BJM Free Press

10 Tips For Effective Advertising

Writing powerful classified ads doesn’t have to be hard, if you invest some time researching effective copywriting.

 10 Tips For Effective Advertising

1. Don’t try to sell expensive products from a classified ad. Incorporate a two step process. As the reader to visit your web site or email an auto responder for more information. Then send the reader more detailed information about your product or service.
2. Examine how the other marketers compose their sales message. It’s a no brainer, just study ads in the materials you are already reading. Or browse some of the free online classified ad sites. There’s not point in copying other ads, just use them as a guide to effective design for your own ads.
3. Advertise in the right place. Yep, it’s a basic idea. Don’t put a cooking ad in the sports equipment section.
4. Advertise in multiple locations that are appropriate for what you are selling. After you find several advertising venues, read their writing guidelines and practice.
5. Advertise in more than one location at a time to attract as many potential buyers as possible.
6. When people read the same ad over and over, every month, they will likely start to ignore your ad. So freshen up you ads by changing the headlines, use new wording, try different lengths of copy, insert some humor, add more details or interesting facts, include a testimonial.
7. Put a key in your ads so you will know which ads are working. Or use different email address or links in place of a key to see which ads pull the most responses.
8. Build your list by keeping a record of every response you get. Then follow up appropriately with information about your product or service.
9. Use the free classified ad sites to test your ad writing skills before committing to a paid ad in a print publication. Study the ads other marketers have placed at the free sites too. Create a free email account and respond to a few of their ads and see how they market their products and services.
10. Study publications and advertisements you receive offline through regular mail to help you better your ad writing skills.

Resources

• My Instant Swipe File
• Sales Copy Master Class
• Copywriting
• Advertising

ADVERTISING MISTAKES: HOW TO AVOID THEM

Advertising isn’t hard to do. You prepare an advertisement or write a classified ad to sell your product or generate interest to send people more information. But the way most people make mistakes is either by their inability to write effective ad copy or by sending it to be published in the wrong publication. Here are some pointers to follow:

Writing Effective Copy

Never try to sell anything costing more than $5 in a small display ad or a classified ad. First of all, you don’t have enough room to tell people everything they need to know to entice them to order.

Instead, you need to employ the “Two-Step” method of advertising. Request the reader to send you $1 or 4 first-class postage stamps for more information. When they respond, you will send them a brochure, flyer, order form and cover letter so they can place an order for the real product.

Now that pricing is out of the way lets talk about writing your ad copy. The best way to learn how is to read the ads other people have written. Don’t copy them word-for-word, but use them as a guideline to write your own ads. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be writing effective ad copy just as well as the pros.

Here’s an example of an ad you could use to sell automobile wax: Free information on the best wax available on the market. If you care about the lasting beauty of your vehicle, send $1 for complete details to (your name and address.)

Advertising in the Right Publication

Even if you make and sell the best candy in the world, you probably couldn’t sell very much of it to people who are diabetics. The same goes for selling race car parts to women or dentures to teenagers.

Although this may sound a little silly and you think it is only common sense to know this — people will often overlook this fact when choosing the publication they will be advertising in. Instead, they will look for the lowest price for the amount of circulation they receive. Unfortunately, this does not work out.

Even though you need to look for good deals that make it easy on your pocketbook, you will be throwing money away if you don’t pre-qualify the publication you choose.

One way of pre-qualifying the publication is to send for a sample copy. Most publishers will send them to you free of charge for the asking. If you don’t know of any mail order publications, just write to Glenn Bridgeman, PO Box 10150, Terra Bella CA 93270 or William Lee, Rt 1, Box 10790, Madisonville TN 37354 and ask them to send you some. (Be sure to enclose $1 or 4 first-class postage stamps in with your request to offset postage costs.) If you tell them you are new to mail order and are interested in publications to advertise in, you certainly will find the $1 you spent is well worth the effort because both of these publishers are very reputable, honest and helpful.

