If All I Do Is Rely On The Yellow Pages........I'm Screwed!

[Mr Clean Carpet]

I am new and I bought a 1/2 page yellow page ad. I was hoping to have a little more call volume, but that is not the case

I am getting a website made, and I will be running an adwords campaign. Any thoughts on generating some calls?

 

[steve_64]

no matter where i go i look at the carpet. if its dirty i start selling. see if there is a BNI in your area. its a networking group that you can visit twice for free but then they want you to pay. whats worked best for me was newspaper ads. half page or so talking about your business and who you are.

all this depends on your market place of course.

chamber of commerce is a good place to look too.

 

[Shane Deubell]

Love your signature, wish i thought of that.
Pretty much you are screwed if you are dependent on yp producing income.

Plenty of great guys here try and narrow it down more, how much money can you spend per month?

How many hours are you willing to work?

How big of a service area? use google

What services can you perform?

 

[Jim Williams]

The internet is the way to go these days. I wish I would have discovered it sooner. The first 3 years I was in business I blew through $36,000 on postcards, YP ads, newspapers and everything else. It all paid off eventually in the form of repeats and referrals. I usually got around 5:1 return on my $$$$ when mailing postcards to select mail routes. I designed a website 5 years ago and haven't done any paid advertising since. Even if you have to pay to get one designed, do it. For the 12.95 a month hosting fee I can't tell you how many calls I get a month. It keeps my schedule full to the point where I have to turn down a lot of work in the summer months and stays pretty steady even in the winter months.

 

[Mikey P]

Love your signature, wish i thought of that.
Pretty much you are screwed if you are dependent on yp producing income.

Plenty of great guys here try and narrow it down more, how much money can you spend per month?

How many hours are you willing to work?

How big of a service area? use google

What services can you perform?

yeah but how is it he has studied political economics at that level yet is unaware that the YP died the day Obama took office?

 

[SMRBAP]

YP died? - I thought they were flourishing under their new plan where they hire fraud convicts on work release to make up their marketing and sales force.. . ... .. .

 

[Mr Clean Carpet]

I have another service business that we stay pretty busy with. I think we underestimated the amount of calls we get from the internet/word of mouth. Now we are getting a website made for both businesses. Up till now the only internet advertising (for the other business) we have is the free listing sites(yahoo, merchant circle, thumbtack, ect) but under the google maps we come up first.

We offer Carpet Cleaning, Upholstery, Dryer Vent, Duct

We live in an area with about 250,000 population in a 20 mile radius. We have 2 papers here, a free classifieds and shopping paper, and a more expensive big corperate paper. Any advice on which one may have better reults should I decide to spend some ad dollars on the paper.

 

[Shane Deubell]

yeah but how is it he has studied political economics at that level yet is unaware that the YP died the day Obama took office?

Haha, i hear you.

YP might still produce for large markets/water damage but the writing has been on wall for like 5 years now. Time to join the 22nd century, or is it the 23rd?

 

[Mr Clean Carpet]

What is the connection between Obama taking office and the Yellow Pages dying? If we can blame him for something else I'm all for it, but what did he do?

 

[trojancarpetcare]

Strap your boots up and start knocking on doors. If your a people person you should get a few jobs from that alone.

 

[Mikey P]

What is the connection between Obama taking office and the Yellow Pages dying? If we can blame him for something else I'm all for it, but what did he do?

The day O took the reigns was almost to the day when people stopped calling the shop they bought their carpets from and started using the web to find a reputable company to clean their floors.


dont ask me why.


But I can track it with Service Monster


Use to get 40 to 80 referrals each from 4 shops in town, now I get less than 10 a year from any of them.


and 400 or more are finding us online..


fine by me, less doughnuts.

 

[Ron Lippold]

I have seen the same thing mike. I can track it back to sept 08. I can't wait till he is gone.

 

[SMRBAP]

Shane - I can speak for a somewhat large market and the YP, our 2 main counties are home for about 1.2 million, and we touch parts of 3 others. The paper book did squat for us from 2005 on both cleaning and restoration.

Since then, it literally takes a state catastrophe that includes major power outages and no electric for people to find and open the book.

Their website ranking of course employs a point system based on what other expenses you incur with them, so unless you waste thousands elsewhere you can't get ranking there.

