Yell dot com

[Mesterh]

Interesteing thread this, I hear many people say that an £800 pound job from yellow pages/yell.com has paid for their £800.00 advert in one go. They feel pleased with themselve that the advert worked!

 

Its a kind of delusional madness suffered by the same people that think they get the money back when they spend on work tools etc!

 

If you allow an advertising budget of say 5% then an £800 pound job has £40.00 available to go towards advertising. So to pay for an £800.00 pound advert you woudl need it to generate £16,000 otherwise your just paying for it out of all the other jobs you do.

 

Interesting thinking on that one maybe my thoughts on expenditure are way out but what I do is.

 

 

With spending on tools etc I usually work out that it costs me 4 times as much to pay for the item.

 

ie spend £1000 on a new saw with the tax back and wages spent on time doing work plus overheads etc it takes £4000 of work to pay for it.

[Rupe]

Thats a good way to look at it. Id say that the percentage of costs that goes towards tools is way more than towards advertising, so your way is about right? I bought an 088 last year and it has done 1200 pounds worth of work that I could have just about managed with an 066 so all it has done is saved me the difference in time between struggling with an 066 ( its the ringing up mostly not the felling) and breezing it with an 088. This difference is significant but only half a day I guess. So I'm £250 up so far. Another three jobs like that and I break even on the saw.

 

But a saw has its whole lifespan to make up its money. Advertising is an annual "fee" so an £800 advert must make its profits within a year before the tax, sorry fee has to be paid again.

 

If we agree that 25% of income can go towards tools then we would agree that no more than 5% can go on advertising? So one job to pay for the advertising is unlikely.

 

 

In reference to what i said above with people thinking they get the money back on tools, I meant the notion that you get it back through tax, not through the money earned from the tool itself. Like when you say you've spent 1000 on a saw and then some numpty say "but you claim that back don't you"

Edited June 3, 2009 by Rupe

[Mesterh]

Like when you say you've spent 1000 on a saw and then some numpty say "but you claim that back don't you"

 

Yeah how many times have I heard that!

If that was the case I would be buying new kit every year and scrapping the old stuff.

 

Why people think that if you spend 10k on equipment your tax bill drops by 10k is beyond me

[Rupe]

Exactly, yet some of these people run businesses!

 

Its the same idea as "getting the VAT back" instead of the reality of just giving it away in a different direction!

[Arborlord]

o is the yellow pages any better where is the future of tree service advertising

[Clark Forest]

Another way of geting your website on the 1st page of google etc, is to get everyone you know to do a search for your own site.

 

For (what I hope will be!) pretty obvious reasons, I can't give away any secrets here, but that's not going to make any difference (sorry!).

 

There are plenty of ways to be help your site to be found in Google / Yahoo / MSN etc, but this isn't one of them I'm afraid. Might save someone a bit of wasted time & effort!