $120K, that's not really all that impressive when you do the numbers and find out that he's probably only netting about $20K to maybe $50K a year max. So don't get too impressed with those numbers. Also, AdSense only works if people go to your website and click on the ads. So how much money is the guy spending to market his website? Hopefully less than $120K per year.

Start by asking yourself some simple questions to narrow down your clients. Here’s a few that immediately come to mind.

- How long have you been in business?
- What is your typical client?
- What is your typical service price? How much is profit?
- What sort of services do you make the most profit doing?
- Where have your existing clients come from?
- Do you do mainly new construction (say adding a deck) or remodeling?
- Do you do small very profitable jobs like a 30-minute job for $200 or do you do larger less profitable jobs… say $1000 for 5-days of work?
- Do you work on newer homes or older homes?
- Do you work mainly on things that would have been covered by a home warrantee after it has expired?
- Do you work on upgrades for people such as a new door because they didn’t like the one the builder put in? Maybe they are upgrading appliances in the kitchen.

These are just a few things that come to mind. I would think through many more of these and narrow down your client. Is your client most likely a lawyer making $500K per year and wants a new deck? Maybe your most likely client is someone making $50K per year and needs his toilet replaced because it’s 20 years old and he doesn’t have any idea how to do the work.

Anyway, what you need to figure out is who/where your primary market is. Then figure out how to get your ad in front of them.

Now you need to figure out your advertising budget. Even if it’s $15 a month, you need to find out how to spend the $15 as best as you can and focus your dollars where they will count the most. Asking yourself questions like the ones listed above will really help you figure this out.

Of course, I would suggest you start with a little larger advertising budget. You need to commit to something for 60 to 90-days minimum. Why? You need to approach marketing as learning a skill. Your investment is a learning tool. You will learn what doesn’t work and what does work. So if it doesn’t work, you need to make sure you give it enough time. 60 to 90-days is about right to figure this out. Anything less and you really do not know if it was going to work for you. So in my mind if you do not give it 60 to 90-days, it’s sort of like gambling with your advertising money. I would suggest that you not do that unless you just have a LOT of money to play with.

A typical small business advertising budget for a handyman service company is probably $150 to $500 per month. The average is probably $225 or so. So if you cannot afford to budget that, then you need to babystep your business and try to generate sales and roll as much of the profits back into marketing. If not, it will be hard to do enough work to pay the bills and continue to grow. So you need to make a commitment. I would suggest something in the $250 range to start as a minimum.

I would suggest that you step back and think about this business a bit and think through the above questions. Then think about the best way to focus on marketing that best fits your marketing, pricing, best client, etc. Then market to those clients first. As you build your business you can expand to market to a larger audience if you wish. But to start you need every dollar to pull its own weight.

If you are a typical home handyman where you do odd jobs for people such as install a light, replace a door, build a deck, install a children's swing, etc. Then you can quickly narrow down your market. However, you need to find out if doing many small jobs is better than a few large jobs. Which pays you the greatest profit per hour invested? Then focus on those areas where those jobs are more likely. One are that might not come to mind at first is new homes. How many new homes are build without decks, children’s play sets, etc? So if it’s a new home in a middle-class neighborhood, chances are that they will need a deck or someone to install a new play set for the kids.

You will want to focus on services that will best fit your core client’s needs. I would suggest doing an ad that list things like… install children swings, replace sliding class doors with French doors, install a deck, repair fencing, painting inside and out, upgrading kitchens, install flooring, upgrade your bathroom, install flat panel televisions, etc. Things that middle-income families want, but cannot do their selves and that they can probably afford to pay someone else to do it.

Now that you have some focus, I would put something together and start thinking of ways to get the ad in front of people. As I mentioned before I think the best way is to go to a local printer and print up 1,000 flyers and hand them out one week. Print the flyer 2 up on a 20 lbs 8.5x11 page and put it on a colored light pastel yellow or green paper. Yellow is the best. You will end up with a ½ page flyer, which is easy to carry and easy to slip in the doorframe or roll up and place between the doorknob and doorframe. It should cost you about 8-cents per page to print them, or 4-cents per flyer. At 1,000 flyers that’s about $40 before tax. I would try to get out about 2,000 of them to start. The first month will be slow, but do it again the second month. After the second month I would expect about 10 calls… hopefully you can close most of them. The third month and going forward, you can probably expect 10 calls from 2,000 flyers… maybe 20 on a really good month. Once you get that working, copy the model into other areas and expand and hire someone to hand them out for you.

You can handout about 100 per hour if you walk fast. Less if you are out of shape and walk slow. So I would set aside maybe 2 or 3 hours a day (in the morning after 8am) and hand them out. Then wait a few days and see how it works for you. After a week of letting it rest, I would do it again in other area.

I would hire a local company if the first run works for you. One posting said $40 for 500 flyers. That’s ok, but that guy is not making much. That’s only 8-cents per home, which translates to about $8 hour gross. After self employment taxes he’s looking at around $6 per hour. You can probably hire a teenager to go with you and help you hand them out for $8 per hour as a 1099 and they’d be happy to do it for you. You just need to watch them or somehow check on them. 99% of these guys will distribute about 50% of them and dump the rest. Even more so when they only charge $40 for 500.

For me, the best way to distribute these flyers is to put them in an HOA newsletter… or just run an ad with the newsletter. They should only charge you $50 to $100 per month for most average sized neighborhoods. But doing this wil