Few things are as uncertain to a new home business owner as where, when and how to buy advertising. If youve started to research your advertising options you are already painfully aware of the costs involved. Costs that can, literally, put you out of business if not controlled. Yet, without some form of regular, effective advertising your business can stagnate and starve to death. How do you know what is right for you In this article well look at some options, and some ways to measure effectiveness, that should keep you in the money and out of trouble.
Will Your Customers See Your Ad
Advertising is sold based on its reach. If a newspaper, for instance, has a circulation of 100,000 subscribers, ad space will be considerably more expensive than a newspaper with a circulation of 10,000 subscribers. The first reaches ten times more people. Reach can be confusing, however, and it is more accurately an indicator of selling price to the publisher than anything else. As the buyer you must first consider how closely the demographic profile of the publications readers matches that of your customer before you worry about the reach.
Demographic profile may seem like a complicated concept. In this case it simply means the people (demos=Greek for people) characteristics of that publications subscribers. Their income, age, gender, and education levels to name a few of the common demographics measured. Most first class publications gather this information and make it available as part of their sales presentation. Smaller, or less professional publications may have incomplete, or even no, data. If you cant get, or determine, the demographics of a publications readership its probably a good idea to pass on it as an advertising medium for your home business.
Cheap Isnt Necessarily Inexpensive
Often new home business owners see cheap advertising, especially in smaller publications like community newspapers, or association newsletters, and think its a good buy when compared to ad space in larger publications. While the two publications in question may look like apples and oranges, there is a way to convert the apples to oranges and make a reasonable comparison. Simply divide the cost of the advertisement by the total number of projected readers. This will give you a cost per view of your ad in each publication.
Here is a simple example of the conversion at work. The Daily - circulation 100,000 -offers you a business card size ad, for one week, at $1000. The Community Weekly - Circulation 5,000 - offers you the same size ad, for one issue, at $50. Which is least expensive
If you divide the $1000 cost of The Dailys ad by 500,000 (thats 100,000 circulation times the 5 days it will run), you get a projected cost of $.002 per view. If you divide the Community Weeklys cost of $50 by the 5,000 circulation (the ad runs once - its a weekly) you get a cost of $.01 per view. The $50 ad is actually five times more expensive.
This is a hypothetical example, of course. There are many things to consider like the fit of the Community Weeklys demograhic compared to The Daily, and the fact that the Community Weekly will likely have a few more views than the initial 5,000 subscibers. Thats because it will sit in a few waiting rooms until the next issue comes out, but this isnt usually enough to make a big change in the cost per view.
Tracking
The most essential tool in your analysis of ad price and effectiveness is tracking. The cost per view, and demographic match are crucial in making your initial decision to try a publication. The acid tests for continued advertising in any medium are cost per call, and cost per sale. Two important measures you cant get without running some test ads and carefully tracking the response rate for each advertisement you run.
There are many ways to track response rate. The ad can request that caller ask for a specific individual by name. When a call comes in for Mr. Bishop, for instance, you know they saw the advertisement in The Daily. You can ask that orders be directed to a specific department. When an order arrives addressed to department CW100 for instance, you know that order came from your ad in the Community Weekly. A less exotic, but very effective method, is to simply ask each caller, Where did you hear about us, and then enter the answer in your tracking software.
Once you have your tracking results use the same type of calculation you emplyed in determining the cost per view before you ran the advertisement to arrive at a cost per call and cost per sale. Divide the cost of the advertising by the number of calls it generated to get the cost per call. Divide the number of closed sales that originated with the ad by the cost to arrive at the cost per sale.
In the end, it is cost per sale that matters. No matter what the cost per view, or cost per call work out to be, your best advertising medium will always be the publication, radio staion, or TV station that provides the lowest cost per closed sale. You cant find that out, however, without running a test ad campaign and good tracking.
Jess Huffman is a Business Consultant and Coach working from his home office in Calgary, Alberta. Jess has helped hundreds of people successfully start their own work from home businesses.
Despite anything you have heard to the contrary, making money on the Internet is not an impossible quest that will take 3 Academy Award winning films to complete.
The recipe for success on the Internet has always been known, the problem is too many wannabe Internet millionaires are ignoring one or more of the essential ingredients.
First and foremost the key ingredient to success on the Internet is having something of value. Though most people think that this ingredient must translate to an actual product, that is not entirely the case. In fact, many successful Internet entrepreneurs do not sell any products at all.
One thing of value that many people overlook though it can be the centerpiece of any good recipe for success is knowledge. Any area where you have more knowledge than the average person puts you in a position to create something of value on the Internet.
Whether you take that knowledge and have an e-book created, or you use that knowledge to create a comprehensive site on a particular subject, your knowledge in that area can become a viable source of income for you.
However, that one ingredient is not enough. Having a product (which can simply be information on a particular subject) is not enough for a winning recipe on the Internet, you need more. The next important ingredient that cannot be overlooked is having a plan.
Throwing a website together and putting it online quickly will have the same results as throwing a souffl into the oven and hoping for the best. In order to truly make money on the Internet you need a real game plan of how to transform your site or series of sites into a source of income.
For many entrepreneurs creating that plan is difficult and that is when it is important to add a second chef to the mix - a website design and development firm. Partnering with the right website design and development firm can help transform your idea, your one ingredient, into a full course meal that can satisfy even the toughest critic which in most cases will be you.
So now you have two key ingredients, a product and a plan - so now what Next you need to get your site noticed and many people forget this very important step. There is no point of opening the worlds nicest widget store in a location that no one gets to.
Search engine rankings are the real estate of the Internet and location is the key! If you truly intend on making money on the Internet you must be willing to invest in search engine optimization. No matter how many e-books on the subject you read, no many how many SEO blogs you review the simple fact of the matter is you need to leave it to the experts - invite another chef into the kitchen, or ideally the chef you invited to help you with the plan can also assist you with search engine optimization.
So may argue that pay-per-click campaigns can be as successful as optimizing a website since you can be immediately placed in the first couple of pages of major search engines. Unfortunately, however, they forget to mention that your pay-per-click campaign will cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars per month with no long-term residuals on the investment.
Simply put - you cannot make chicken salad without the chicken and you cannot have a successful website without search engine optimization. For those entrepreneurs looking for the recipe for success on the Internet you need only 3 ingredients: a product of value; a game plan and search engine optimization. Like any recipe - the quality of those three ingredients will make or break the recipe, therefore get the best of each ingredient your budget will allow.
David Casey is vice-president of sales for SetSitesHigh ( ) an internet design, development, marketing and search engine optimization firm based in New York.