What different ways do you know of marketing a business?

[Jo]

I have a couple of suggestions for you:

1) Ask all your happy customers to give you the names of two referrals that you could contact to do their plumbing.

2) Ask any satisfied customers to write some testimonials that you could use in any promotional materials.

3) Try to build some relationships with local realtors/estate agents who are likely to have contacts with Landlords and may even know some that would be interested in having some work done.

4) Finally, make the most of free advertising online. Here are a few suggestions:

gohuman,com - usually very good if you want to target a market in a particular zip code
Craigslist- good to target a city - but your advertisements have to be renewed regularly and there is a lots of spam on the site. Your advertisement only appears on the top until the next person places a listing, causing yours to drop lower down on the screen.
Classifieds,org
sell,com - mostly paid advertising, some free available
oodle,com -looks pretty good, but I haven't tried it myself
backpage,com : I've been told this is good, so it's worth a look

And here are a couple of others I've just come across -- I haven't looked at them, but you might want to.
adpost.com
epage.com

The first one, gohuman,com is really good because you can link your listing both to a category and a zip code so it gets targeted at the particular area you want it to be seen. I hope you won’t mind me suggesting that you get your existing customers and friends to post an endorsement on the site to make potential customers a bit more comfortable with you because they will see you have a good reputation.

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Good luck,

Jo