No matter how long you are in business or how many clients you have, there is always a need to continue advertising. After all, some of your clients may not have a great deal of work all of the time, so you want to make sure that you have enough of a client base to cover that period when business is slower. Not only that, if the company is a small one, when business is slow, they may choose to do their own billing, even if it isn’t quite as efficient, in order to save money. All of these are reasons you need to constantly have a database of clients even if it means sometimes that you appear overwhelmed with work. After all, if you do find that you sometimes have more work than you can handle, you can certainly outsource it or ask a family member to help you out for a little while with the overload.
If you have a limited budget, you can choose to use the Internet and some of the free classified sites for your advertising. A website from an inexpensive web host is another means of advertising inexpensively. The cheapest and most efficient way to advertise is certainly word of mouth and the distribution of business cards. Anytime you enter a restaurant that has a jar for business cards, take advantage of it, not for the prize that the free drawing brings but for the exposure. The grocery stores often have bulletin boards where you can place advertisements – tack a business card on the board every time you enter or whenever you notice that the last card you placed is gone. Keep a constant supply of flyers available for distribution, but don’t make yourself a nuisance by placing them on cars in the parking lot at the mall – besides, the owners will probably just throw them away just as you probably do.
The most likely place to place flyers is in the medical offices where the magazines are because everyone reads those while they are waiting for the doctor. If the office staff is willing, ask them to post it in the window by the reception area or in the front window so that everyone can see it. The daily newspaper is quite effective, but also quite expensive, so unless you have a decent size advertising budget or haven’t had any luck other wise, leave the newspaper for a later date.