4 Effective Ways to Promote Your Big Garage Sale

Every once in a while, you’ll look around your house and realize you have too much stuff. Some of it has to go. After all, let’s face it, if you still haven’t found a place for that antique lamp that’s been sitting in your garage for the past two years, it doesn’t belong in your house anymore. 

With this realization, comes the urge to get rid of all the excess stuff you have lying around your house. And what better way to do it than to have a good old-fashioned garage sale? To throw a successful garage sale, however, you have to be smart about promoting it. You may have the most incredible items to sell, but if no one’s coming around to see them, then your efforts are a waste. 

There is so much you can do to advertise your garage sale once you decide to organize it. In this blog post, we’ve compiled some tried and tested promotional strategies for you to throw the most successful garage sale in your neighborhood.

Let’s take a look!

1. Take an ad out in the local newspaper

A lot of the people who will be interested in a garage sale will be people who live close to you or in the general area. No one’s going to drive thousands of miles to look at used stuff. So your best bet is to get the word out in your neighborhood before anything else.

If there’s a local paper or magazine that everyone reads religiously in your neighborhood, put an ad for your garage sale in there. Local publications usually don’t charge a lot and if you give them the content to publish, you’ll likely get a great deal from them. 

A good way to go about this is to create a digital poster and ask the publication to print it wherever they have space in their paper. If you’re not sure how to make your own posters, check out websites online, like PosterMyWall, that have retail poster templates that you can customize and design in minutes. 

When making your poster, make sure to add specific information about your sale – for example, the most valuable items you’re selling as well as your address, date, and time of the sale. You should schedule the ad ideally a week before your garage sale date. That’s far enough from the date for people to be able to plan their visit and close enough so they don’t forget about it. 

2. Hand out flyers in your neighborhood

There’s nothing quite as effective as advertising face to face, getting people’s input, and answering any questions they might have on the spot. Distributing flyers allows you to do all that seamlessly.

Make a flyer distribution schedule. Start your distribution about two weeks in advance and work your way forward from there. Make sure to always hand out flyers during rush hours so that you can reach more people. Here are some places to hand out flyers:

• Local malls
• Outside grocery stores
• Parks
• Outside movie theatres
• In people’s mailboxes

For better results, you should also try door-to-door flyer distribution, particularly for people who live on your street or in your block. To make a stellar flyer, try this online flyer maker that’ll help you create incredible flyers in minutes. 

You can also repurpose your flyers and put them up as posters around your neighborhood. And if you want to make a new poster quickly and efficiently, try this online poster maker to make a poster that’s truly gorgeous and professional.

3. Advertise online

If you want to get a bigger reach for your garage sale, head on over to the Internet. Sites like Yard Sale Search and Garage Sale Finder allow you to post about your sale and get customers. And because these websites aren’t particularly stingy about word limits, you can describe your sale in detail and help people get a better idea of what it is you’re selling.

Posting about your own garage sale on these sites is incredibly simple. Simply click on the option to list your own sale and follow the instructions for adding your information.

Because these sites post the sale as soon as you add it, it would be a good idea to add your sale a day or two before it happens so that it doesn’t get drowned underneath a pile of other sale announcements. 

Also, share the sale posters you created on your personal social media pages as well. Let your friends and family know that you’re hosting a garage sale, and invite them over to come and have a look at the items. 

4. Put up a sign

Before you go ahead with this strategy, check your local laws regarding putting up sign boards around your neighborhood. You may need a special permit. 

Once you’ve taken care of the legalities, create a couple of garage sale signs using a cardboard sheet and permanent marker. Attach wooden bamboo sticks to your signs and stick one in your yard. Stick the others close by, for instance, in a nearby park, or in someone else’s yard (get their permission first, of course). 

A creative way to go about this would be to create signs with arrows that guide people in the direction of the garage sale. This way, anyone who’s passing by the signs on the day of the sale and has a few minutes to spare will be able to make it to your sale. 

Make sure to put up the signs on the day of the sale. You don’t want people showing up to your house on the wrong day. 

Final thoughts

Use both location-based strategies like newspaper ads, flyers, and signs, and Internet strategies like social media and garage sale websites, to get the word out about your sale and bring in as many customers as possible. Remember that the timing of your promotion is crucial in this regard. So start your planning at least a month in advance so that you have plenty of time to promote effectively.