Getting the Ball Rolling

Starting Up with Low-Cost Advertising

I started advertising for my computer business today, just running around town and putting up some flyers.  At the moment, I am only operating under my name (as I do not have licensing yet, I can't advertise as a business name until I do). 

So I typed up some flyers, pretty simple ones on Word, and stuck them up all over my hometown.

Locations

I started out by hitting the local assisted living apartments, since I am offering a 10% senior discount I figured that would be a good place to start.  I made sure to focus on my ability to come to them, as I would guess that seniors would not want to deal with the hassle of unplugging and dragging their computers out to their cars to get to me.  I was also tossing around the idea of setting up in the community rooms and having a day or so where people can come and talk to me, and since I am there anyway I can do some quick, cheap computer work to start to build a little rapport.

Next I hit bars and restaurants in the area, making sure I hit a lot of different establishments so that I can be sure to get maximum exposure.  I wrapped up by posting on the bulletin boards of the couple of gas stations in town.

Formatting

Just a couple notes on formatting, or at least what I know (which honestly isn't a whole lot at this point, but I will be learning as I go).

1. Leave a bit of extra space in the margins.  On bulletin boards, it can be very overwhelming to deal with the sheer amount of text on the pages, and leaving nice wide margins makes my text stick out.
2. Pictures are important.  I have to say that while I was posting my own flyers I was looking at the other advertisements near mine, and one thing I noticed is that I was drawn much more to those that had any kind of picture, even if it was just clip-art.
3. It seemed to me that printing your material was obvious, but a large portion of the advertisements I saw were hand-written with marker (or sometimes even pencil).  I have to say that, as a consumer myself, I would give a lot more credibility to ads that were printed than those that were written.

Placement

The most important aspect of placement that I saw was to place ads at eye-level.  People are a lot more likely to notice ads that are right in front of them than those they have to look for.

In a few instances, eye-level placement was not possible.  I decided that the next best idea would be to place ads that stick out from the others, for example have my ad hanging out off of the side or the bottom of the bulletin board further than others.  I thought that this might catch people's eye, since it is not just mashed in with all of the other text.


This information will become more refined as I continue to educate myself on marketing techniques.  I did try very hard to make sure that I talked to clerks or managers at the establishment, both to make sure that I had the proper permission to post on their boards and to make sure that I mentioned my computer service business to as many people as I could.  This method got a lot of people to tell me that they or someone they knew was ALWAYS looking for someone to fix their computer, and gave me an opportunity to give a bit of a sales pitch.  This got a lot of people to tell me that they would send people my way if they got the opportunity, and I am not sure if they would have taken the time to even notice the post without that face-to-face connection that I made.

At this stage in the game, it's all about rapport.  My hometown has around 500 people in it, and getting a few people to start talking about me and my business can have HUGE effects on my clientele.

Going forward, I need to start getting the legalities taken care of so that I can start to work on my website, my facebook page, and I can start marketing using my business name and logo.  I am going to try to find a lawyer in my area who might be willing to consult with me for a low price, as I need to keep overhead low and can't afford to have some big-name lawyer charging me for every little question.

I will try to post more information as I get it.  I know the next little while will be a blur of legal terms and tax information that I am not used to dealing with, so as I make sense out of it I will try to keep you guys informed.

Thanks for your support, and stick with it!  It's a lot of info to sort through, but the satisfaction I am already feeling is well worth the worry and effort.