First, satisfy yourself that goods, services or unwanted possessions you are about to advertise are legal and decent. You should be their legal owner with rights of disposal. Further, you must realise that, if you try to advertise anything indecent, upstanding publishers will reject your ads and probably keep any fee. That's 'heavy' stuff out of way!

Now establish your contact details. Consider including two means of contact: a landline and mobile number perhaps. Landline numbers suggest permanence and may inspire confidence in customers. Mobiles often make you more contactable. Now double-check details. Are they accurate and valid? To ensure any sort of ‘return on investment’, customers must be able to contact you.

If you prefer contact by e-mail, acquire temporary addresses from Yahoo or Hotmail say, rather than use a permanent one provided by your Internet Service Provider. The ‘permanence’ rule mentioned above doesn’t apply to e-mail, due to spam problem. Although many small ad sites protect against automated address harvesting, it’s impossible to prevent manual harvesting. Mail ‘boxes’ can protect privacy; as can use of first names, nicknames or business titles in adverts, rather than full names.

Whichever you choose as a means of contact, do check your text messages, voice mail, fax machine and e-mail regularly. Try to reply to all sensible advert responses within twenty-four hours of receipt. Otherwise, your hot sales ‘leads’ may go cold. Ignore, block or report if necessary any suspicious responses.

If you trade commercially, tell your potential customers in your adverts. Honesty and truthfulness are always best, if you want to make a long-term business from selling by small ads. Place Trade and Private adverts in separate transactions if necessary, to make it easier to track business investments later.

Tell potential customers best day, and time of day, to contact you. They will want to avoid embarrassment by contacting you just as you are going to bed. You may be better at negotiating deals first thing in morning. Stating contact times might save you waiting by a telephone, in case calls come through.

Also, consider telling potential customers roughly where you live, at least county and nearest town, possibly a village or suburb. Many small ad sites now offer postcode or telephone dialling code proximity features, and find nearest offer to customers’ locations. When choosing size of an area, consider carefully your security and privacy.

Look for small ad providers that offer website links, especially if you are in business. Use small ads to attract customers and interest them in these links. Create specific ‘landing pages’ on your site, so that you can track small ad performance. Use your website to stimulate desire and provide means to ‘close’ sales. Include ‘rich’ media, like full-size photographs, on your website. Including thumbnails in small ads is of questionable value. Poor quality thumbnails could deter customers.

And nothing throws a budget out of whack faster than advertising.

Advertising, or paying good money to get your message in front of your target market, still has a place in your marketing mix, although it's not quite as effective as it once was.

If you're going to advertise, you need to be smart about it -- or you can quickly find yourself with a blown budget and not much to show for it. Below are seven questions to ask yourself before writing out that check.

1. Do you need to generate customers/traffic/leads/etc. right away? If so, then you better pull out your wallet. Advertising is hands down fastest way to get your message in front of your target market. (You're paying for placement after all.)

2. Do you have another way to get word out about your business? For instance, do you have a customer database or an e-zine list? If so, then you might be better off sending an e-mail (assuming you have customers' e-mails). Although technically e-mail announcements fall under advertising, I'm not counting it in this particular case because it's more or less free (or very low cost).

Perhaps you have a good news angle and a good relationship with a reporter. Or you have a high-traffic Web site and/or blog. Or maybe you're an active volunteer with a large organization and can use networking to get message out.

But if none of those really apply, then you'd better take a closer look at advertising.

3. Do you need to augment your other marketing efforts? Maybe you have articles featured on a Web site targeted to your customer base. Great when your article is front and center and not-so-great when your article is buried in archives. A little advertising on that site can keep you in your target market's sight all time. Or maybe you struck gold and got a big article written about your company in perfect trade publication. Fantastic for that month and not-so-fantastic for other 11 months of year. Or maybe it's taking you longer than you'd like to drive traffic to your Web site. Advertising is good for speeding things along.

Frequency is king when it comes to marketing -- if you're out of your customers' sight, you're probably out of their mind when it comes to buying time. Advertising is a good way to beef up or speed up what you're already doing.