The Display ad is the sexy side of the written word, and is the area most businesses look to rapidly increase sales. When developed with care and used with caution, a display ad can be highly effective. However, running expensive display ads is extremely risky and more often than not, they do not recover their costs. Of course most people who sell these ads won’t tell you this. Instead they’ll tell you about their large readership, and how if just a small percentage of their readers respond to you ad, you’ll get rich. It just makes sense. Run a big ad, make a lot of sales, and get rich. Except it doesn’t usually work that way. What happens is you pay big bucks for a big ad, and when it runs, nothing happens. No orders, no calls. And you’re out the entire amount you paid for you ad with nothing to show for it.
Most people who haven’t run a large display ad simply don’t believe this can happen. They can’t conceive that they won’t get a response from a large ad. But I can tell you from personal experience it happens. A lot more often than anyone selling these ads wants you to know.
For this reason I strongly recommend that anyone thinking about buying an expensive display ad should consider the risk. If you can’t afford to lose everything you invest in the ad, don’t do it. In most cases, a simple press release will be more effective (and quite a bit less expensive) than a large display ad.
It’s true that we have had considerable success with some of our full page display ads, but after several early failures we set up some guidelines to follow when running these ads. These guidelines are:
1. We always test ads in low cost publications. (Rarely do we ever pay more than $300 for a full page ad–even in national publications.)
2. Our full page ads are always run in highly targeted, limited circulation publications. We only run ads in places that we know our customers will see.
3. We always run a break-even analysis before we place an ad so we know for sure exactly how many sales we’ll need just to pay for the ad. If the numbers indicate we’ll need more than five sales, we don’t run the ad.
4. We always create the ads ourselves. That way we have absolute control over the content, the structure of the offer, and exact wording. It does make a difference.
5. We always request specific ad placement in the magazine or newsletter. We usually request a right hand page in the back two thirds of the magazine. Never let a magazine decide where they’ll place your ad.
6. We always negotiate the price of the ad. Usually we pay about 45% of the printed rate card rate (and sometimes we pay much less than that).
By following these guidelines we are able to reduce our exposure to financial loss on display ads in magazines. If the ad fails to work, we still lose money and momentum, but not near as much it we had blindly run expensive ads.
Keep these guidelines in mind when running your own display ads, and you’ll have a good chance of striking it rich also. (One of Bill Myers’ first display ads cost a few hundred dollars to run and brought in over $40,0000 in 90 days! This ad is in “The Unfair Advantage Letter Book.”
Well book mark us here at https://www.cyourad.com
