Ad in the book

Good input guys, thanks.

Wow, Willy, you had to be knocking them roofs out to justify such an expense! But then again, your near a city whereas my biggest town is 26,000.

This is a good topic.

The yellow pages will let you into the book cheap and then hike the prices up every year until your paying a ridiculous amount.

I started with them in 1997 paying $75 per month for a small ad. Within a few years I was paying a couple thousand per month for a large ad.

I've heard a lot of smart business men say that you need at least 5 good sources of leads for a service business to do really well.

When your business is new you lack the referring customer base and repeat clients that are of course the highest quality leads but after being in business for many years you have developed this.

So according to the guru's we need 4 more sources besides our customer base. The yellow pages can be one of them or you can choose 4 others. It's a personal decision that only you can make.

I also could not get them to give me a reasonable deal. It was just up up up with the prices. Eventually, after being in "the book" for over 10 years I dropped out of it. I continued to get business but not very much new business. That is until I added several other types of lead generation.

I stayed out of the book for 2 years. When i dropped it, I was paying $2,500 per month. They let me back in for $409 but that's for a smaller ad than I had before.

That was the real yellow pages. Here there is also a secondary book called yellow book. 5 years ago I was paying them $1,500 per month. After dropping them for 2 years also, now I'm paying $350 per month for the "exact" same size ad but it is a discounted rate.

People are starting to use the internet more and more to find someone to do business with. My number 1 lead source today is my website and they know this.

They try to counter it by offering their online stuff. Which for me has done nothing but cost me money. It's been pretty much worthless.

You can still get new customers from the books if that's what you want but the number of people using them is dropping every year.

Maybe the home owners have figured out that this is where all the hacks are advertising?

We used to have a 1/4 page years ago, and then we dropped it. since I had ATT for a service provider, we did have a line listing in the yellow Pages. last year we dropped ATT and went with the cable co. for our phone, so now we are not even listed. Heck, most people don't even use the phone books anymore anyway. I never realized we were not in the phone book until a few months ago, but then again, we have all the work we can handle anyway.

SO, we have no listing in the book, we have no web site, only 1 of our trucks has a small logo on it with no phone number, our trailer has no logo or phone number, I don't advertise in any other medium, and I make it hard for people to find me. We are still about 3 months out! HMM... I wonder if that yellow pages thing is a racket?

But then, I'm a tiny company and don't need to high cash flow to keep going. and as for your question, I'd rather get the people that like the feeling of working with a small company instead of a large one.

I never had the largest add in the book, but when I dropped my ad altogether, the only people that quit calling was the window shoppers. so out of the 1-2% of jobs I got from them, my quality high profit customers more than made up for it . Now the only calls I get are froom the YP trying to get my business back.