Free Advertising for Your Business

1/6/2015

There are many legitimate ways to get discount advertising, and many ways to get so-called "free" advertising.

This article is about a way to get the cost of your ADS 100% covered, so that your advertising costs you nothing. If done right, you'll even profit from it. There is some work involved, but it's easy, enjoyable work.

First, you need to have your own display ads ready to use. These can be one column inch, two column inch, 3" x 6" or whatever size. What you are going to do is to create your own ad sheet. In other words, you will put your ads on a page, then sell the rest of the space to other advertisers who want to reach the same market as you. Their payments will cover the cost of YOUR ads reaching that market.

Ideally, you will have some small ads on one side of the page, with other advertisers taking the rest of that side, then you can have either more ads or a full page flyer on the back side, with all costs covered, INCLUDING your mailing expenses.

Here's a short course in creating an ad sheet. First, create a heading on a piece of paper. Don't make it too big, because you'll take up valuable ad space. Try to keep it to one inch tall. Leave room for your ad rates, which we'll figure out later. Next, divide the rest of the page the long way into three columns.

If you use a one inch heading, and leave a quarter-inch margin on the top and bottom, you'll have three columns that are seven inches tall, or 21 column inches (3 columns x 7 inches). If you figure your ad rates at $5 per inch, going to 1,000 opportunity seekers, you can get a maximum of $105 from a one-sided ad sheet. If you use both sides, you can get a maximum of $225 (you get an extra inch of advertising per column on the back side, since you don't need the heading).

How do you get other advertisers? Buy inexpensive ads in the ad sheets you receive in the mail. You can use the least expensive, one column inch ads. Tell the name of your ad sheet, the circulation, the ad rates, and, of course, your name and address. This is all you have to do.

If your rates are competitive with the other ad sheets, you'll get the advertisers. Don't worry. When you receive their to reach 1,000 people. Printing them will be $20 - $30. First class postage, which costs $.29 at this time, would be $290 alone. How can you cover that, along with printing expenses, with only $225 or less? There are a few different ways. First, you can advertise a "big mail."

Do this with one inch ad sheet ads. Tell people they can receive a collection of your best offers free by sending postage. Put together a selection of your advertising flyers, along with your ad sheet, and the envelope you will be sending them in. Weigh them to get the number of ounces, and find out the required postage. Put that amount in your ad ("send three first class stamps to:"). You will get a lot of orders that way.

Another way is to use a circular mailing service. These are usually run by people who have their own offers that they want to mail for a lower cost. They will charge by the flyer, usually three to five cents, to include it in their mailing. Thus, you can mail 1,000 of your flyers for $30 - $50. This is actually a good service you can run yourself.

Finally, if you don't want to deal with the mailing OR printing, you can use a print & mail dealer. This dealer will print your circulars and mail them by the thousand in their own bulk mailings. This is the least expensive way to go. You can usually get 1,000 flyers printed and mailed for under $50. That's only ten ads you'd need to sell, at $5 per inch. That's pretty easy to do. You can then fill up the empty spaces with your own ads, for extra exposure. Any ads you sell over ten is shear profit!

This method of covering your advertising costs is being used by shrewd mail order dealers every day. You can start one ad sheet, then when it's to the point where you're mailing a few thousand monthly, start another going to a different market, for added effectiveness. The work is not hard, and it's fun!

Related Articles