Many of you don’t do Yellow Page advertising anymore, but for those of you that do, here’s what I suggest.

When someone is looking in the yellow pages, they are actually ready to buy, so your ad has got to jump out at them, and then have them contact you instead of all of the other so-so ads that are listed.

I often hear many business owners grumble about the high cost of Yellow Pages advertising, but those who insist it costs them anything are simply foolish.

For 70% to 80% of all business, you have to work at Not making a profit from Yellow Pages advertising. In most of the businesses I created, Yellow Page advertising wasn’t useful. But for the others it was a Gold Mine. For most businesses, Yellow Pages Advertising will work.

The reasons many Yellow Pages ads do not pay off for their advertisers are very simple and common. All you have to do is look and you will know what I mean. They can be summed up as not having a direct response ad at all.

-They don’t have a headline to grab the reader
-There aren’t any reasons to choose you verses the other advertisers.
-No offer
-They look just like all the rest of them.

Here’s just one example

FREE Special Report Reveals What the Real Estate Industry Never Tells you About.
“How you can get top dollars When Selling Your Home in Today’s Slow Market!”

Call 1-800, 000-0000 Extension 11 for Free Special Report and Recorded Message.

It will jump out at the person looking for your specific product. If you do advertise in the Yellow Pages, change it to the above and let us know the results you get.

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Probably 99.9 times out of 100 prospects, will not spend the time to read your unsolicited ad or direct mail piece.

The reason is that you are “interrupting their lives.” The simple act of having an ad or sales letter before a prospect will bring them to the proverbial “fork in the Road” and forces them to make a decision to either read on or not read your message.

Every time their eye moves from one word to the next, from one sentence to the next sentence, from one paragraph to the next, they reach yet another fork in the road. Now they have to decide whether they are going to keep reading the ad or not.

What makes your prospect make the wrong decision and drop your ad into the nearest trash bin?

Unsuitability: Your prospect already has what you are offering and quickly decides your product is of no interest to them.

Boredom: Most of the time ads are very boring so they stop reading it.

Disbelief: Your claims are too exaggerated or even dishonest and they figure that they can’t trust anything you say. So always tell the truth.

Exhaustion: Your ad is so difficult to read and impossible to follow, that they simply give up on reading any more.

Interruption: This is probably the number one reason a prospect stops reading your offer. Something just happened to take their attention away from reading. They now will deal with the immediate crisis instead of continuing to read your offer.

I’m sure you can come up with more items but this should give you a start. Let us know why you stop reading an ad or sales piece.

Technorati Tags: acquire customers, acquiring customers, acquiring leads, ad copy, ad story, ad testing, ad writing, Advertising, alex mandossian, all marketers are liars, attract clients, attract customers, attracting leads, attracting prospects, creating customers, customer acquisition, magazine ads, promoting your business

As I travel, I have an opportunity to read many ads in many magazines and newspapers.  What disturbs me is that 99% of them are downright dull and I often yawn when reading them.

As the saying goes, “How you say something is just as important as what you say.” An ad should be similar to a face-to-face sales pitch.

A great ad will have, not only the offer itself, but the language, the tone, and the “voice” of the offer.

The problem is that most sales messages get so engrossed in describing the company, its products, and product features that they fail to appeal to the reader.

It’s understandable.  People in business are often so tied to their businesses or products that they get tunnel vision and fail to look at their copy from their reader’s perspective.

It’s understandable, but inexcusable.

My advice is to be more experiential in your ads, as if the reader is experiencing what you are telling them.  Let them feel or imagine how it feels.  Make it “benefit-rich”.  Most importantly, appeal to the reader’s ego when describing those benefits.

People always buy for, or are influenced by, personal desires, selfish reasons and self-interested motives.  And guess what?  It’s been that way for thousands of years, and nothing’s changed.

People are people.  They always buy on emotion and they always will.

Our job as entrepreneurs is to express our offers in terms that trigger the prospects emotions, press their hot buttons, tug at their heartstrings, and push them into taking action. 

To do otherwise with your offers is the biggest mistake you can make.

Technorati Tags: ad writing, magazine ads, newspaper ads, sales offer

I ran across this magazine ad a couple weeks ago.  It’s a good ad because it tells a story and is personal (Excuse the quality of the image; I had to copy and scan it.).  Take one of your ads and massage it to be like this…to tell a story and be personal.  Then test it out and tell me your results.

Too see a larger version of the ad below, click on this link: http://www.kenvarga.com/Oregon_Fishing_Person_Ad.jpg

Technorati Tags: ad copy, ad story, ad writing, story telling