Business cards are great salesmen for any company new or established. They help you advertise your business to the public.

You need to plan your distribution campaign so that you everyone in the area of your premises will know that you are situated there and that you are ready to do business with them. There are endless possibilities when you distribute your cards in the busy areas around you. Think of railway stations or bus stations with people standing around waiting for transport, you could be handing them your cards so that they could be reading them while they are waiting.

Shopping malls are very good places to stand around and hand out your cards. People are in a more relaxed frame of mind and more likely to be in the mood for looking around. So take the opportunity and hand out your cards. Do the same in any public place where people gather together.

Try magnetising your cards by pasting a small magnet at the back of each card. These magnets can be obtained from most craft shops. There is something about a magnetised card that most people cannot resist so they will take them home and put them on the fridge for future reference. Every time they open their fridge they will look at your business card and when they need your product or service they will be sure to remember you.

If you find that members of the public are reluctant to take your card from you, you need to look at them objectively as they might need to be redesigned.

Banners are intended to advertise or promote a product or services.Though advertising can be done through various means but custom banners are one of the simplest and easily accessible means to publicize your products, services, goods or any cause. It is the target of any business that the advertisement must reach every person. Custom banners are those banners that are customized to suit your advertisement demands. You can choose any medium to advertise your product but the advantage of custom banners is that these are long lasting and perfect for both indoor and outdoor purposes. Mostly, banner stands are found in large exhibitions, trade shows, charity shows and also at retail stores.

Custom banners are light in weight and can be carried anywhere to your desired place for advertisement. You can place the custom banners to the arena where you think the product will get more advertised but at the end of the day you can pack it without any hassle and can carry it. It helps you to build the perfect logo and design for your event. You can make it more graphical and impressive by the help of a designer. The custom banners are an exclusive way to promote your products or services. Its smooth and remarkable design leaves an ever lasting impression on the spectators. Well, it’s up to the business owner to choose the medium of advertising since it can be done through either print media or electronic media. You have to choose any one medium that best suits your requirement. If you choose the custom banners as the medium then you can also hire the services of those companies who provide the banner advertising services.

You just have to tell the service provider, the kind of service you are looking for. The professionals are experienced enough to handle the design and style format of your banner. They can make different kind of custom banners furnished with different shape, size, design and style along with the logo of your company. You can use some attractive bylines and pictures that gives a message related to your business promotion. Without a clear message in your custom banner, a person will not be able to get the clear meaning of your advertisement. The most important aspect of advertising is that the banner must be kept at an appropriate place where you can get maximum audience. The use of custom banners is not restricted to business use only, you can also use it for personal work as well.

In a custom banner you should not only look for the design, shape and styling, but also the message that you will use in the banner for the promotion. Usually, the images do more than half of the work for you if you happen to choose the right image and message for the advertisement. Hence, it is very essential to choose the perfect image that suits suit’s your requirement. The images you chose should also be graphical to give a clear picture of your product or services. The banner also reflects your views and innovative ideas that you use in the promotion and further it will help you to make a successful promotion. There are different modes of advertisement through through banner. Some of them are horizontal banner display, double sided banner display, scrolling banners, retractable banner stands etc.You can opt for any medium of advertising your products or services.

Wouldn't it be nice if everyone got as excited about your company as you are? Unfortunately some businesses just aren't very sexy; in fact, some businesses are downright boring. As a consequence, companies that sell commodity products and routine services tend to rely on presentations that load-up on features, specifications, and statistics that may be relevant to anal-retentive types, but hardly compelling to the vast majority of your audience.

There is no reason why every company can't deliver an exciting image to its audience; one that generates the kind of buzz and excitement usually associated with companies like Apple, Victoria's Secret, Benetton, Absolut Vodka, and Sony.

It may seem impossible to produce a whole lot of steam for things like sand paper, accounting services, and facial tissue, but thanks to the Web and it's extraordinary ability to deliver multimedia content, even the most mundane offerings can get hearts racing and the blogosphere blogging.

