How To Write Order Pulling Ads 9

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

1. what’s the most profitable way to use classifieds?




Classifieds are best used to build up your mailing list of
qualified prospects. Use classifieds to offer a free
catalogue, booklet or report relative to your product line.

2. What can you sell “directly” from classifieds?

Generally, anything and everything, so long as it doesn’t
cost more than £3.00 which is about the most people will pay
in response to an offer in the classifieds. These type of
ads are great for pulling inquiries such as:
Write for further information. Send £3, get two for the
price of one.

Dealers wanted, send for product information and a real
money-makers kit!

3. What are the best months of the year to advertise?

All twelve months of the year! Responses to your ads during
some months will be slower in accumulating, but by keying
your ads according to the month they appear, and a careful
tabulation of your returns from each keyed ad, you’ll see
that steady year round advertising will continue to pull
orders for you, regardless of the month it’s published.
I’ve personally received inquiries and orders from ads
placed as long as 2 years previous to the date of
publication.

4. Are mail order publications good advertising buys?

The least effective are the adsheets. Many of the ads in
these publications are “exchange ads”, meaning that the
publisher of adsheet “A” runs the ads of publisher “B”
without charge because publisher “B” is running the ads of
publisher “A” without charge. The “claimed” circulation
figures of these publications are almost always based on
“wishes, hopes and wants” while the “true” circulation goes
out to similar small, part-time mail order dealers,
therefore most of the people who receive a copy are
“sellers”.

With mail order magazines, it depends on the quality of the
publication and its business concepts. Some mail order
magazines are nothing more than expanded adsheets, while
others strive to help the opportunity seekers with on-going
advice and tips he can use in the development and growth of
his own wealth building projects.

A complete guide to British Mail Order Opportunity Magazines
and Adsheets is published by John Pooley, 27 Carey Street,
Reading, Berks, RG1 7JS, and is priced at just £2.50. A new
edition is published 3 times a year and each edition has
about 21 A4 pages.

5. How can I decide where to advertise my product?

First of all, you have to determine who your prospective
buyers are. Then you do a little bit of market research.
Talk to your friends, neighbours and people at random who
might fit this profile. Ask them if they would be
interested in a product such as yours, and then ask them
which publications they read. Next, go to your public
library for a listing of the publications of this type from
“British Rate and Data”, this contains current information
on nearly all papers and magazines in Britain, including
their advertising rates, it also classifies periodicals by
their areas of interest.

Make a list of the addresses, circulation figures and
advertising rates. To determine the true cost of your
advertising and decide which is the better buy, divide the
total audited circulation figure into the cost for a one cm
ad, e.g. £10 per cm with a publication showing 10,000 circulation would be 10,000 into £10 or £1 per thousand.

Or £15 per cm with a circulation of 42,500 would be 42,500
into £15 or about 35p per thousand.

Obviously your best buy would be the second example because
of the lower cost per thousand.

Write and ask for sample copies of the magazines you’ve
tentatively chosen to place your advertising in. Look over
their advertising - be sure that they don’t or won’t put
your ad in the “gutter” which is the inside column next to
the binding. How many other mail order type ads are they
carrying - you want to go with a publication that’s busy,
not one that has only a few ads. The more ads in the
publication, the better the response the advertisers are
getting, or else they wouldn’t be investing their money in
that publication.

To “properly” test your ad, you should let is run for at
least three consecutive issues of any publication. If your
responses are small, try a different publication. Then, if
your responses are still small, look at your ad and think
about rewriting it for greater appeal and pulling power. In
a great many instances, it’s the ad and not the publication’s
pulling power that’s at fault!

Copyright Avril Harper, UK

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