ForumsAdvertising, Sales and Marketing

Have you checked in to joining your local Chamber of Commerce? I have found that Networking is the best marketing I get for my money. Also networking groups can be useful and helpful. We placed an ad on a local radio station with no luck (twice), we also did a bulk mailing with no luck and a few advertisements here and there with no luck. What we have truly found is that word of mouth works the best and the most effective way of getting the word out is to network. Good Luck

I agree that word of mouth is the best advertising there is. It is already what appears to be working for Handyherman.com. I think a business like Handyherman.com would need to join 100 or so chambers around the country to be able to get the word out like we would like to.

I signed up on your website, and I have to say that your site seems very basic. You said you have had luck posting on forums for your advertising but you do not seem to implement any real type of communication on your actual site to keep your audience coming back. that being said I also have noticed that at least at the moment your site lacks a decent base (I seem to be only one of two businesses in Illinois). I would suggests that until your site draw more of an audience allowing your users to broaden their search parameters even further. For instance give the option to search within a state rather then miles from a specific city, or be able to see a lists of all companies within a certain category rather then by location.

You may want to look in to hiring somebody to redo the look of your site or at least improve upon it yourself. I think the header (where your logo and login info is) and the menu piece are good but the rest seems very flat and basically lacks information, both textually and visually. I hope you will take this for what it is, constructive criticism from someone who know a little about a lot but not a lot about much.

Drew, I like the site's cleanness and simplicity. Basically, you're a competitor to Google, but for business only. I like the idea. I would think that if you were to buy some business email lists, asking them to sign up for free. Add a rating system if you don't have one, or maybe some sort of vetting of the businesses that sign up. Once you've built it up, it could be something that a national company like Bank of America would "partner up" with to offer the service to its customers nationwide.

You could also offer vehicle signage and other promotional items as a co-op program, giving the business a great price if they put your logo somewhere on their marketing materials. That's what I do for a living. For example, if you have a business advertiser that likes to give calendars to his customers and prospects, we can set it up so that he can receive the 5,000 pc. price on as few as 250 calendars, just because they have your logo printed somewhere on them. Doesn't have to be as big as his logo, just so it's there. As an example, if you had 200 businesses each handing out as few as 250 calendars each to their customers and prospects, you've got calendars in 50,000 homes with your logo or url on them. Said calendars are likely right where you'd want them to be, too. Your advertiser wins with low pricing, you win with lots of promo items in lots of homes, and what has it cost you? $0.00 It's a great service to offer your advertisers.

If you'd like to discuss this or other programs, please give a call at (877) 250-4354.
Let me know if I can help.
Sincerely,
Ted Pendlebury

Hi,
I'd suggest that you start working on your SEO /search engine optimisation/. One of the most important tips for that are:
*100% valid code on all pages
*A lot of original content
*Incoming links to your site
*Listing on directories - Yahoo!, Google/DMOZ.org, MSN
*A lot of keywords per page, relevant to your domain name, headings (h1, h2) and title of the page

Misc tips on SEO:
*Don't pay for it - SE (search engine) algorythms are changing so fast that the moment you pay for it you will have to pay for it again.
*Don't do Hyper Optimisation - take your time, don't spend on it more than a hour or two per day. The more often the updates on your site, the better the ranking on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
*Don't rely 100% on it - good SEO can take more than a year to accomplish as you need high PR (page rank), domain popularity, relevant sites (one citing your content) and so on.
*Play fair! - the so called Blackhat SEO techniques can get you banned for nothing. Never use them.

By my judgment that is the real handy work a site should have for popularity. You can also do some offline advertising such as: leaving sticker with a catchy phrase and the address on walls (a classic, but might litter the area if you are pressing it too much), have the name of your site on your car, make stickers for cars and ask friends and relatives to use them, posters, billboards (much more effective than some PPC /pay per click/ advertisements.

Hope this helps! Good luck.