Advertising Information

Advertising has come a long way since people used to carve messages into the bottoms of sandals, and it takes a little bit of research to make that progress do more for your small business.

I say small business because I own and operate a small business specializing in helping small business make the most of their advertising budget by combining different forms of advertising. Print advertising will never disappear, as wonderful as the internet and television are there is still no substitute for flipping through a newspaper or sitting in your favorite chair by the window checking out some of your favorite magazines. The problem with print advertising be it newspaper or magazine for most small business owners is the cost. Unless you commit yourself to advertising in multiple issues you will not get the best prices and for most of us that usually results in purchasing a smaller ad than we had hoped for. One of the biggest downfalls of newspapers is the lack of target marketing capability, about the only thing you can tell from most newspapers is where the majority of the subscribers live although you can get other demographic info like income/age/education bracket but that's more info than we need. Magazines do offer an advantage here by appealing to a much more specific type of readership, demographic, target market or whichever buzz word you prefer but that too is going to come at a higher premium with similar sacrifices to the quality and size of ad you would like to run.

Television, like magazines can be very useful in reaching a very specific group of people with your advertising, for example if you have a bait and tackle shop you can just purchase advertising time during "Fishing With Fred" as opposed to purchasing your time slot during the local news. If there is a television show that you know reaches the people you know would benefit from your product or service you can contact the producers to find out how to buy commercial spots during their program. Cable companies often offer discounts on commercial production with the purchase of commercial airtime or "spots" as they are called. These spots usually are either 15 or 30 seconds long. With the falling costs of video cameras in addition to computer video editing hardware and software the cost of a television commercial is much more affordable than most people think, you might even be able to make one yourself.

Enter the web site, the most "bang for your buck" an advertising dollar can buy. Nothing can provide more information to a potential customer than a web site, giving them hours or even days worth of information. Offering a place to show photos, videos, maps and tons of other info most of us could never afford to put into a tv or print ad. Combining your web site with your other forms of advertising can lower your overall advertising costs by allowing you to place a smaller ad which now contains your web site address and your basic contact info and some key information about your business and reduce that thirty second tv spot to a fifteen second spot. If you really crunch the numbers you can reduce the cost of your print and tv advertising enough to pay for your web site and it's hosting. And don't forget having a web site opens up all sorts of advertising methods and venues that other forms of advertising could not begin to hold a candle to.

Fred Ost is a writer, web designer and owner of Pocono Media web design. He is also a founder of, and staff writer at the free independent artits community at http://www.scptv.net.