I was recently asked by our new Sales Manager about tips for posting employment ads on CraigsList to hire a Sales Professional for our business. Having run a national real estate investing business that was constantly looking for real estate agents, mortgage brokers and other professionals to work with and having posted quite a few ads on CraigsList looking for those professionals, I thought I would share with you some of what my experience has been.
What about posting frequency?
First of all, to share with folks that are new to CraigsList and to remind those that are already familiar: it is extremely important to be listed near the top of the results page so you need to relist your ad as frequently as allowed by CraigsList’s terms of service.
What to include in the ad?
Next, here are some tips about what to post in the ad: first of all, having ads that have website addresses, in my experience, will tend to decrease your response rate. Exceptions abound with that generalization though as having a link to a large, publicly traded company could actually improve response rates. For most small business owners running ads to hire for a sales professional will likely be better served by running their ad with minimal information about the company name.
There was a time when I included my telephone number in employment ads, but I have since stopped doing that for a number of reasons including people calling without actually reading about the job and I’d spend time repeating what we included in the description. Removing my telephone number, actually increased response by email.
Once you get in touch via email, immediately try to get them on the phone (especially if they are going to be doing telephone sales). Build your relationship on the phone at that point.
How about the compensation?
Should you include how much the job pays? How much about the job compensation should you include? Well, here are some generalizations: for sales positions, if it includes a base salary (which our jobs typically do not), you will tend to increase response by including that. You may find that you get a larger number and a different type of person replying to those ads: someone looking for any job that has a salary and not serious sales professionals. If your sales job has some type of variable pay schedule like a commission only position, I would prefer being careful not to over-promise. Over-promising on pay will boost response, but at a huge cost in reputation and very likely a huge cost in keeping great people around long term.
What type of response might you expect?
In a mid-sized city (approximately 100K population like my city of Fort Collins) from posting a single ad in the sales section you might get one response each time you post the ad. Sometimes you won’t get any responses. In very rare cases you might get two responses. You will not be overwhelmed with responses posting an ad for that type of ad.
With a smaller response, we can and should really focus on really connecting with candidates that you’d actually want to work with to show them they are part of a small team that really is committed to helping them succeed.
Conclusion
To summarize, when posting ads for hiring a sales professional on CraigsList, I recommend shying toward the side of under-promising to keep a reasonable chance of keeping people after they inquire. I would not include a website address or a phone number in my ad for most cases. I’d be more likely to include a phone number than a website address though. However, I would want to get on the phone with a candidate that looks promising as soon as possible to start building a relationship. I’d also keep reminding myself to have patience… getting one or two responses per post is reasonable in most cases.
Until my next post,
James
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”.
Alright let’s talk about classified ad websites and how you might use them to better market your handyman business. We’re kind of going to go through some of the other ones here. But most of classified ad websites, when you kind of hear that term out on the internet, most of them, except for the top three, are going to generate very little or no traffic to you whatsoever. So I wouldn’t waste my time, and I’m going to tell you what three are the top three here in the moment, but I wouldn’t bother with any of the other ones, just focus on the top three. Some local ones may be able to provide you with some good link bonuses. For example, I’ve heard some success lately of people going to their local newspaper website, and one of new article is posted in the morning, they go on there and they comment on the article about the local news, about something going on in the community. And a lot of times, they’ll post there, their name and their business name, or their website address and their business name, as part of just them commenting on it. And a lot of the local newspaper websites, and local television websites as well, will allow the complete follow links and things that are going to give you a good link bonus, because a lot of these sites are relatively popular. They’ve got a lot of great content that they have coming out, and they do allow follow links on there, so it’s something to look at. But those aren’t really the classified ad websites. But some of them even have classified ad sections on them, which is why I listed them here.
