How to Make Your Web Site Advertising, Newspaper and Phone Directory Advertising More Profitable!

By Noel Peebles

Courtesy of Ezine Articles

The results I have seen achieved from newspaper, phone directory and web site advertising, have been nothing short of amazing. It has all been accomplished using simple, but powerful, strategies.

Whether you are running web site advertising or any other kind of advertising – it still needs to get results. Your advertising will cost you the same, regardless of whether it pulls in two sales or does 1000% better and pulls in 22 sales.

So, how do you make your advertising work like crazy?

Your first task is not to get your prospect to read your advertising. You first need them to notice your advertising. I might be old school but, from years of “hands on” experience, I know that EVERY written advertisement needs a powerful headline. That goes for mail order, phone directory advertising, web site advertising, newspaper advertising etc. Every advertisement needs to grab attention with a powerful headline.

When I sort through my mail I do it next to the wastepaper basket. Unless it is something important, or a bill I need to pay, most of it gets trashed.

If I spot an eye-catching headline, I might be tempted to read a couple of paragraphs to see what it is all about. The same goes for web site advertising; if the web page doesn’t immediately grab my attention, I will move on to the next web site.

So, the first job of any advertising is to get attention. The second job is to keep the reader interested in what you have to say. You just have to get the person to read the first sentence, then the next sentence, then the one after that, and so on. Keep them interested and you may start to create a desire for what you have to sell.

Take just one step at a time. Get their attention and then keep them interested. Create a desire. Then, introduce a call to action and ask them to buy.

It is really important to work through the process in the correct order. There is no point in asking for the sale if you haven’t first grabbed their attention and created the desired.

That is why so many advertisements fail to pull in satisfactory results. A lot of advertisers put their company name at the top of the advertisement (boring!), and expect that to grab the attention of a reader. The business owner might like to see his or her company name big and bold at the top of the ad, but the average reader won’t have the same interest. The reader is more interested in “what’s in it for me.”

We are all interested in ourselves and want to know how we can benefit in some way. This is an important point all advertisers need to understand if they want better results from their advertising.

Now, before I go, take another look at the headline of this article. You will see it includes a benefit, which is exactly what I have just been talking about. If you have read this far, then you must have been interested in what I had to say. Hopefully you now have the desire to improve your advertising. However, I will stop there and not ask for a sale, because that is not the purpose of this article.

The important thing is that you understand the important sequence of the AIDA process – Get Attention, Create Interest, Generate Desire, and then Call for Action.