Emotional Experiences Connect

Let's take facial tissue as an example; it is one of the most common, boring everyday products you can imagine. There is just not much you can do to sell this stuff other than telling people yours is softer and cheaper than the other guys, but then the other guy is saying the same thing; the result, consumers buy whatever is on sale. But wait, the clever fellows at Kimberly-Clark instituted a brilliant website campaign for their facial tissue, called "Kleenex - let it out."

The campaign zeros in on the emotional experience associated with why people use facial tissue: to wipe away tears of joy or sadness or maybe to clean-up cute little runny noses - in each case the result of some moving event.

Tapping into this emotional association is key to the Kleenex campaign and key to your new thinking on how to make your boring stuff, exciting.

Video - The Best Way To Tell A Story

The Kleenex campaign features prominent videos of articulate people telling their personal stories, all resulting in the need to use a facial tissue.

A pregnant woman discusses the emotional impact of having a child and as her eyes begin to tear, the interviewer hands her a Kleenex. A second video features another well-spoken woman talking about her return to New Orleans after the devastation of hurricane Katrina. Again as the woman becomes emotional and begins to cry, the interviewer hands her a tissue. Nothing more needs to be said, this is very powerful story telling that connects to the audience and delivers an image of the brand as caring and sensitive; the exact kind of impression the company wants to portray.

Even companies that aren't exactly dead-from-the-neck-up boring can benefit from this approach. The Home Depot ran a series of advertisements with a husband showing his wife a series of power tools that he wanted. Rather than try to convince his wife, and by association all the wives in the audience, that he needs another expensive toy, the husband points to each tool and states, "this is your new shelving unit" and "this one is your new kitchen" - a far more dramatic and effective way to make the case for a new purchase.

You can deliver the same kind of powerful marketing messages for your own company by presenting Web-based videos that follow a few very simple guidelines.

Six Steps To Turn Boring Into Exciting

1. Use People to Sell People

There is no substitute for people. Human beings are capable of communicating with an enormous degree of nuance and subtlety, using voice, expression, body language, and gesture; no animation, avatar, or artificial substitute can take the place of a real person for communicating meaningful, memorable marketing messages.

With relatively easy-to-use production tools anyone can create a video, but not necessarily one that delivers the message or image that your company wants to present. We have seen far too many poor quality efforts both on the Web and even on local television, where company presidents with bad haircuts and ill-fitting suits, uttering nonsense-riddled scripts in zombie-like performances expose themselves to audiences expecting more, much more.

Skilled performers communicate in very subtle ways to an audience, and only the well-practiced professional has the experience and capability to deliver the intended experience. The cost of saving money by doing-it-yourself or with amateurs can result in delivering an unintended message that may undermine the impression and image you are trying to create.

2. Perception Is Reality Use Scripted Professionals

You will notice that I described the women in the facial tissue videos as articulate. Now I cannot tell you if these women were actors or not, or that their powerful presentations were scripted, but if I had to guess, I would say these very effective videos were about as carefully produced and constructed as the latest episode of 'Survivor' that by no means makes them any less effective.

The point here is that perception is reality, and the professional filmmaker knows how to tell a story and communicate a message; and that is not the same thing as being able to turn on a video camera.

3. Tell A Memorable Story

When we talk about companies telling their story, it is important to distinguish between the company's history and the emotional experiences generated by the product or service.

Company histories can make for interesting videos and can produce a sense of trust associated with being in business for a considerable length of time, but that sort of presentation does not speak to the underlying emotional and psychological factors that actually trigger a sale.

It is difficult but imperative that businesses understand that marketing is not about you, or even the product or service, it's about the audience.

Like the Kleenex videos and the Home Depot commercials, every product and service that is purchased from your company represents an experience, a story that relates to your audience's aspirations and needs. It is the audience's story that demonstrates credibility, clarifies purpose, penetrates memory, and makes the message compelling.

4. Create An Emotional Experience

The vast majority of decisions we make are colored by the emotional relevance associated with those decisions. No doubt rational factors figure into our decision-making process, but the pivotal factors that attract the use of one product over another are emotional.

