My First Advertisement - Craigslist and Beyond

[Steve]

This sounds like a real interesting opportunity! The way you are going with all this, you are going to need to hire some employees by the end of the season!

[Hedgemaster]

I was starting to get overwhelmed, so I stopped posting my Craigslist ad about a week and a half ago. I still get a few calls a day which tells me that people do use the "search" feature and not just look at the most current postings.

Without the keywords, my "old" ad would never have shown up.

I have to say that this whole "Craigslist" thing has worked out much better than I had anticipated.

[Steve]

That is great news. And amazingly enough, many members seem to experiment a little with craigslist and shortly give up after placing an ad or two. Here you are really doing well with it, so a key factor to success may just be sticking with it.

[Hedgemaster]

Originally Posted by Steve

That is great news. And amazingly enough, many members seem to experiment a little with craigslist and shortly give up after placing an ad or two. Here you are really doing well with it, so a key factor to success may just be sticking with it.

I'm not sure that there's "one" key factor, but no matter what type of advertising you do it requires repetition. Getting your name in front of people on a regular basis is very important. Anyone who runs one ad and claims it was a waste of money really doesn't have a firm grasp on how advertising works.

I think that part of my success with the Craigslist posting is that my ad isn't a typical "classified ad" - there's an actual advertisement - an image to look at. I appear ten thousand times more professional than anyone else who is posting even though they may have been doing this for decades. I've gotten a lot of "I liked your ad", and "very professional" comments from people when I inquire how they found me and what made them choose "me" when it came time to pick up the phone.

Another part is lack of competition. Don't get me wrong - there are a LOT of listings in Pittsburgh, but not a lot in my specific area. I started out advertising a very broad area - "the East", but as I started picking up more clients in one particular area, I decided I wanted to get more clients in that area rather than driving further than I needed to, and began using that area in my posting title. Lots of postings for the "East", but only one other guy posting ads specific to the general area that I'm targeting now.
(I've also noted that he's "improved" his ad since I started posting. )

One other factor is likely "location". Surely some areas get better results from CL advertising than others. I was convinced that I would get nothing more than cheap bastards looking to get work done for nothing, but the people who use CL to seek services come from all walks of life.

I dunno... I had no money to advertise using traditional methods, so I turned to Craigslist. It worked for me. And amazingly, no SPAM! (knocks on wood)

I don't know much about clickable pics or if it's only on this forum, but the clickable pic on post #7 takes me to a Cruz lawn care...

probably not a big deal on this forum but thought i'd let ya know!

[Hedgemaster]

Originally Posted by SaberLawnCare

I don't know much about clickable pics or if it's only on this forum, but the clickable pic on post #7 takes me to a Cruz lawn care...

probably not a big deal on this forum but thought i'd let ya know!

It's been a while, but I think he was just showing me an example of how you make the ad take the potential client directly to a website by clicking on it.

[Hedgemaster]

UPDATE: 3/18/13
Rather than starting a new thread, I thought I'd just add to this existing one.


I've gotten a few calls this season from Angie's List and figured I'd toss up an ad on Craigslist as well since the first one worked out pretty well for me.

I was going to simply use the same one seen previously in this thread, but the headline says "EVERYTHING is TURNING GREEN!" and at the moment NOTHING is "turning green". LOL! There's actually some snow on the ground that we got overnight. I needed something else.

I took my existing yard sign design and modified the bottom (area under the phone number) to include a few photos.




I posted it around 2:30am and have had 2 calls today so far - one a commercial job at a vacant car wash that needs maintenance.

I did not include an email, website, or phone in the text portion of the CL ad.
If a human is viewing, they can see the phone number as seen above. If a spambot is viewing, not so much.

In 2011 I posted on CL and I got a lot of good clients.
In 2012 I got more cheap people calling and since I had a mostly full schedule, I didn't run the ad a lot.
I guess I'll find out how it goes in 2013!

[wat5150]

Looks good. Whos that guy in the green shirt?? You may want to get him off your ad.

[Hedgemaster]

Originally Posted by wat5150

Looks good. Whos that guy in the green shirt?? You may want to get him off your ad.

I dunno, but he looks larger than life, and quite studly.

[Steve]

Very nice work.

What is your view on using the 'Taking new customers' headline versus potentially others you could use. What do you like about that one?