10 Steps To Profitable Print Advertising

The best place to be is on a right-hand page, near the right margin, above the fold. Main news is generally the best section, since it has the highest readership, but remember your target audience. Appealing to college students? Choose the entertainment or fashion pages. Advertising convenient hours for working women? Buy space in the business section.

The most important consideration is to get next to editorial material—a story, column or photograph. Avoid the "buried" position, surrounded by other ads, which some refer to as "the readership cemetery."

Simple testing and follow-up techniques can tell you how your ads are working and which newspapers work best. You can test headlines and other elements by doing a "split run." Run an ad in half the copies of one newspaper; run the same ad with a different headline (or illustration, ad size, whatever you want to test) in the other half. Include a coupon offering an incentive such as a discount or free gift. Write a different code number on the coupon for each half of the run, counts up the coupons and you’ll see which headline worked best.

You also can use coupons to test newspaper effectiveness. Run the same ad in several papers, again including coded coupons. Count how many coupons came in from each newspaper, and you’ll see which paper worked best. Test several types of ads, offers, sizes, newspapers and days of the week until you come up with an "optimum ad, then run the ad with confidence. Remember that consistency plus repetition equals sales. And at the end of the year, you’ll realize that advertising is fairly low-cost for the returns you get.