Study the publication to see what other people are advertising and how they are advertising it. Contact some of the people who sell items similar to your own with the hope of networking with them. You would be surprised how much free publicity you can get just from corresponding, calling and networking with others.

Once you locate a publication you want to advertise in, give it a try for 3 months. If you don’t get any response or only a few orders, try another publication. There are millions of them and eventually you will hit the right target market that will be interested in what you have to sell.

Don’t Stop With One Publication

Just because you locate the target market of people who are interested in purchasing your product there is no reason you can’t advertise in more than one publication. In fact — if you don’t, your ad will become stale. If the same people continue to see your ad every month they will probably get tired of looking at it. Besides, if they wanted the product they would have ordered it by now. Don’t tire them out! Alternate different size ads and get rid of ones that don’t work well.

Leave your ad running as long as it brings in orders for you but also advertise in 5, 10, 20 or 50 other publications also to generate a steady stream of orders and to reach more people.

Key Your Ads

Many beginners in mail order never key their ads so they know what publication people saw their ads in. In fact, I personally never did this myself and ended up losing a lot of money. So please don’t make the same mistake I did.

Keying your ads means that you place a code of some sort in your address so that when people write and order something from you, you immediately will know where they saw your ad. Keep a record of every name and address of the publisher you send an advertisement to. Record the date you sent the ad and the date you received a checking copy, proving that your ad appeared. Also record the “code” you used so you can immediately identify where it came from.

An example of coding your ad would be: If your address is “123 Anytown St,” it could become “123 Anytown St, Suite A” for one publication and “Suite B” for another. The postman will still deliver your mail to “123 Anytown St.”

Of course, if you live in an apartment complex and there are apartment numbers you could turn “111 Johnson, Apt A” into “111 Johnson, Apt A-1″ for one publication and “Apt A-2″ for another.

Post office box addresses are also simple. You could easily turn “PO Box 585″ into “PO Box 585, Dept A-1″ for one publication and “Dept A-2″ for another.

People will sometimes even change their name on the ad for keying purposes. You might see the name “Harriet’s Recipe Book” instead of Harriet Ranger. Harriet might also use “Harriet’s Cookbook” or even “Harriet’s Solution to Stress” on her ads relating to these products. Use your own imagination and pretty soon, keying your ads will be a normal part of your life.

Be sure and keep track (on your Record Sheet) of how many responses you receive from each publication. After 3 months, look over your Record Sheet and get rid of the publications that didn’t do well. You’ll go broke if you spend $10 per month advertising a 2-inch ad if you only receive $1 back in orders. After while you’ll be able to see where it pays you to advertise your particular product and then you can send in larger ads to those publications. Never stop using this method and you’ll never stop getting orders in your mailbox.

It’s a win-win situation for everybody!

Tabloids vs. Adsheets

Another question about advertising that many people have is whether it’s better to advertise in tabloids or adsheets. Many people will sell you information on the best day to mail and the best time of the year to advertise. They think they have it down to a science and will convince you of their methods.

However, there are NO set rules that can be employed by everyone. That’s because there are a wide variety of ways to approach various products. If you sell travel services and read a report that told you not to advertise during the summer months, you’d go broke. The summer is the travel industry’s biggest money-making season!

Don’t get hung up on specific statistics made by people who claim to be expert researchers. There is no way to determine what is best for you than to try it yourself and see what works. You are the person in control of your business and you are where the buck stops. Take advantage of your authority and try every angle you can think of until you determine what’s best for your company’s product and/or service.

Tabloids are a fantastic advertising vehicle and adsheets are too. Sometimes people feel a small 1″ camera-ready ad gets lost in a tabloid filled with 100′s of them. This may be true in some circumstances and not true in others. Do you look at 1″ ads in tabloids? Of course you do. You scan the pages and your eye is always directed to one or two on the page that catches your eye. Ask yourself “why” they caught your eye. Was it because the ad was placed in a specific area on the page? Was it because of the headline or the word “free”?

There are a million different ways to market and sell your particular product or service. What might work for John may not work for Joe. You have to find your own way.

