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  Jason Felstead January 18, 2011 at 9:11pm

  I started off avertising in the parish magazines and got a fair bit of work from that, went with yellow pages as well but i found it to expensive, now my work comes from word of mouth, the best advertising.  If you do good work then it shouldnt be that difficult to get work by word of mouth, but dont sell yourself short.
• PRO

  Paul @ Ashgate Garden Care January 18, 2011 at 9:51pm

  Good quality leaflets to start with and when you get too busy to walk the streets, local magzines.
  
  Word of mouth is also good.
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  Lawnman January 19, 2011 at 10:07am

  I still leaflet drop, good quality card outlining my services. Hopefully if not replied to immediatley its something that might make it to kitchen pinboard.

  Leaflet drop lets you target specific areas where you think your target customers are likely to be, IMO start February then March and April , by then should have established a start on customer base.

   

  I used www.solopress.com good quality A6 flyers, also it might seem a bit daunting but I would recomend you  order 10,000, print costs drop dramatically as volume goes up. 

  if you get say a 1% call back rate this should get you  100 leads.   
• PRO

  Neal Barker @ Etesia uk January 19, 2011 at 11:12am

  leaflets are the best way to start as people have already said you can target the areas you think would hold the best clients for you, what may be a good idea aswell would be some sort of one off discount coupon on the flyer and even print your basic rate if its garden maintance so they could see what the cost would be to keep you on and what they would save with the discount

   this would give you the opertunity to show what you could do for them and make there garden sparkle and even if your not right for that customer after seeing your work they could even put your name forwerd to people they know, word of mouth is started 
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  Sean Busby January 19, 2011 at 11:57am

  One option is to approach a well trusted local garden centre/nursery and ask them if they would pass your name on to any customers who need work doing. You may have to prove your worth to the nursery first as it'll be their reputation on the line as well as yours. It's worked for me, and combined with word of mouth and "over the hedge" enquiries I now have enough regular clients and can make room for more lucrative one-off jobs in between. Good luck.
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  Anthony Toop January 19, 2011 at 2:39pm

  Although i was sceptical at first i have in the past had a reasonable uptake from ads in paper shop windows. A well worded and printed (no dodgy lop sided photocopies that are so often the norm) A5 ad can be suprisingly effective at bringing in a trickle of work to get you out of the starting blocks. From then on word of mouth starts to kick in which helps, but a decent website will be needed to bring the bigger jobs, atleast thats my experience anyway, HTH