Gunn man,
I wish I had your rates from the newspapers. I tried the classifieds business section last year for just a couple of months during the summer and the absolute bottom dollar I could spend was $85 a month. At the time, there were 10 other pw's listed and 4 of them had large text, bold lines, and overly descriptive captions and all 4 of these are at the top. Paper's policy is the more u pay the closer to the top u get. There is only one company that lists year round in this section and they have been in operation for 25 years. The smaller, local community paper that targets a wonderful market of neighborhoods had their best deal at 1/8 page, 6 month commitment, black and white for $113 a month. So far, after two months in the larger paper (85,000 daily distribution, 150,000 weekends and wednesday) I have received one call that did not result in a sale. In the smaller paper, (3000 - 5000 distribution) I have received one call after 4 months that did turn into a job.
Now, not to say that anything u stated is incorrect, but I can't afford to wait for these forms of advertisement to have effect. I didn't get into the yellow pages until august of last year but that ad has far and away paid for itself. Cold calls were the best source of jobs for me last year and the second best was working a deal with a local store owner that allows his customers (same neighborhoods as the smaller local paper) to run tabs. I cleaned his deck and he allowed me to put a flyer in his monthly statement. I spent about $30 printing the fliers and received close to $10,000 in work from them. They went out to about 450 people. Door hangers were my next best and just yesterday I got a call from a door hanger that was put out last June. And yes, I did receive one complaint last year about the door hangers. It had fallen off her door and onto her freshly painted deck and the color ran from rain and marked the deck. Turned out that a wet rag took the stain off. I recommend getting out of the door hangers as much as possible, as your time is best spent cleaning rather than marketing and I hate approaching people's doors but I always wear a company shirt, slacks and keep the fliers in plain sight so anyone can see what I'm doing without too much speculation. I've tried post cards too but I need to spend the money and get the very best list that I can, I wound up wasting a lot of money on postage to undeliverable addresses. I think I got about a 1% return on cards that were actually received.
Sorry for this getting long, but I just wanted to share what has and has not YET worked for me. I would encourage everyone to try everything at their disposal until they are filling their weeks consistently with work and then u can begin to fine tune and choose what is working best.
By the way, congratulations on the home show. I'm hoping to have a booth next year so I might be hitting you up for tips. Out of curiousity, which pictures did u think people found the most impressive? and what was the most requested service?
John