How To Write “Order-Pulling” Ads – Part 3
In part 3 of our series I have selected some of the common questions that I get.
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
1) What Is The Most Profitable Way To Use Classifieds…
Classifieds are best used to build your mailing list of qualified prospects. Use classifieds to offer a free mini course, booklet or report relative to your product line.
2) What Can You Sell “Directly” From Classifieds…
Generally, anything and everything, so long as it doesn’t cost more than ten – fifteen dollars which is about the most people will pay in response to an offer in newspaper classifieds. These types of ads are
great for pulling inquires such as: Write for further information; Send $3, get two for the price of one; Entrepreneurs wanted, send for product info. I’ve found that it’s better with online classifieds to send prospects to a squeeze page to warm them up and capture their name and email address.
3) What Are The Best Months Of The Year To Advertise…
All twelve months of the year! Responses to your newspaper ads during some months will be slower in accumulating, but by keying your ads according to the month they appear, and a careful tabulation of
your returns from each keyed ad, you’ll see that steady year round advertising will continue to pull orders for you, regardless of the month it’s published. I’ve personally received inquires and orders from ads placed as long as 2 years previous to the date of the response. People hang onto your mailshots!
4) Are Mail Order Publications Good Advertising Buys…
The least effective are the ad sheets. most of the ads in these publications are “exchange ads”, meaning that the publisher of ad sheet “A” runs the ads of publisher “B” without charge, because publisher “B” is running the ads of publisher “A” without charge.
The “claimed” circulation figures of these publications are almost always based on “wishes, hopes and wants” while the “true” circulation goes out to similar small, part time mail order dealers. Very poor medium for investing advertising dollars because everyone receiving a copy is a “seller” and nobody is buying. When an ad sheet is received by someone not involved in mail order, it’s usually given a cursory glance and then discarded as “junk mail”.
Tabloid newspaper are slightly better than the ad sheets, but not by much! The important difference with the tabloids is in the “helpful information” articles they try to carry for the mail order beginner. A “fair media” recruiting dealers or independent sales reps for mail order products, and for renting mailing lists, but still circulated among “sellers” with very few buyers. Besides that, the life of a mail order tab sheet is about the same as a daily newspaper.
With mail order magazines, it depends on the quality of the publication and its business concepts. Some mail order magazines are nothing more than expanded ad sheets, while others strive to help the opportunity seekers with on-going advice and tips he can use in the development and growth of his own wealth building projects.
It may seem strange to be talking about newspaper and magazine advertising to online marketers. As I said in an earlier part of this series, placing ads offline that send prospects to a webpage is very successful. I don’t see a lot of people doing it which opens up the field for you to clean up. Some of your best customers will be those who were looking at traditional ads for information on how to get started online.
5) How Can I Decide Where To Advertise My Product…
First of all, you have to determine who your prospective buyers are. Then do a little bit of market research. Talk to your friends, neighbors and people at random who might fit this profile. Ask them if they would be interested in a product such as yours, and then ask them which publications they read. Next, go to your public library for a listing of the publications of this type from the Standard Rate & Data Service catalogs. (SRDS).
Make a list of the addresses, circulation figures, reader demographics and advertising and decide which is the true costs of your advertising and decide which is the better buy, divide the total audited circulation figure into the cost for a one inch ad; $10 per inch with a publication showing 10,000 circulation would be 10,000 into $10 or 10 cents per thousand. Check a number of places out using this calculation and pick the best ratio.
Write and ask for a sample copy of the magazines you’ve tentatively chosen to place your advertising in. Look over their advertising-be sure that they don’t or won’t put your ad in the “gutter” which is the inside column next to the binding. How many other mail order type ads are they carrying-you want to go with a publication that is busy, not one that has only a few ads. The more ads in the publication, the better response the advertisers are getting, or else they wouldn’t be investing their money in the publication.
To “properly” test your ad, you should let it run thru at least three consecutive issues of any publication. If your responses are small, try a different publication. Then, if your responses are still small, look at your ad and think about rewriting it for greater appeal, and pulling power. In a great many instances, it’s the ad not the publication’s pulling power that is at fault!