And their pay per call program is the best white collar crime they have devised to date..... which I just rec'd a call about and argued with them yesterday.... and was planning a warning post here today about.

Other online PPC in our area is fetching about $35/click for water loss, and click fraud is rampant.

Work on referral programs on both ends of your business and gaining ground on organic placement.

 

[SMRBAP]

The day O took the reigns was almost to the day when people stopped calling the shop they bought their carpets from and started using the web to find a reputable company to clean their floors.


dont ask me why.


But I can track it with Service Monster


Use to get 40 to 80 referrals each from 4 shops in town, now I get less than 10 a year from any of them.


and 400 or more are finding us online..


fine by me, less doughnuts.

They probably had more business happening themselves that generated ref's for you. In 08 - late 09 we were breaking records, the slide started late 09 and has continued.

My data suggests rather than having an interim cleaning (something to just make it livable for a touch longer) with intention to replace, folks did all that was needed in effort to save what they had. No money to replace, no lending to help replace. So they had the stretch done, or had the rotary cleaning upgrade, had the wee wee stains done. Hence a good run for us.

Now, they still can't afford new carpet, nor even a do what needs done cleaning. It's all going in their gas tank, or coming from a state unemployment card with barely enough to survive.

If he gets reelected I am thinking about closing down and vacationing.

And I will expect those that voted him in office to handle my bills while I am away, I should get my fair share too right ?

 

[Mikey P]

A uppity up at Jon Don told me that when they tried pay per click a Yahoo at Yahoo sucked up 15,000 dollars worth of clicks in a matter of days

 

[SMRBAP]

A uppity up at Jon Don told me that when they tried pay per click a Yahoo at Yahoo sucked up 15,000 dollars worth of clicks in a matter of days

Google shows the clicks it has not charged for, but there truly is no system of checks and balances on that, it is just something they do for feel good factor imo. There is no stated parameters such as any IP that clicks today can't click again to create a charge in x amount of time, etc.

The real proof would be if they (and they easily could do this) line itemize IP's on charged clickthroughs, so that you could spreadsheet them then auto organize in something like excel to see if you have a history with certain IP's.

You can get it, but it takes going through legal channels.

With restoration related keywords fetching $35 plus per click-through in my set geographic zones - it doesn't take too much to rack up ridiculous costs in short order.

 

[Shane Deubell]

Shane - I can speak for a somewhat large market and the YP, our 2 main counties are home for about 1.2 million, and we touch parts of 3 others. The paper book did squat for us from 2005 on both cleaning and restoration.

Since then, it literally takes a state catastrophe that includes major power outages and no electric for people to find and open the book.

Their website ranking of course employs a point system based on what other expenses you incur with them, so unless you waste thousands elsewhere you can't get ranking there.

And their pay per call program is the best white collar crime they have devised to date..... which I just rec'd a call about and argued with them yesterday.... and was planning a warning post here today about.

Other online PPC in our area is fetching about $35/click for water loss, and click fraud is rampant.

Work on referral programs on both ends of your business and gaining ground on organic placement.

We stopped end of 2008, had 2 pages.

At some point google was bringing in more jobs at a fraction of the cost.

 

[idreadnought]

Yp is dead. I mean bury that book, it is starting to smell

So I have tracking numbers on all my different marketing avenues. The business I recieved from yellow pages in the last 4 months was 2-1 on advertising costs compared to the income I brought in. That means I spent a dollar in yp ads and made two in gross sales. That is horrible. I spent 10 grand for a years worth of marketing and lost a couple after you add up my overhead and expenses. Do not advertise with them.

Back to your question. Online does good for us but we do real well with a high end postcard deck that goes out. It goes out to 25,000 of the most affluent houses in the area. We do a great job services those type of customers. I pay 1,500 4 times a year for it.

 

[mcatt]

Wherever your located you need to work on your google places for that site/ business.

 

[Shane Deubell]

Ours came in today, only 1 full page black/white ad and a couple quarters.

They completely removed the white pages, was really small.

 

[steve_64]

this is my last year in the book i think.

 

[jcooper]

Heck!

A uppity up at Jon Don told me that when they tried pay per click a Yahoo at Yahoo sucked up 15,000 dollars worth of clicks in a matter of days

I do Yahoo in a small area, 30k people and only spend a hundred bucks a month! Nobody goes to Yahoo anymore.
I could see that happening on google if you set it up wrong, national instead of local.