Alright, so here are the biggest three classified ad websites. And what I wanted to do is show you a graph of the relative traffic of the three of them. All the other classified ad websites that I’m aware of have super-insignificant traffic compared to these three. And you could see that the first one is, by a large margin, the biggest one. And it’s not even close. So the two at the bottom – the orange one is a website that’s owned by eBay, Kajiji, and I’ll talk to you about that in a minute. The green one at the very bottom is Backpage, that’s the smallest of the three. The second-biggest one is Kajiji, which is orange on there, just a little bit above Backpage. But then the one that’s really big, and has by far the largest amount of traffic, on a scale of like, three times or four times the amount of traffic, is Craigslist. And so you’re going to want to kind of prioritize. If you’re only going to post ads for your service or product on one website, which one would it be? Craigslist. So want to go and focus on that.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Use “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” to learn how to effectively market your handyman business using free and low cost online classified ad websites.
I think you should be aware of it, and you should post this magic number – the dollar per hour that you need to be earning – somewhere conspicuous – whether it’s in your car on your dashboard or in your tool box so that you have to look at it every time you open up your tool box or maybe you put it on your mirror in your bathroom. You need to put it somewhere so that you need to realize what that number is and be reminded of it all the time, because in my opinion you need to stop doing all other activities where you could be earning that amount of money but you’re doing a task that you could be paying someone else to do cheaper than what you’re doing that at.
For example, one of the things we’re going to talk about a little bit later is posting ads for your product or service or information about your products or service on some of these classified websites like BackPage and Craigslist and Kijiji. You’re going to find out that is a relatively low dollar per hour task – something that you can hire a high school kid or someone you can outsource to for much less than your magic number.
So should you be doing that type of low dollar per hour work if you could be doing actual paid work at your higher rate? And the answer is no.
You should be outsourcing that – paying someone else $5 or $10 to spend 30 minutes or however long it takes them to post those ads up every couple days for you, instead of you focusing on taking the time and then what’s inevitably going to happen if you’re not really focusing on it and you’re not committed to it is it’s not going to get done. By outsourcing you also increase the probability it’s going to get done.
In my opinion, you should know what that number is, and then be outsourcing and delegating everything else you possibly can if you have the work available to do it. Now, if you’re just getting started out and there’s really no way that you could be earning that $28 an hour, go ahead and do the marketing yourself until you have the cash flow coming in in order to support it, but once you’re able to make a choice between I could work an extra hour on this project here tonight or I could go home and be really tired and try to do this marketing project when I could be paying someone $5-$10 an hour to do. Go ahead and pay them the $5 or $10 and do the extra work there at the project and make your money and then go ahead and give up some of your money to someone else to do something for you which is going to bring business down the road.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Learn exactly what marketing to outsource and specifically how to outsource marketing in your handyman business in “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
The following is an excerpt from “How To Market Your Handyman Business” (a 1 hour and 41 minute free training course download available to our visitors).
Jassen: OK, you’ve mentioned outsourcing several times throughout our call tonight-
James: I did? (Laughter)
Jassen: You have, there are certain things you have – you and I tend to outsource some, different things because I’m more into the accounting realm then you are so I’m perfectly comfortable doing those things where you are going to outsource that, everybody’s got different strengths and weaknesses so for someone listening to this that says ok I get the concept but I don’t think I can do this or that and instead of using that as an excuse explain to our listeners how they can inexpensively and effectively outsource some of these things that we’re talking about in order to make it happen rather than just you know letting it go with I get it, I see the value but I can’t do that.
James: OK, I will try to give the five minute version so that we’re not on the phone until tomorrow- (Laughter) -the five minute version of this is that there are lots of websites online that and I’ll name a few there’s odesk.com, there’s Guru.com, there’s Elance.com those are three websites that I can think of off the top of my head plus you can go post a help wanted ad on craigslist in your local market-
Jassen: Oh yeah.
James: -or Backpage.com
Jassen: Right.