If you're not connecting to your audience on an emotional level, then you are left with a commodity that can only be sold on price and features, and unless you're a monopoly, there will always be some competitor willing to offer your customers more for less.

When presenting your product or service it is important to tap into an emotional element that your audience can relate to as its key purchasing decision factor. When people purchase boring accounting services and software, what they're really buying is an improved life style for their families. It really doesn't matter what you sell, if you look hard enough, you can find the emotional benefit that should be the central element of your marketing message.

5. Create a Believable Relevant Personality

Part of the process of connecting with your audience is creating an appropriate personality for your company. Many corporations today believe in the cult of management personality but this is a dangerous game. Your company needs a personality of it's own, one that is distinctive and that will stand alone and not be dependent on senior management's ego and self-promotion.

Web-video marketing campaigns provide a vehicle that allows companies to create appropriate personalities that engage, inform and entertain your audience in ways that establish your identity and create the basis for a prosperous business relationship.

Clever marketing can create a corporate personality but it is imperative that you follow through and deliver that personality in all aspects of your relationship with your audience. Producing a campaign that promises one thing and a website, staff, and product that delivers another is one of the easiest ways to alienate customers.

6. Deliver A Critical Hot Button Moment

Web-video presentations need to focus on single issues that are driven home by the addition of a hot button moment or punch line. Remember you are telling your audience a story that needs a beginning, middle and end. That story should build to climax and deliver the point in a single memorable moment.

The era of point form slide presentations is dead, along with the laundry list of benefits approach.

Creativity, personality, and the ability to communication and develop an emotional connection to your audience through the use of Web-video campaigns has the potential to turn even the most lackluster company into a vibrant and exciting marketing business.

Many people do not realize their own market. Most people think when they open a store that they will sell to someone like themselves. With this mentality, their customers will be just like them because their marketing is targeted to what they like and how they think, so the people who respond will agree with them. But is it not also a limiting factor? How many customers are they excluding with their advertising campaign?

And, the hardest question of them all:

Do they really want to sell to themselves anyway?

I know that you are probably thinking that is a silly question, but humor me a few minutes. Let’s look at your basic white, middle-class, business owner. I know there are other kinds, but please bear with me. His (or her) ads will appeal to white middle-class and either one class higher or lower, depending on how it is designed. This is a class that is apt to live above their means, and though they may not seem to be on a tight budget, their money is usually promised to payments on other items.

Working with businesses in the area (Waco, Texas), we have found that their favorite customers are not in this description. According to businesses in both car sales and furniture sales, they would rather do business with the Hispanics in the area. This is because the Hispanic population has a tendency to have access to more liquid cash. They also have a better record of being more prompt in their payments.

If you had the choice between a customer that looks like you and acts like you, but is delinquent in their payments, or a customer that comes from a different culture and may have to bring their son or daughter who is in high school to interpret for them and pays on time faithfully, who would you pick?

Now the question is how to reach this largely untapped market. One of the easiest ways is the internet, but it is also one of the ways you can get ripped off. Language is not a static formula, and this is why we have not had much success with computer translations. Each day, language changes, evolves if you will. Some words are born, some words die, some words change meaning, some words change pronunciation. On top of that, when a language is divided and there is not much contact between the two sections, they have a tendency to change differently, influenced by different factors. When you hire a Spanish translator, you may find some one that is fluent in Spanish, but the question is what dialect, or flavor, of Spanish is it? Many people do not realize that there is a huge difference between dialects. We can read and watch British news with not much difficulty, but when I went to London a few months ago with my family, it was a different story. I felt like a little mini-translator standing behind my dad, explaining what people were saying. It was not just the accent he was having trouble with, it was a different way of speaking on top of a different vocabulary. Instead of asking him if he was in line, the question was “Are you queuing?" Rarely in the U.S. do we use the word queue. For example, it is used in the printer control panel on your computer and other computer jargon, on technical documents, and possibly some other formal occasions. I do not believe I have heard it used in everyday Standard American English, and I have never heard it used as a verb, even in computer jargon.

That is just one example of how English is different across the ocean, and the same linguistic rules that spur change in the English language, spur change in Spanish. Another problem that people have when translating web pages to target a new consumer, is what I would like to call the “yes-but-no factor". My boss recently received some information on a DVD from a major Italian manufacturer. The graphics and media affects were amazing, but when the narration began, it sounded like a different language. When we listened again, the stresses were on the wrong part of the word, and the words were out of order in the sentence with articles such as the and a/an were left completely out. Even knowing this, it was hard to understand. Yes, it was English, but no, it was not English at all. This is why it is important to have a native speaker translate the material, and not just any native speaker, but one from the region to which you are marketing.

There are many customers not being reached. Find out who they are in your area and try something new to reach them.

Friends from the Creative industry generally lamented about being under paid and under appreciated while clients were genuinely concerned if they can recoup their investments in creative and production costs. After I published "How to Pay your Advertising Agency?" at my blog and ezinearticles, I was specifically asked if I can provide an example of “Pay by Performance” with a marketing agency or advertising agency.

Assuming the client has a decent agency brief and the marketing/advertising/creative agency understood it perfectly, then they actually conceptualized an equally decent campaign; theoretically there should be good returns. However, the marketplace is a strange place where big changes can speedily shoot a hot product down into the bottom of a valley. Though rare, it has happened before. It is such uncertainties of the marketplace, doubts and fears of clients and the difficulty of quantifying the value of “creative” people that the quotation is grounds for heated debates.

I believed a fair price is one where the client and the marketing agency agreed upon. The price can be agreed upon but “unfairness” somehow would still cropped up. The client might not be able to attribute his success to the press advertisement as there was no tracking device established. The designer might start to believe he has been paid peanuts when the sales results hit the roof. Even nothing was said and expressed; dissatisfaction can quietly seep in and adversely affect an otherwise cohesive working relationship.

So instead of offering or accepting a fixed price, both parties can consider the “pay by performance” option. To “pay on results” or “pay by performance” is not as simple as it might appear. Marketing, advertising and communications is largely a skill based, creative industry; where the “products” are ideas and action taken. Just as a beautiful fireworks display is over when it’s over, ideas exposed can never be taken back to reuse and recycle in their original forms. I am sure you can see the challenges of a “pay by results” program. The real costs that were tough to measure are the creative cost though it is not impossible. To effectively deploy “pay by performance”, you would need to overcome various challenges, and those had been discussed at another of my article, "Does Pay by Performance works with an Advertising Agency?".

After considering those factors and you still think “pay by performance” is for you, you may like to consider this working model.

1. Established what constitutes sunk cost, which could easily mean time (for research, analysis, brainstorming, conceptualization, copywriting, visualizing, story-boarding, desktop execution), material (such as photography with photographer, models, studio, props or purchased photo images or database for direct mail), traveling expenses.

2. Establish the quantum of such cost. Where cost cannot be quantified, you can check with your Association of Accredited Ad Agencies for recommended rates.

3. Client needs to agree to the quotation and to paying the sunk costs

4. Both parties need to agree on the performance measure. This includes fixing the deliverables and determining the expected results for each of these deliverables. One of the most obvious, and accurate, deliverable would be response to the campaign. This is usually measured by including some kind of direct response within the campaign. It could be a call-in number, an email or a web site.

5. Payment of the performance level should have a clear end date. Companies should not be afraid to pay. Alternatively, they can put a cap on the quantum, assuming that they are expecting a runaway success for the campaign. Again, this cap needs to be agreed. For example, both parties can agree to a $50,000 or a $5,000,000 cap to the performance bonus portion of the agency fees depending on the size of the project.

There are of course many ways to spin this. Above is simply one way to look at a complex arrangement. I am sure you can come up with a few creative ways to do this.

An aerial advertising is something like when a small towing airplane tows your company's banner behind it to advertise company through the banner. The main goal behind this is to let your company logo or slogan be seen and remembered by thousands of potential customers at whatever place you want and whenever you desire. The message given in such a banner is often called aerial message. Aerial advertising is spreading like nothing now a days due to its great capabilities to advertise at targeted audience.

Its a fact that people have the tendency to look up when they hear an airplane. This attraction of people towards a flying airplane will make your aerial message seen and, most importantly, remembered by various others. Many private limited companies offer aerial advertising now a days and it has been noticed that average view time they provide for your aerial ad is somewhat 17 seconds directly in front of the targeted area. Even if the time seems to be shorter, the viewers want to trail such airplane banners from horizon to horizon. This way they can get your aerial advertising a lot longer. The exposure is even greater if the pilot circles around.

Usually in aerial advertising flying billboards attached to the airplane soar at 1000 feet high when over the land and 500 feet when over water's edge. Surveys carried out have declared that after 30 minutes of time nearly 88% of the people remembered seeing the aerial ad go by and also 79% viewers remembered as which product or service was being advertised using billboards attached to the airplane.

In aerial advertising airplanes are made to fly over at places specially targeted like over crowded beaches, theme parks, festivals, rock concerts, race tracks, ball parks, rush hour traffic and in fact just about anywhere as suitable. Depending on the customer's demand airplanes can also be made to fly in different local, regional and national markets to advertise the aerial banner of the customer and also different types of custom aerial billboards, like custom painted and computer generated, are created as per the requirements to do the advertising in more effective way.

If you are looking to advertise your company name, logo, brand or product, it could be nothing better then aerial advertising. You can find many companies providing this type of advertising at very low cost. Also there is a great benefit as in aerial advertising you can target any outdoor place far and wide to advertise your product or services through billboards and aerial banners. As a result aerial advertising is far better then any other type of advertising. Only thing is that you need to make right choice of company providing aerial advertising services. You can also find many websites in Google of companies providing these services.

Because the Advertising Agencies tell you it works without producing one iota of evidence to substantiate their claims as to the exclusive increase in sales that one advertising campaign has produced!

It works because we live in an over informed society, and the agencies are working very hard to increase the quantity (but not quality) of clutter

It works because the customer has become immune to advertising, so Advertising Agencies are attempting to cut through the clutter with brilliant creative work.

Advertising works – especially now that it is moving onto the Internet!

Advertising works because advertising agencies pay scant attention (if any) to the actual process of communication, and concentrate heavily on creativity and media buying.

Advertising works because the days are numbered for TV ads dominance…but they don't know what to replace it with!

Advertising works because the correct model of communication is totally ignored by the advertising industry whilst they cling onto the reach frequency model beloved by the advertising industry but which has no relevance to the actual process of communication.

Advertising works to waste your money. Study the annual expenditure of advertising in America, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Japan and Australia. Apply the statement "50% of my advertising expenditure is wasted but I don't know which fifty percent" the costly ineffectiveness of advertising is huge, to say the least. Now factor in the fact that there has never been any true accountability.

Then consider that this wastefulness has been going on since the end of the Second World War, now that's wastefulness!

Advertising is clinging to a world that existed ten years ago as if it were trying not to notice it’s vanished. Advertising has to modernise and change. Its effectiveness will regenerate itself because the information content of advertising is a fundamental necessity for the efficient conduct of a complex and free market place.

Instead of asking, “When are the good times coming back?” we should be applying ourselves to doing advertising in ways that are right for the time we live in.

Of course advertising works, it works very efficiently to kill off any good idea that was not invented within their own agency. It is amazing when you consider the many excellent marketing ideas that have been available, however the promoters of such ideas eventually gave up selling to advertising agencies because all advertising agencies wanted was to get their clients onto television.

That it might not be the ideal medium was totally ignored!

Of course advertising works, consider this: Despite all the evidence to the contrary, here’s what a current luminary of the advertising industry said recently

"The conventional stuff won't ever go away," said Kate Bruges, the Marketing Director of J Walter Thompson.

"An awful lot of this unconventional stuff is the icing on the cake, that extra bit of media mileage. But it's never going to give you the cost-efficient mileage or get the message across consistently enough to a large enough number of people."

Another example of the usual Advertising Agency bull. They will not accept that there are better ways of communicating with consumers than ‘conventional stuff’.

It is also fascinating that she talks about cost-efficiency when she has no idea just how cost ‘ineffective’ her cost-efficient mileage really is! Just where is the evidence to support this cost-efficient mileage? What factual piece of research has been done to measure the cost effectiveness of the ‘conventional stuff’? And without such why are people like Kate allowed to get away with making such audacious claims?

Paul Ashby pioneered interactive communication to the advertising and marketing communities some twenty-five years ago. The communication issues he addresses have been neglected during the explosive grown of advertising in the 60s, 70s and 80s, these are Cognitive Dissonance, Selective Retention and Selective Exposure.

Online advertising can be a very cost-effective solution to promote your business or product. There are many different types and although many can give you good exposure for your money, some can lose you money very quickly if you do not know how to do it properly. Online advertising is not the same as offline advertising. It is in many ways a much more direct medium than TV or magazines.

If someone is looking at a web page that you are advertising on, then it is because they have chosen to go to that page. Of course it could be that they are just surfing around, but people these days tend to be more web savvy and targeted in what they are looking for and in the sites that they look at. Most people now use more targeted searches and so if you target your advertising well enough so that it appears in places that are highly relevant to your site, then it is quite likely that you will get a good result.

There are many different types of online advertising such as, pixel advertising, ezines, banner ads, article marketing, forum marketing, text links, pop ups, ecourses, back end product sales, content sites, pay per click, joint ventures, viral marketing, and thats to name just a few. You have to decide which is the best for your product and/or service. If you're not experienced, one of the easiest ways is to find out what methods the bigger sellers in your market are using. If they're successful in the same market as you, then it is a good bet that this type of advertising works well with that market. But that only means that it is a good place to start, after you have had some success, you will have a better idea of what the market wants and what other ways you could advertise to them.

Online advertising is really like any other type of advertising in that you have to know your market and what they want. You also need to know the right way to reach them. The best way is if you are a part of this market and are interested in what you are selling, so that you will know what they want. But if you are not, then it is a good idea to do some research. Visit sites that are on the same subject (especially forums) to find out what they are interested in. That way you will know what to sell them and how to sell it.

Online advertising can help give you exposure to your business if it's done properly. It can be very lucrative or you can loose some money. Do your research, advertise properly and you'll be on the lucrative side with no problem at all.

Maybe it’s because I got mononucleosis during college and still look a little yellow at times. Or because I worked for the Yellow Pages for 25 years as a sales consultant. I think it’s probably because I wrote an insider’s guide book as a “behind-the-scenes” look at the directory publishing industry which is now currently the only one in print and available at Amazon. But, for whatever reason, I’ve become the voice of the Yellow Pages. With that awesome responsibility bestowed upon me, I decided to write a series of articles like this one, that gives tips and suggestions to those of you who have considered placing ads in this interesting media. First, a history lesson.

In case you weren’t aware, the Yellow Pages have been around for over 120 years, since their innocuous beginnings in Wyoming as a small pamphlet meant for local advertising. The very first time the term “Yellow Pages” was used was back in 1883. It occurred when a printer, working on a regular telephone directory, ran out of white paper and used yellow paper instead. That simple act began a legacy.

In 1886, Reuben H. Donnelly produced the first official Yellow Pages directory featuring business names and phone numbers, categorized by the types of products and the services they provided. Fascinating, right? Let’s move on to the book as a medium in today’s world.

To begin with, the biggest drawback to placing an ad in the Yellow Pages is the long lag time and the time on the shelf. Let me explain. Most YP books publish at least six weeks after the ad is placed. So, if you drew up an ad toward the end of the solicitation and had it proofed, which could take two weeks, it wouldn’t come out for another six weeks. And because it could take another four weeks for delivery, that’s three months. And suppose that you were forced to drop one of your brands listed in the ad, you couldn’t change the ad for another year. Those are the few disadvantages. But I would rather concentrate on the main advantage. It’s the book itself.

More than just another media like TV or newspaper, the Yellow Pages is a reference manual. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve arrived in a new town and found myself going through the local Yellow Pages in the hotel room looking for a restaurant. Try doing that with any other media. Or use it for the maps, local attractions, or an airport shuttle service. Remember, it’s a book. It sits there on the end table, ready when you are. You can look at the ads or the listings, if you just need a phone number. Like I mentioned, it usually has the main attractions of the local town including seating charts for the sports arenas, directions to the museums and zoos and their prices and times. What an amazing book and it’s totally free to use and automatically updated every year.

When I was in Barcelona, Spain, it was in my hotel room. And in Mexico and Canada, and in the London phone booth. It’s a world-wide phenomenon that, like quantum physics transcends time and space. Okay, maybe I am being a bit dramatic, but that’s why they call me Mr. Yellow Pages. But you get the point. That’s the reason that for the small, locally-owned business, it’s an invaluable way to reach their customers. I never made excuses for our seemingly high prices. I simply explained that it was based on usage, which was greater than any other item available in the marketplace. In other words, more people would see their ad or message in the Yellow Pages than anywhere else, for any price. It was the place people went when they needed something, especially emergency services. In that aspect, it reigned supreme. No one ever threw out the old directory until the new one arrived.

If you have a home based business or a family business, you probably cannot afford to hire a professional copywriter to create your advertising. However, you still need to advertise your business, so how can you make it as effective as possible? One thing you must never do is try to create a fancy advertisement. The instructor of a class of students learning to be copywriters said, "Creativity is not a positive virtue for an advertising copywriter. Whether it is a print, on-line or broadcast ad, when you ask a potential customer what he thought of the advertisement, you do not want him to say it was exceptionally creative. Instead, you want him to say it made me want to buy the product right now."

Here are five advertising tips that you may use to help make your advertisements much more effective.

1. Customers want believable proof that your product is better than the product they are currently using. Let people know how good your product or service is by offering proof that it is much better than similar products, or that it has met or exceeded certain tests or specifications. When using numbers in your advertisement, such as how much faster your product is than the competition or how much better it works, do not use round numbers. Use uneven numbers like 24.7% rather than round numbers like 30% and your message will be more believable. Be sure that the uneven number you use is lower than the provable round number it replaces.

2. Be bold and up front about who you are and where you are located. Rather than appearing to hide behind a post office box number, tell people that your business is located at 456 First Street West in the red brick Keever Building, which was constructed in 1913. This not only makes you seem more interesting, but also more believable and trustworthy. This also applies if your business is in your home. For example - Mary’s Catering Services, located at 456 First Street West, the yellow building at the corner of First Street West and Fifth Avenue.

3. A satisfaction guarantee is very important. Customers will always be more willing to buy from you if they believe that you will refund their purchase price if they are not satisfied. You may incur some expenses paying for refunds, but your increased sales will more than make up for these added expenses and the good will that you generate is priceless.

4. Similar to identifying where you are located, it is mandatory to provide contact information in your ads, especially ads in print and on-line messages. It can be your phone number, Internet URL, email address or all three. However, make sure they are correct and working properly before you publish the ad. For example, if you are publishing a toll-free number that only works in the USA, you must also include your regular telephone number with area code. In this way, potential customers from other countries will be able to contact you and buy from you.

5. One final thing needs to be included at the bottom of your advertisement. If it is a flyer or display ad, it would be placed below the body of the ad. If it is a written ad or sales letter, it should have a PS following the signature. Since this part of your advertisement is the last thing your potential customer will read, use it to reinforce your most important point or offer an incentive to get the reader to take immediate action.

If you ensure that all your advertisements follow the above five tips, you will find that your cash register rings much more frequently.