Don't Forget Print Advertising

It’s very easy to get a good idea of which competitor advertisements are successful

Let's discuss a scenario… say you run a website that sells a product that is useful to someone looking to make money at home and you would like to get some additional exposure by advertising your product via print advertising.

The first thing you can do is go to your local library and request all the current issues of the "Money Making Opportunity" magazines, as well as, the older issues going back a year or so. You can then scan through each issue and examine the advertisements which are similar to yours. You should also check to see which advertisements have continued to appear in the publication over time.

If an advertisement continued to appear in the publication for several consecutive months, then you can be pretty sure that it is a moneymaker. Why? Simple. Nobody will continuously spend money on advertising that does not product a profit.

Studying these repeat advertisements is also one of the best ways for a beginner to learn how to create good advertisements

Many of the great Internet marketers will tell you that they became great marketers by studying the techniques of mail order marketers. As mentioned earlier, mail order marketers typically operate at lower profit margins because they have more costs (postage & printing), so their advertisements have to pull more orders to be successful.

Study the small display and classified ads that continue to appear in the magazines month after month. These ads are very likely producing a profit for their owners. And keep in mind, these small display and classified ads are the equivalent of the Internet marketer’s Google Adwords ads.

Also study some of the books written by the experienced mail order pro’s. I especially recommend picking up Joe Sugarman's Advertising Secrets of the Written Word.

Print advertising mediums tend to have a long shelf life, so print advertisements can continue to pull orders for months and even years!

Once you place your ad in the magazine, newspaper or catalog, the ad doesn’t disappear at the end of the month. The ad will continue to be in that publication. Granted, the ad won’t be printed in any newer publications unless you renew it, but many people keep magazines lying around for months, and even give them to friends and family to look through. So your one ad can continue to draw prospective customers to your website several months after it was produced.

You can create a web page for each ad to see how well the ad is performing

In order to be a successful marketer, you need to track how well an ad performs – how well it brings you prospects, or how well it brings you customers.

If someone types your URL from an ad they saw within a magazine, then how will you know that person went to you website as a result of looking at your magazine ad? Well, a good way to track these visitors is to create a duplicate web page for that ad. It isn’t hard.

For example, if you’re selling widgets at www.widgets.com, you can place a print ad that instructs the prospective customers to go to www.widgets.com/info.htm. The info.htm web page can be a duplicate of the default web page at widgets.com. You can see who and how many potential customers came from your magazine ad by extracting all the requests for the info.htm page from your web logs.

You can target your audience very well

As you probably already know, it doesn’t do much good to place an ad selling fishing tackle in a mothers-to-be magazine. In short, you need to target your customers.

Targeting your customers is not too difficult in the print advertising world. Go to your local library and take a look at the popular magazines that fit your topic. Also ask the librarian if they have the current Standard Rate & Data Service (SRDS) directory. The SRDS directory contains the advertising rates, circulation and other basic information of newspapers and magazines within the advertising industry. You can probably find at least a dozen publications that fit your target market.