James: So there’s five or six websites, I don’t know how many I named five websites that I can name off the top of my head where you can go there and post up a description of the job you’re looking to do and you’ll have people bid. Now here are some things that you could outsource number one is you can outsource the concept of writing articles or even putting the articles on your website for you, you can go even hire someone to go build your website for you, I offer a very small number of that service so if you need your website set up you can contact me and I’ll see if I’ve got time to do it for you because I can actually do that relatively quickly and can get everything you need set up for you or you can go outsource that. Another thing you could do is you could hire someone to keep your advertising up on classified ad websites I think I mentioned Craigslist and Backpage as classified ad type websites where you can keep your -you know “handyman available to do these types of job” ad up on those sites so very specific ones about specific niches you have or free offers for special reports or audio downloads and keep those up on the classified ad websites for you, you can hire someone to do it almost as if you had an assistant that took 20 minutes a day just to make sure that your ads are still up-
Jassen: Right.
James: -that’s easy to outsource and there’s lots of people that would love to do that especially people stay at home moms, older people, handicapped people that they’re just looking for little piecemeal jobs all over the place. They’re not necessarily looking to do 40 hours a week they couldn’t do it if they wanted to because their schedules crazy or whatever it is and they’d be willing to do little jobs like that for you and you can outsource those. You can also hire someone to coordinate placing the articles or ads on other people’s websites or newsletters. You can go contact you know real estate agents and say “Hey here’s a great article on tips for preparing your house for sale why don’t you go post that up on your site” and that could be a way you could market yourself but if you’re not willing to go do that because you’re out there actually doing the handyman work during the day you can hire someone on one of these outsourcing websites for a very nominal fee to do emails to your real estate agents in your local market and try to build relationships and contact them that way and they can say “I’m their virtual assistant or I’m their personal assistant and I’m helping him with that, he’s out there working on houses today but you’re welcome to call him on his cell phone if you ever need to talk to him directly and then just have your virtual assistant be giving out your cell phone number.
Jassen: Right.
James: That’s the best way to do it and so those are a couple different ways- let me see if there’s a couple other ones here you can hire someone to contact other owners of websites and do some posting of articles on there or like we talked about before doing some social media stuff you could – although I don’t really recommend this for most people you could hire somebody to go do your social media blogging you could go and have someone go and update your Facebook account, update your Twitter or update LinkedIn, I mean a lot of like really high end professionals do that, I mean do you think Britney Spears is updating her Twitter account?
Jassen: Oh, probably not.
James: Yeah, do you think Donald Trump is updating his Facebook account?
Jassen: Absolutely not.
James: Yeah, and so you could go hire someone to take care of that for you but I don’t think it’s important enough to do it I think you could just build that relationship if you’re into that and be real about things but you could outsource it if you wanted to and so those are some different ideas on outsourcing.
Jassen: OK and we’re what two thirds of the way through our outline and we’re at the hour mark I believe so-
James: OK good we’re speeding up.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want access to our full 7 hour training course? Upgrade to “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” today to get instant access and take your handyman business to the next level.
In some other recent posts I’ve been discussing selling your house in a weekend.
Let’s talk about step number 5 in selling your house in a weekend using a round robin auction, and that is advertising your house for sale on websites.
If you have a website for your business where you normally list properties for sale, go ahead and put this property up and then on all of your marekting include that for more information go to whatever your website address is in order to get additional information.
In addition to that though, to build awareness for this particular house for sale, you should also consider advertising on websites that have free classifieds or that have paid classifieds that you know have solid traffic for real estate. So if your local paper is going to charge you an extra $10 or $15 in order to put your house on their website in the classifieds section, you want to do that. You also want to go to some of the websites that have free classifieds where people look for housing. One of the big ones that’s nationwide, or at least it’s in most of the major cities, is CraigsList. Go ahead and go on there, put your house up for sale and run essentially the same ad that you would run for classified if it’s a classified-sized ad or the same ad that you’d run for a display ad that’s a little bigger. For our Real Estate Investor Bronze Members I have some additional information on how to do this (including some special considerations and recommendations including access to Sell Your House In A Weekend plus over 100 other audio courses for real estate investors) on the Real Estate Investor Wiki. Or you could put a lot more information on there if they’re going to give you the space in order to do that. So, go ahead and put up your house for sale on all the websites that you can possibly do in order to get the maximum awareness out for your house. You’re really trying to raise awareness by doing this massive marketing campaign.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. If you have not yet seen the special free downloads page for real estate investors, check it out now.
