Welcome to this week’s Marketing Minute Tip, “6 Secrets To Making Money With Print Advertising, Not LOSING It”. Print advertising can be a tricky business and a pricey one too, particularly if you plan to play in the big sandbox a.k.a. your local daily paper. We’re talking about thousands of dollars sometimes for just a ¼ page ad. An ad that almost no one sees and even if they do, it’s so generic it doesn’t compel anyone to take action. So do you just give up on print advertising? Of course not! You get smart.

Here’s how, but first let’s make a few assumptions:

• Your target market is broad-based and you can’t buy a list.
• You’ve decided your first test will be the newspaper.

Your first ads are going to be advertorials, that’s ads that look like an editorial and read like a news item with a headline that will attract your target market. The headline might read something like, “The 6 Common Mistakes People Make When Buying (fill in your product or service) and How to Avoid Them”.

Now, in most markets there are different kinds of newspapers. There is the main publication, which is usually the largest and most expensive place to advertise. Placement in these publications is at a premium, if you can get it at all.

So the best place to start is the smaller, community based papers. This is a better investment for several reasons:

The community newspaper is usually a weekly publication, unlike the larger daily paper, so it hangs around the household longer and is better read page to page.

The cost to advertise is lower, and since you are in the testing phase you want to make sure your ad pulls. In fact, you may want to use several community based papers for your test.

You can usually request specific placement, which means you can get the premium spots on page 3, right hand side or page 5, right hand side. And if these are not available, you can usually get pages 2 or 4 as your next best option.

Small paper publishers are also more willing to work with you on the layout, font size and so on. And since you want your ad to look like an editorial, your font type and size should be the same as in the publication.

You’re also more likely to be able to get away with saying you don’t want any borders around the ad, nor do you want it to say “This is a Paid Advertisement.” If they do require a border, however, or notification that it’s an advertisement, you can usually make the border around it as thin as possible and put the word “Advertisement” at the bottom, instead of the top.

You can also request that the font size for this unsavoury word be “Mice Type” i.e. as small a font size as the paper will allow.

I’ve shared six different secrets with you here about print advertising, but there are a whole lot more we just don’t have to go into here. If you would like to learn more about the Marketing Strategy we reviewed today go to www.YourMarketingRobot.com

Or, to see more information about our complete membership system, go to www.ProspectsToProfits.net or give one or our reps a call at 1-800-858-8889.

To your marketing success,

Mike Kowalski
President
Automated Marketing Solutions

One Response to “6 Secrets to Making Money on Print Advertising”

1. money making Says:
   August 5th, 2010 at 9:59 am

   what a great post, i like it

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