Thursday 8 May 2008

Silver Saints Day Three

London's newest handyman service has just begun its third day of trading. We have three jobs booked in for today having taken a total of five bookings yesterday.

We have had a few teething problems, mostly to do with our website and our Google AdWords campaign. I spent almost two weeks designing our Google campaign and it worked perfectly for about two hours on Day 1, but then Google stopped showing our ads. I spent the rest of Day 1 trying to contact Google via email to find out what was going on. At the beginning of Day 2 our ads were showing again for the morning but not in the afternoon. JT managed to find a contact telephone number for Google and I spoke to one of their representatives. She explained that because our ad was new and was appearing at the top of the sponsored links so often it was flagged by their computers and our campaign paused until they reviewed it.

Luckily for us they approved our campaign and our ads are now showing again. I thus have high hopes for day 3 in terms of the number of bookings.

The second problem we've faced, is our website, http://www.silversaints.com/ . The website is vital to any professional handyman service, especially in London. Ours just was not ready in time, I forced the website designer to put a half complete website up on Day 1 so we had something to point our Google campaign to. But there is no doubt, given the amount of people that have viewed the Silver Saints website versus the number of booking we have taken. That the uncompleted website is turning customers away. A new version will be uploaded this morning and the final completed version should be up by Monday next week.

In order to try to drum up a few more jobs, JT has been dropping 500 leaflets a day around South West London. The weather in London this week has been ideal for this type of activity!

Keep reading for updates on exactly how things are progressing with our handyman service.

1 comment:

Grey handyman said...

The jobs will come! Given the importance of the website we shouldn't be surprised at a slow start. Good for JT pounding the streets. I've left a number of cards (the big ones) in my local 'yummy mummy' coffee shop and there should be some in a King's Cross hairdressers, either already or soon.