Advertising has come a long way since people used to carve messages into bottoms of sandals, and it takes a little bit of research to make that progress do more for your small business.

I say small business because I own and operate a small business specializing in helping small business make most of their advertising budget by combining different forms of advertising. Print advertising will never disappear, as wonderful as internet and television are there is still no substitute for flipping through a newspaper or sitting in your favorite chair by window checking out some of your favorite magazines. The problem with print advertising be it newspaper or magazine for most small business owners is cost. Unless you commit yourself to advertising in multiple issues you will not get best prices and for most of us that usually results in purchasing a smaller ad than we had hoped for. One of biggest downfalls of newspapers is lack of target marketing capability, about only thing you can tell from most newspapers is where majority of subscribers live although you can get other demographic info like income/age/education bracket but that's more info than we need. Magazines do offer an advantage here by appealing to a much more specific type of readership, demographic, target market or whichever buzz word you prefer but that too is going to come at a higher premium with similar sacrifices to quality and size of ad you would like to run.

Television, like magazines can be very useful in reaching a very specific group of people with your advertising, for example if you have a bait and tackle shop you can just purchase advertising time during "Fishing With Fred" as opposed to purchasing your time slot during local news. If there is a television show that you know reaches people you know would benefit from your product or service you can contact producers to find out how to buy commercial spots during their program. Cable companies often offer discounts on commercial production with purchase of commercial airtime or "spots" as they are called. These spots usually are either 15 or 30 seconds long. With falling costs of video cameras in addition to computer video editing hardware and software cost of a television commercial is much more affordable than most people think, you might even be able to make one yourself.

Today, with advent of email and other cheap sources of communication you don't have to be that paranoid about your message-except you are writing an advertisement. When writing a classified ad for example, every word must count in small space allowed and so word choice becomes very important.

But word choice is not only about being brief.

Even when crafting a long sales letter you should try and avoid using personal pronouns: "we, me, I, our,us". The sales message should be about your prospects and not about your company. The "we syndrome" is a common error but it can easily be avoided. A sales message should state upfront benefit to customer not parade how many awards company has received in past ten years. Whenever possible then copy should be written in third person.

There are some other words that are very common in advertising but are just too vague to have any force. Great copy is always specific. "How to make $3,567.23 from your home in 30 days!" has more force than "How to make money from home." Here are some commonly used words that lack force because their meaning is too ethereal:

"It" - State what "it" is rather than leave "it" for reader to figure out. This word can often be replaced by what 'it' represents or stands in place of.

"Quality" - This has a similar meaning to "personality". We often hear people say that someone has personality. But everyone has a personality whether good or bad. The same holds for quality. Every product or service has some quality which customer will be ultimate judge of.

Superlatives such as "tastiest, best, fastest, strongest, superior, minimize, optimize". The problem with these words is that they instill doubt in readers because these claims appear unsubstantiated. These words lack power because they are not measurable. Take word "superior" for example. What criterion or measurement was used to judge this product as superior and by how much?