According to Start Up Journal small businesses are less and less dependent on the traditional Yellow Pages for advertising.
Some small-business owners are forsaking traditional advertising venues for online advertising — including ads in search engines Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. and free listings in online classifieds sites like Craigslist. Others are using Internet firms like Spot Runner Inc., which help small businesses create affordable commercials and buy air time for those ads in local television markets — something that’s usually too costly for smaller firms.
FYI SpotRunner advertises primetime Central California ads on ESPN for $44, Bravo network for $18 and AMC for $13 by purchasing otherwise unfilled air time. Worth checking out but I suspect if you’re in “Buck Snortk, TN” (a real town by the way) they don’t handle your local cable network, though they could produce the ad.
As someone fascinated by Craigslist, I found this information amazing too…
About a year ago, Perrone Maintenance Corp., a carpet-cleaning business in Brooklyn, N.Y., was running weekly print ads in several local newspapers. “I was spending a lot of money,” says Don Perrone, the company’s owner.
In July, the company, which does about $100,000 in annual revenue, began posting an ad on Craigslist New York City. Mr. Perrone, who is also a New York City detective, posted an ad that contained several photos, including one of the cleaning machine and another of a living room displaying a clean carpet. The listing also contained the company’s telephone number and a link to its Web site. Today, Mr. Perrone says, he gets about 90% of his business from Craigslist. “I stopped the newspaper ads after a week on Craigslist,” he says, “because I was getting about 15 calls [a day] from Craigslist, and half of them led to steady service contracts.”
Note: in competitive markets like San Francisco and New York, you have hundreds of service ads placed daily.
If poisting once gets your ad lost, delete the previous ad and repost it at other times in the day, not just “once a week” as the reporter mentioned in the Start Up Journal story. They’re obviously oblivious to how Craigslist works. The only time this isn’t true is if a prospective customer comes to Craigslist and searches for information.
james on May 16th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
hey great blog post. we are creating a similar free ads site in brasl called RedeParede.com Craigslist hasn’t translated to portuguese or spread to other cities in Brasil and we thought it time to offer free ads to Brasilians also. Come visit us. Classificados Gratis Brasil
Ed on September 19th, 2006 at 3:29 pm
Spotrunner’s biggest direct competitor Cheap-TV-Spots.com produces better quality custom TV ads for less than Spotrunner. Unlike Spotrunner, CheapTVspots.com allows national airings of both 30 and 60 second ads. CheapTVSpots also will produce a web-sized version that their clients can distribute or post whenever they like. The other difference is that Cheap-TV-Spots.com does not tie the client down with long term contracts. Cheap-TV-Spots has the quickest 1 week turnaround time and generally offers more flexibility during the start up phase. This flexibility allows TV to work very well with web and print advertising.