Advertising doesn't cost, it pays! And good advertising can pay you well. Bad advertising, or no advertising at all, invites disaster.

You have to advertise if people are to be made aware of your business and benefits it offers them. Without advertising you rely on word of mouth recommendation or press editorial, both extremely effective, but slow and generally unpredictable.

Advertising takes many different forms, from painting your name on side of a van to delivering leaflets door-to-door or posting printed cards in shop and post office windows. More often term applies to classified and display promotions in appropriate media, usually newspapers and magazines, and it is with this definition we concern ourselves here.

Advertising by itself does not sell. It will not sell a bad product (customers will ask for refunds) and it won't open up new markets. It is not a miracle cure that can generate sales for a dying product. Conversely, advertising will not sell your must successful products to people who simply don't want them.

Main Points About Effective Advertising

* It reduces entire population to your target audience and reaches as many of those people as possible at least available cost.

* It must always have an objective. This means having a clear idea about what you want to accomplish in your advertisement. Reasons for advertising include:

* To invite orders or enquiries

* To launch new products

* To publicise price changes.

* The message must attract your target audience, it must interest them, create a desire for your product and prompt people to act (order or ask for further information). This acronym AIDA is one you will encounter many times in advertising.

* It must be truthful and straightforward. The nearer your advertisement is to reality, more effective it is.

* Sufficient resources must be allocated to accomplish your advertising objectives.

* Testing is crucial to effective advertising, allowing good promotions to be repeated and bad ones to be eliminated.

* Every aspect of your advertisement must be prepared from customer's point of view. That person wants to know how you and your product can benefit him. The most important feature of any advertisement is benefits it contains.

* It must be placed in appropriate media.

Newcomers to business tend to confuse real benefits of advertising, frequently considering it a necessary, and expensive, evil, not long-term investment it really is. In short, effective advertising is lifeblood of your business. Without it you will surely fail!

Deciding When and How

Advertising can be a major headache for many firms, not just new businesses or those without specialist advertising departments.

As just such a shopkeeper, I have to say that I do love my work. I get up early every morning to check how sales went overnight. How many customers came in? What did they buy? Did they ask for anything that I haven’t got in stock? I then check money ‘take’ to confirm what’s selling well and what’s not. My shop, by way, is a ‘24/7’ Internet enterprise.

My next joys are to replenish shelves of my shop with fresh products and remove any old stock. This isn’t a manual labour of love though. It’s just a matter of visiting several wholesalers on ‘net (the affiliate network sites) and ordering stock. These sites offer shopkeepers like me a growing number of RSS product feeds.

I simply select merchants I want to do business with and products I want to stock. The degree of product selection available to me depends on way RSS feeds have been set-up. Sometimes, I must take every product a merchant offers me (or none at all); often I can take a group of products from various merchants; usually, I can opt for a specific product with high value to my customers.

Having made my selections (of merchant and product), I download RSS feeds. This is an elegant process, whereby software checks to see if I already have ordered products in stock at desired levels, fills my shelves if I haven’t, and removes any stock that’s past its ‘sell-by’ date. There are no delivery drivers to monitor; no pallet trucks to push; no returns documentation to fill in. What’s more, my merchants do most of merchandising for me: offering me up-to-date photographs, product descriptions, prices and so on, as part of their feeds.

Within an hour, I’ve re-stocked my shop with fresh, desirable produce. Of course, that’s not end of my joy. Oh no, rest of my day is spent in gleeful bookkeeping, marketing and so on; kind of pleasures undertaken elsewhere in retail management. Thankfully, my wholesalers do much of data management for me, which makes bookkeeping easier. The suppliers meanwhile send me special offers by email, which is akin to entertaining sales reps. in real world shopping, I suppose.