Find help: I need help in ways to find clients. - Help.com

ADVERTISE

i had a cleaning business and for starters I made flyers on my computer and started hitting the realestate places and getting the word out. I did mass mailings every month and it took a couple of months but I soon had more work than i could handle. and even after I stopped my business I was still getting calls a year later. also you can bid low at first to out bid everyone and offer some coupons to your first customers to get more business. the best way for advertising in a town is word of mouth…….good luck to you!

You have two very smart and good advisers in whiplas and tigers8052. When I was about 14 years old (1965) started out cutting grass with father’s lawn mower. Understandably he did not want me to perpetually use his lawn mower for my lawn cutting service. An appliance store also sold lawn mowers. My father told me he would give me a week to get up the money to buy my own lawn mower, he would let me use his lawn mower for a week. In a week I had enough to buy my own. So when I was not at home he took my money and went to the store. It was a good thing my father was mechanically inclined, the store was having problems with a new lawn mower. It appeared that they could not get this lawn mower going, so my father looked it over and asked how much they would take for the lawn mower that did not work, $26.00(USD)was their reply. Father took it home and had it running in minutes. What he saw was that the spark plug wire that went to the coil was loose, he reattached and it ran! And I was in business.

How I went about advertising was that I started out with maybe 3 customers. I built from there by buying a rubber stamp with my name and address and making my own business cards and distributing them in a 4 block area (and mind you I had no telephone back then, seriously). People would stop me when they saw me going or coming from a lawn cutting and make appointment. This went on for 2 summers. As child in the 60’s I made enough after expenses to supply myself with my summer hobbies.

But we are not talking about a child here making a business, we are talking about an adult business but the same principles apply. What I would suggest as previously stated by whiplas and tiger8053, business cards, ads made you by you by computer and hung up on store bulletin boards (with may be rubber cemented business card on the printed ads), actually going to apartment complexes with business cards and printed ads in hand, if you can mass mailings. Added if you can afford approximately $120.00 a year (go to http://www.rickswebfactory.com for a reliable host, $119.40 a year), get a host and create your own web site. There is a free web page editor and ftp program to aid in making a site, the site is:

http://www.freshwebmaster.com/

has these tools for free.

Web Page Editor: In this particular case the editor is a WYSIWYG(What You See Is What You Get) editor. This will help you to create the pages without having to know the web page language or have to hand code the page making chores.

FTP: File Transfer Protocol. It is a program once you have created the you have to get it to the host some how and this is the way.

P.S.
You are going to have to go out drum up business yourself. That means walking around the neighborhood and letting people know you are out there and available. Do not turn down individuals/homeowners for business, these a lot of times will lead to more business.