Word of mouth advertising is probably the BEST method to advertise for your fledgling daycare.  Word of mouth could be as simple as your husband talking to his friends at work letting them know that you provide daycare from your home, or your parents telling their card playing friends that their daughter now offers a great new, clean daycare in their area and those people telling their children about you.

When starting your marketing campaign, it would be a good idea to work out a budget before starting.  Decide how much you are willing to spend over a period of time and try to stick as close to that as possible.   If your budget is zero, at least that’s a start.  But as with everything, remember, it takes money to make money.  With a budget of zero, it’s still possible to market your daycare, but is just a slower process.  Marketing budgets don’t need to be huge, even $50 a month is something that can be worked on.

Whatever you do, when starting a marketing plan, do not underestimate advertising your home daycare on the Internet.  There are many free websites that offer advertising in your local area including sites such as My New Daycare.com.  These type of sites offer visitors lists of daycare facilities in their local area and some times offer reviews of the facilities as well.  A lot of the time, you can login to your account on these websites and check how many times your listing has been viewed and, if you have a website, how many times it’s been clicked through.  In addition, these websites generally have a contact form that allows visitors to send you email directly.

Other Yellow Pages style of websites such as Kudzu.com are also a valuable resource, but aren’t as targeted and many times are paid sites.  These types of sites generally have more visitors, but the percentage of people looking for actual daycare locations may be less. 

What is the difference between paid listings and free listings on directory websites?  Generally, the difference is your position in their database and how much information they allow you to present to visitors to the directory.  A free listing may only allow you to have your basic contact information and a brief description of your daycare, whereas a paid listing will be listed above all of the free listings and will allow you to display more information about your daycare listing.  Many times you are allowed to upload more pictures, or upload a parent handbook or other types of documents for people to have access to more information about your daycare.  A paid listing will allow you to receive more exposure then a free listing.

Is a paid listing worth the price that you pay?  This is really a personal choice.  Usually, a year’s cost for a listing may equal a week’s worth of tuition for one student.  However, if that directory listing brings in just ONE new child, it pays for itself fifty times over throughout the year. 

I know there are many daycare directories on the Internet today, so which one do you choose?  Do your homework and spend some time looking at each directory and what they offer.  If you were a perspective parent looking for a daycare, would you be able to find your daycare easily?  Is the information presented in a concise manner and is the website easily navigable?  How much information does each site allow you to give to perspective parents?  Are statistics available (how many times your listing has been viewed, etc)?  How SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly is your listing?

If sites offer free listings, by all means, submit your daycare to them!  You won’t lose anything by submitting a free listing.  If you like one or more of the sites best, try a paid listing for awhile and see what happens.  Again, if you receive just one new paid client from the listing, it pays for itself over and over again.

Finally, if you are still having a hard time deciding which sites to list on, contact their support departments and ask them your questions.

Also remember that if you run out of available slots in your daycare, update your listings on these sites to show that you are full, but people can add themselves to your waiting list if you allow this. 

What other methods of online advertising are available?  Another great source for advertising is Google’s Adwords program.  This allows you to display your daycare listing on the Google search engine at the top of all listings for a specific keyword combination.  You bid on keywords against other people advertising for these keywords.  So, for instance, if you want your listing to show up on top of the search for “daycare”, you will probably be competing with many other people for this search term.  Therefore, the price will probably be fairly high.  However, I would recommend using search terms more local to yourself such as “new york daycare”, or “los angeles daycare”, since you are only looking for possible clients in your area.  Keywords that are narrower search results such as this are generally less expensive and will bring a more targeted audience to your listing.

You don’t have a website to point Adwords to?  Starting a website isn’t too expensive anymore, but if you don’t have the expertise, you can point Google Adwords straight to your daycare listing on the SEO friendly daycare listing services such as MyNewDaycare.com.  The listing service should have a SEO friendly URL for you to point to such as http://www.mynewdaycare.com/MyHomeDaycare.html.  If the URL isn’t a friendly URL, it would be best to find a site that does have a SEO friendly URL.  SEO friendly URL’s are easier for people to remember and give your daycare a much easier (and professional) URL to remember.

Hopefully this gives you a little bit to think about when thinking about either starting your own daycare, expanding your present daycare, or are having a hard time bringing in new clients.  This is the first post for this new blog and we hope to bring you more information to help your daycare grow and for parents looking for their new daycare for their little guys.