Alright, so let’s talk about Craigslist and how you might, as a handyman business owner, want to use it to market your business. What do you want to post on Craigslist? By the way I have a lot of experience with posting on Craigslist. I don’t do a lot of posting on it anymore, but it’s highly effective and I would recommend for promoting your local business. So what do you want to post on Craigslist? Well as a handyman, you definitely want to promote your particular handyman service. So there’s a section on there for promoting services. And you want to do your ad that’s very specific, a very specific offer for something, not just “Joe’s Handyman Service.” So you want to talk about the special offer for finishing a basement, or finishing a kitchen, or doing flooring, or preparing a house for rental. And you can vary up your ads, you know, you run one ad one day. And couple of days later, maybe you’ll change up your ad, run something different, and change up your ad and run something different. Find out which one’s working best for you by measuring your response, whether that’s by using a 24-hour recorded information line with a separate extension for each. And by the way, you can repeat the message, you don’t want to keep recording the message over again. You just copy the message from one extension to another, but you use a different extension just for tracking purposes. Or of course, you can record the message if you want to specifically address how they got there, and say “Hey thanks for coming, thanks for inquiring about my ad on Craigslist about refinishing your basement. We’ve got some special reports available if you’re thinking about doing it yourself. Or if you’d like, I’d be happy to give you a bid on what it would be for us to do and kind of talk to you about some of the challenges. I’ll be more happy to come out and give you a bid, and tell you some of the challenges that you’re going to have with doing your basement or anything tricky that you’d probably run into.” Then you go ahead and set up your way for them to contact you, and the call to action, and everything else. So that’s kind of what to post.

Any type of marketing where you can market your business, whether it’s a request for free report, or your service, or a free audio CD about “How to sell your house quickly by doing some minor repairs to it ahead of time.” Then those are the types of things you want to post. How frequently should you post? I’m going to tell you that you should go read the Craigslist guidelines, to find out the frequency is they are currently allowing you to post. Sometimes it changes. But then I would probably focus on letting my post up until it has left the first page. Or, if it has been on the first page for a week or two, I might consider taking down the old one and putting up a new one. So part of it’s going to depend on how quickly the categories that you’re posting in are moving. If you’re posting an ad, and there’s lot of other people posting in that category, when your ad first appears, it’s going to appear at the top and every time someone else post above you, it moves down one slot until it finally gets to bottom of the page, and falls off the bottom of the page and goes onto page two. Page two is going to get significantly less views than page one. In fact posts that are halfway down, or all the way near the bottom of the page, are going to get significantly less views than posts on the top of the page. So posting frequency actually matters. You should get a boost in response, a boost in number of people viewing your Craigslist ad, when you first put it on, and for the next period of time when it’s still really close to the top. The longer it’s been on there and moves down the page, the less people are going to be viewing it. So that should answer about posting frequency, but follow their guidelines. Don’t abuse the guidelines on Craigslist. You’ll get banned from being on there. They’ll be flagging your listings and you’ll get calls from people complaining that you’re taking advantage of the system. Most ads on Craigslist, by the way, are completely free. So there are only a couple of sections on there where they’re asking people to pay at this point.

In some categories you can use links to your website on Craigslist. I’m not a fan of doing that for the search engine bonus, but if you’re trying to lead people to more information, you can use that. That’s kind of a two-step marketing tool to go to your website. That’s a possibility too. You can also use people just to send you an email back, and then you can reply to them with additional information. I would probably lean toward doing a telephone number, a website that leads additional information, and then also an email address on there, and test to see which one gets you the highest response. It depends on what you’re offering as to what’s going to get you the best response on there. And Craigslist is big enough than it’s worth testing on, so I definitely recommend that.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Want to learn about how to market your handyman business using low and no cost strategies like CraigsList? I recommend “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.