I'm coming in late on this so I may be repeating something. I live in the Wahington DC metro area. My best ads are in community association newsletters. For about $40, my ads go to 4000 homes. I now advetise in two such planned communities. I run the ads during the school year and the ads at least pay for themselves. Usually, they do much, much better than that. They have been a good investment. I have a small yellow page ad that does not bring in as much work as the community association ads. I adverstise pre-purchase inspections, tuning, and repair...get a few inspection jobs and tuning jobs...but I am not sure if the yellow pages are worth it. A chain of music stores in the area also gives out my business cards. Those 5 stores have given me lots of work. The real problem with this area is the transient nature of the workforce. People often live here for only a few years. Sometimes this helps. I recently got a referal from a naval officer in Norfolk, VA, a big NAVY town. I had tuned his piano when he lived here and he gave my name to another officer who was moving here. Another time, a naval officer had me tune his piano, moved, then came back two years later...he called me back last fall. I think the real key to success is to somehow get hooked up with SERIOUS piano players and then do good work. The successful tuners I know are tuning high end painos almost exclusively. Unfortunately, there's only so many of these pianos to go around. I'm lucky...besides tuning painos, I also get hi-dollar technical writing contract work...more than I can keep up with at this point in time. This is good because the piano busines, for me is very slow in the summer. I wonder how many tuners are supplementing there piano income with other work? One RPT here has become a message therapist in order to make more bucks. -- Frank Cahill Associate Member Northern Va
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