One of the best and easiest ways to advertise without having to worry about shelf life of those who would most likely use your services or buy the products from your small business is to use inserts in your local newspaper. A marketing piece might also be to insert our flyers in the daily newspaper. This usually ranges from $23.00-35.00 per thousand if we print the flyers and $25.00-50.00 per thousand if the newspaper prints them. The newspaper rarely prints flyers in house, although some do. They contract it out because their printing presses are all computerized and specialized for that industry only. Large newspapers such as The Los Angeles Times have really neat programs whereby they will mail a flyer to every residence, which doesn't take the paper. Christmas time is a bad time to do inserts because it gets lost in all the shuffle of 20 other color catalogs of every retailer under the sun.

Under no circumstances should you do inserts on Thursdays or Sundays. On Thursdays grocery stores typically come out with their ads and on Sundays, which is usually a newspaper's highest circulation day, all businesses try to get in. A good day is Monday, Tuesday or Saturday. Most people don't read the paper on Fridays because it's the weekend and they've got things to do. Also, you want the phone to ring on Mondays and Tuesdays since they are the slowest days for many small businesses.

Most people call on the first or second day after an ad. Over one-half call immediately and the other one-half call over the next three weeks. When the ads are designed properly, we get 0.5-4.5% market penetration (phone calls). This is three times as much as placing an ad in the newspaper. Ads in newspapers, much like the telephone book, don't work for us very well at all. It's a waste of money and you will be under whelmed by it's dismal results. Weekly newspapers are good if you advertise in the service directory because the shelf life is longer. Inserts in weekly newspapers are awesome. They normally will fall into the same price range as daily newspapers. When placing an order for inserts be sure to ask which days have one to three inserts or no other inserts. This is your best choice for days and it will raise your inquires by 1-2%.

If your current newspaper advertising is not pulling for you the way you wish it were, try inserts next time. Think about it.

"Lance Winslow" - If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance.