Guide to Home Business Advertising

The media is a powerful tool, the average person spends an huge amount of their life consuming it in one way or another, and will spend a significant percentage of that time looking at, listening to or watching some kind of advertisement. If you want to use the power of the general media, you need to know what you're doing.

Advertise in Magazines and Newspapers

There are three kinds of advertising you can get in newspapers and magazines: classified, advertorial and display. Classifieds are the small ads towards the back of the publication, while display ads can be almost any size, from a small corner of a page to a massive full page spread. An advertorial looks like an article but is in fact an advertisement.

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There is, however, an exception: niche and trade magazines. If you've ever looked around in a news stand, you will have seen just how many magazines there are out there, filling every niche in the market. You need to find the magazine that people who are interested in your services might read. For example, if you're a wedding photographer, look for a magazine called 'Wedding', 'Brides', or something similar.

Advertising in these magazines will be far cheaper than placing an ad in a general audience publication, and far more likely to actually get some targeted responses.

Radio Advertising

Wherever you do business, the chances are that there's a local radio station. Once your home business grows to a decent size, you might consider buying some air time on it.

Really, though, the only kind of home business that can benefit enough from radio ads to justify the cost is one that does anything to do with cars. Since radio is almost entirely limited today to in-car entertainment, you know that almost everyone your ad reaches will be a car-owner, and so might be interested in what you're offering. If you offer something that people need cheaply or even for free, you can get a big response.

Television Advertising

Unless your business is pretty big, this might be a bad idea. You'd have trouble producing and showing an ad even on local cable stations for less than $10,000. Of course, if there's a market for your product and you've got the budget for this, you could take a chance and possibly make a profit. The home businesses that tend to do best out of TV ads are ones that have a 'unique and useful invention' product with easy-to-demonstrate benefits like an infomercial. Research shows that you can sell almost anything given a 60-second ad, a free phone number and a price point of $19.95.

Billboard Advertising

Here's one that gets overlooked pretty often, but can be very effective if you do it right. Billboard ads are typically expensive, but they do generally stay up for a long time, and they can be very targeted to an area where they're physically located. You'll have the best results with this if you can put one near enough to your business that it could say: turn right at the next intersection, or something like that. Phone numbers are pretty useless on a billboard, but you could have some luck putting a website address up there.

Local Theatre Advertising

Here's one avenue that often gets overlooked. If you turn up to the cinema early, you might have seen that before the big-budget ads, ads for local businesses are run. This can be a great place to advertise relatively inexpensively in quite a high-profile way, and it works especially well for carry out food businesses.

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