Well Monday morning at 9am I was depressed, sitting in my chair drinking coffee wondering why I only had one job scheduled this week. I didn't know what to do as it hasn't seemed like anything was working. Then, wham, by 11 am I had 3 more jobs booked this week. 2 more booked on Tuesday, and one more Weds and Thurs. Today I had 3 jobs (first time for that one). I have one tomorrow, and my first commercial job (a Church) on Saturday. This ended up being a fun week... hopefully the phone keeps ringing.

I padcapped a berber tonight with Punch. Turned out well and went much faster than usual. I think I like that stuff.

How did you get the jobs, flyers, mailings or cold calling?

This week I ended up with one repeat customer who owns a couple of rental properties, one from Craig's List, one from a postcard mailer, and about 5 from the yellow pages.

I know people say that the yellow pages produces a lot of low quality calls, but I've gotten some good customers from them too. The Church, for example, told me I was the tenth company they had called, and was the first who could offer an all-natural product, fast drying time, and a reasonable price. While they were on the phone I read to them the label off my Orbit-Natural bottle, and they were sold.

At any rate, I don't know what works for everybody, but the yellow pages is my best payoff as far at bang per $$ I've spent so far. If I didn't have those calls I wouldn't be getting any calls.

Maybe I'll have to revise my thinking on the relative value of YP advertising. Do you have a display ad?
An inline ad? Or just an alphabetical listing? When I was spending more or YP advertising than I do now, it seemed that most of the calls wanted to know right up front: "what do you charge?"

There are 3 yellow page books in my area. When I was starting I realized I had missed the big one. So I put a small display ad in the cheapest of the other two, and a 1/2 inch inline display type ad in the other. I'm not getting tons of calls from them but a few a week. About half are the price shoppers and I seem to get about 1 in 3 of those. But others have told me that they just started calling and I was the first to answer the phone, or they need it done at a certain time or day so if I'm available then I get the job.