Shall I have my Phone Number in My ad?
Jun 19th, 2008 by Sophie
Shall I have my Phone Number in My ad?
This is a question that comes up daily.
My answer is: if you like to talk to people (as opposed to booking all your appointments in email), then by all means make it easy for people to call you. Just make sure you have a lot of info in your ad, so that you don’t have to spend your time telling people what is in your website… etc. etc.
Another concern: what happens if someone searches for your phone number on google… or on yahoo.
For that, I recommend that you “obfuscate” your number, somewhat, and you do it slightly differently every time.
example: original number 123-456-7890
obfuscated versions: 1-23 45-5 7-890, 1 23-4-56-789 0 etc. etc.
you can place dashes in between as well, like 123/4/5/6/7-890
that way, alternating the pattern, you are very untracable.
I am one of those who prefers to do most everything by e-mail initially. I’ve found that putting your phone number in ads tends to attract guys who have nothing better to do than call and pretend they want to book you (wasting your time), or make prank calls to you. Using e-mail first inhibits that to a great extent.
Nice blog site, btw.