In addition, classifieds sometimes work well in tabloids and adsheets and sometimes they don’t, look in the back of the Globe or Enquirer. Don’t they have page after page of classified ads? If nobody was reading them and responding to them, the advertisers wouldn’t be submitting advertising to the Globe or Enquirer for them. So evidently, people DO read classified ads — even if there are 100′s of them. Test the waters and do what works the best for you.

HOW TO MAKE MONEY RUNNING CLASSIFIED ADS

The cost of advertising classified ads is extremely low-cost in mail order publications. The trick is that you have to run A LOT of them to pay off any money unless the publication is not dominated by classifieds. What I mean is that there are some classified publications where the type is so small that classified ads are too hard to read. People will simply skim them over and more than likely miss yours. Therefore, before advertising in ANY publication whatsoever make sure you write and request a sample copy. This way — you’ll know up front how noticeable your classified ad will be. You also will know the length of classified ad to run. (Example: if most of the ads are short, you can run a longer one and be noticed easier.)

Probably the most effective classified advertising is in national publications like The National Enquirer, Star Magazine and Small Business Opportunities. But who has enough money to pay for a classified ad in these when the rates are $6 to $10 per word? You do! That’s right! Now there is a way that almost everyone can appear in these highly-circulated and target-marketed publications for $50 or less!

First of all, get yourself a Voice Mail Box. You can get these through a wide variety of places but I personally use American Voice Mail. (Contact them by calling 1-800-347-2861 or by writing them directly at 2233 Barry Ave, Los Angeles CA 90064.) You don’t have to live in California to establish service with them. You don’t have to go through a credit check or have valid telephone service. You can even have a PO Box with no street address. Anyone can establish a Voice Mail Service. There are no previous requirements.

Simply call them up and establish your Voice Mail Box over the phone. It will be activated within 24-hours and the charge is around $10 per month. You also have to pay the first and last month’s charges within 10 days after establishing your Voice Mail Box, but $20 is very little to invest for the convenience and marketing advantage that will now be open to you! Once your Voice Mail Box has been turned on and your payment received the company will mail you information on accessing your Voice Mail Box and how to leave a message on it.

Now start placing classified ads asking people to call your Voice Mail Box number instead of sending in $1 or a first-class stamp for more information (like you do in your ads now.) When they call, you will have a recorded message describing your product or service in more detail. At the end of the message, you will ask the person to leave their name and address so you can mail them additional information with an order form.

Now, 24-hours a day, your Voice Mail Box service will be working for you. Once or twice a day, you can call the Voice Mail Box yourself and retrieve your messages (this doesn’t cost you anything.) Write down the names and addresses and immediately send them follow-up materials as promised.

You would be amazed how effective this form of marketing really is. The call doesn’t cost you anything and you have up to 2 minutes on your recording to tell the caller more about what you’re selling. It sure saves classified word space and cost — plus, callers are more excited about your product or service when they hear a “real” voice telling them about it. You’ll get a lot of fantastic leads and increased business!

Here are a few examples of classified ads you can run in national publications that will draw inquiries for you:

• Start your own publishing business. Call (number)
• Make money with me. Call (number)
• Free business information. Call (number)
• Start a real business. Call (number)
• Free gift. Just call (number)
• Make $1,000′s. Call (number)
• Stay home and make money. Call (number)

Of course it depends on the product you are trying to sell. You want to make your ad generalized so a lot of people will call it and listen to your message. You can qualify them and eliminate people not interested in your product or service because when they call, you’ll tell them everything you wanted to say in a classified. If they listen to the entire message and leave their name and address to receive your materials — they are probably interested in what you have to sell.

However, don’t be too generalized. If your product is bookkeeping services, say “Low-cost Bookkeeping services. Just call (number).” If you offer items for re-sell, say “Distributors needed for new product. Call (number).” And if you sell gift-type items, say “Free gift catalog. Call (number).” After you test a few out first in the low-cost publications — you’ll be ready for the big time! Have fun!