For those of you who are just joining my journey of starting a handyman business, you can get caught up here. If you have been following along, thank you!

After I wrote my last post, I was thinking of what to write about next. Originally I thought of focusing on my experience with GoogleAds. It seemed like a good topic when it popped in my head at the end of my last post.

However, I don’t really understand exactly what goes on behind the scenes to truly educate anyone. So I will focus on what I have learned so far and what I plan on doing in the future with advertising both digital and physical.

So as you know I have been trying to build my handyman business since 2022. I have gone from The Hive Contracting & The Hive Woodworks to The Hive Works. I have tried most of the free and lower cost options. Obviously the social media giants facebook and instagram. I dabbled in TikTok, and it is another way to display your work or products.

For my business social media is great to showcase the work I have done. However, it’s not very good to get business. With the exception of Facebook, I can’t target my posts to a specific area I want to have customers. With facebook at least I can post on groups to get in front of a more targeted area or client base. I am still working on learning and have already learned one valuable lesson. There are a lot of other people using this free method and it is very easy to get lost in the shuffle. Perhaps I am not dedicating enough energy on getting my name to float on the top of the pool.

I have had some better success with Google ads. It was pretty easy to set up, within a few minutes I had a nice ad posted and running on various platforms. The great thing about Google ads is that you only pay for clicks. So if someone sees my ad on YouTube, I only pay a small fee if they actually click on it and come to my website. I was getting quite a few clicks, but not to many converted into actual jobs. Actually only one job after running the ad for a month. It cost me almost $300 to run that ad and only got a small job from it. The job payed enough to break even and I was very excited to get it. However it was not the rush of clients I envisioned. Then something weird happened.

I got an email from Google ads telling me my ad account was suspended. I was so confused. What happened? I didn’t change anything on my ad or website! The email said I violated Googles circumventing policy. I followed the link to learn what this was about, but none of the examples given as reasons fit anything I was doing. I certainly did not do anything intentional to break a policy.

So I followed the instructions to get to the issue and fix it, but no luck. I filed an appeal, well I thought I did, but nothing improved. I did not hear from anyone regarding my issue. Time went by, I got really busy with my day job and completely forgot about the issue. Until a few weeks ago when my wife and I made a big decision!

I am going to go into more detail on the decision in another post, so stay tuned. But back to the issue with Google Ads, now I really needed to fix it. So I got to work on it. I tried to file another appeal through the help tab in Google Ads site…..no luck. It’s pretty much a basic form to fill out, general information about my business and website, with a section to explain the issue. One required field is for the website address linked to the ad. So I put in my website as I normally would: www.thehiveworks.ca. Clicked submit and immediately got a note telling me to fix a field. The field highlighted in red was for my web address. The instructions said to try a different format. So I typed: HTTPS://www.thehiveworks.ca. Again, no good. ARGHHHH!!!! So I tried: HTTP:www.thehiveworks.ca, you guessed it, No Bueno.

So I found a number to call. This was unfortunately the only number I could find to talk to an actual human. I spoke with a gentleman who too all my info down and listened to me vent. He said he will email me a link to a different form to fill out. I got the link, followed it to……THE SAME FORM. WTF….

I tried hoping maybe something was different, but nope. So I called again and spoke to another gentleman. I asked to speak to someone in the technical department, as the only number I could find was for sales. He told me that the technical department doesn’t have phone support! Google is a huge company but does not have the ability to help people one on one, what a shame. This salesman told me he will email me a new link along with another secondary link. I followed the secondary link first hoping it would be the path to resolution. It was not, it just sent me to a list of issues that could cause my account to be suspended. The other link sent me to the same form I was originally having an issue with.

Furious, I left it alone for the rest of the day. When I got home I talked to my wife about my experience and told her I am going to try one last time on her laptop. Up til now I was using my IPad to fill out the form. When I used her laptop, boom form filled and sent. I received a confirmation email within minutes telling me I would have a response within 5 business days. When I woke up the next day I had an email from Google Ads! Congratulations! Your account is no longer suspended!!!!

So here I am trying to figure out how to make a great website and start advertising with zero experience. Yet Google, the biggest search engines in the world can’t tell me that using a tablet on their website doesn’t work?

The lesson I learned and I hope it will help you, is that this is not easy. But it isn’t impossible if I can get this website to this point, so can you. I will start my ad back up and keep trying to use facebook to advertise. I will let you know how it goes in a future post.

Next post will be a big exciting announcement. Subscribe if you are interested.

Thank You for your time!!