Any Advice

In 25 words or less ....

Tell us why we should even have our  carpets professionally cleaned and what makes your service better than the other guys.

It is not advertising but marketing you need to learn about.  Positioning your product or service into its niche and then effectively working at that niche.  Did you do any research into what the potential customer is looking for?

Describe who your target customer is.  Then look into what your target spends money buying, what services the customer employs, where you customer spends leisure time.  I take it your customer is not shopping primarily at Walmart, is not a do-it-yourselfer and does not make the TV and computer the focal point of their free time.

Get into the head of your customer, shape your business to fit the mold needed and then find a way to present your message in such a way that the prospect will remember you.

And those directories you are not in yet - see how many links in the search engines are links to the listings in those directories.  Now you know a bit more about getting on the first page of google or yahoo or msn or whatever!

Your business is MARKETING a carpet cleaning service, not cleaning carpets.  You can have a business or a job, depends on how you WORK it.

Nuff said.
 

I think it is a good concept to market your business with a mix of common marketing (flyers) and online marketing.

On many search engines it takes some time to rank well with a new website and a new domain. Older domains are usually ranked much higher.