If you have unlimited capital behind you, and can afford to persistently advertise your product until you are successful, save yourself some time and skip this article.

If however you have a limited budget, you will have to make every dollar count in your advertising efforts.

You can have the greatest product in the world, light years ahead of any competition, and it can sell for half the price, but the only person who’s going to buy it from you is your mother.

Unless you tell the world about it !!

The key to successful advertizing is persistence.

Back in the “old days” when I was in Direct Mail Order all the research showed that people had to see an ad 7 to 10 times, on average, before they bought the product.

Yes I know, that was 1,000 years ago, but guess what – people are still people. Their brains haven’t changed or their attitudes. If anything the Internet has taught them to be more cautious about throwing their hard- earned money around.

You have to learn the difference between cost per sale and cost- effective. In advertising, companies talk about “reach” in terms of “cost per thousand”. That means that a large ad that will cost $100 and be seen by 1,000 people has a cost/thousand (or cost/m) of $100, but a small classified ad that costs $20 and reaches 1,000 people has a cost/m of $20.

Now that is a little simplistic, because of course other factors affect the readership.

If your $20 classified is half way down a page full of similar ads, then less than a third of the readers will have the patience to wade through them all, and your ad will not be read.

Search for on-line publications that have a readership of at least 1,000 subscribers, and that carry relatively few ads. You need a “content-rich environment” to surround your ad. That way people will read through the publication, and see your ad.

What did I mean by cost/sale ? That’s easier to explain. If an ad costs you $20 per insertion and has to be seen 8 times to make a sale, your total ad cost is $160.

Let’s assume that your cost to produce (or buy) your product is $20 but don’t forget to include all taxes, shipping and handling costs etc that you expend.

If you charge $40 for your product your net profit is $20, but if you make only 1 sale your cost/sale would be $160/$20 or $80 per unit.

In reality, if there is a market for your product, you will make a sale or two after the first couple of ads, so the cost/sale ratio will constantly change.

Try to write a “Killer” headline that grabs the readers attention, and above all try to keep the content of your ads constant. Remember people will have to see it about 10 times before you’re going to make a sale.

I helped a friend with a commercial garbage pick-up operation many years ago, and one of the things that was a great help with gaining him “name recognition” was a slogan that we had painted on the rear of both of his trucks, and each of his containers.

The slogan read “Satisfaction Guaranteed or Double Your Garbage Cheerfully Refunded !”

As you can imagine this quickly became a talking point with people who otherwise would have never heard of his company.

Another friend established a carpet cleaning company, about 10 years ago. In part I set up a tele-marketing office for him.

Over 50% of the people who refused our offer said “I’ve never heard of you”, and hung up, so I selected one area of town, where we would start to concentrate our efforts in one week.

In the mean-time we sent 2 of out trucks (covered with large logos) to that part of town, and parked them in two seperate high visibility location all day – every work day.

The result- suddenly almost all the people that we contacted knew the name of the company, and our tele- marketing campaign took off.

You don’t always have to spend a fortune to achieve that all-important name recognition.

As a final word don’t forget that many publications, mine included offer FR~E classified ads to subscribers. You should be subscribing to several newsletters anyway, if you really want to learn this business, and if one is offering FR~E ads, take advantage of the offer. Don’t forget about the need for persistence.

Let the readers see your ad over again, until they feel comfortable with you and your product, and their curiosity will take over.

Then you will need to have a well designed sales page in place ready for them to see – and buy.

But that’s another article

Martin Cargill has his website at www.millionsbynet.com
and gives a FREE mini-course at mini-course@getresponse.com
This and his newsletter ” Independence Day Ezine ” are
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