10 Free Advertising Ideas
by Shane on 20/10/06 at 9:19 am
6 comments
(This is well worth the copy and paste! – from Small Business Branding)
Jake Wolf started his landscape business after posting “Landscape design student needs your home for portfolio development” on a local yahoo group. Within a week of his post he received 30 calls and had lined up enough work to quit his job.
Jake’s plan for 2007 is to have 100 customers signed up for his monthly fertilizing and pesticide program. Here are his plans for signing that first 100:
My plan for signing up 100 new customers by the spring rush.
- Send out a thank you email to all existing customers and alert them to my plans for next year.
- Join as many local online groups as possible. Many allow new members to introduce themselves.
- Call up landscapers who don’t have pesticide licenses and work out an affiliate deal with them to take care of their fertilizing and pesticide applications.
- Start writing an email gardening newsletter and heavily focus on local needs and resources.
- Offer free gardening classes just like a Tupperware party with someone hosting and bringing several friends over. Trust me, this beats giving free estimates.
- Film educational gardening clips using local people and host them on youtube.com. Include links to the most recent one in every email signature.
- Forget the website, almost no one visits the current one. Get listed in free local directories instead.
- Say hi to every neighbor of existing and new clients. Pesticide laws require neighbor notification. Why not knock on their door and say hi?
- Offer a travel savings discount to your customers if they help you get more work on their block.
- Say something new and always include a call to action. Everyone already knows landscapers cut lawns, mulch, top soil, prune, snow removal, bored yet, insect control, fertilize, retaining walls, mickey mouse, landscape design, irrigation, ponds, pavers, oy this is too much and this is only half of it!
Jake will make his 100 new clients. How do I know? Look at the list. He’s actually ‘doing’ things to grow his business. He’s not just sitting by the phone.
by Jeff Barson
Shane Dryden is the 'Maven' at Ideate. The driving-force of Yuppiechef, Shane loves to write on advertising and innovation. He spots the non-obvious stuff behind the obvious, which seems obvious, but isn’t really that obvious (obviously). View more articles by Shane.
John
Oct 20th, 2006
Point number 7 is interesting: “Forget the website, almost no one visits the current one.”
Aren’t you guys web people?
Karin
Oct 20th, 2006
Point 4: write gardening newsletter, made me think automagically: good idea, but turn it also into a blog. Then I read point 7: forget about…
Not so clever
Jake Wolf
Oct 20th, 2006
I almost always include something about a free newsletter when advertising my business and have never had anyone interested. I get many more calls and emails for every online ad I post on yahoo groups than I get clicks to my site.
Next time, I will include and excert from the newsletter. Maybe that will give people a helping hand to read more and subscribe.
I will have a blog next year with daily updates of garden observations and will focus on seasonal gardening tips and issues occuring locally such as bug infestations and disease outbreaks.
A couple of things to note. Many people just want to landscaper to show up and do a good job without having to keep on checking to make sure things are going smoothly. These people will never look at a website or read a newsletter. As long as they are happy, they just pay the bill and keep renewing the contract. On the other extreme, there are people who are always asking about certain plants and other things. Those are the ones who the website/blog is for. They’ll read every single one and will TELL their friends about things they read. That alone may be worth the effort. We’ll see.
You can follow along at http://landscapestartup.com
Karin
Oct 20th, 2006
Hi Jack
We also send out a monthly newsletter (wooden flooring retailer) to existing customers and ‘prospects’, list of architects etc. We always make sure in the newsletter are direct links to our websites (and blogs nowadays). We notice it does drive more traffic (from existing cusotmers and contacts) to our site, which in time leads to more questions, sales of add-on products.
Might work for you also?
Other idea: see http://www.thekissbusiness.co.uk/2006/10/happy_reminders.html
victor
Dec 28th, 2007
thanx for the good advice. keep up the good work.
regards
victor Tholani
Debra Fourie
Feb 10th, 2009
Hello Am looking for a free site to publish adverts for our small new business – any ideas?
thanks
Debra