ever ask your sales Rep “what the heck is this?” The reason you don’t ask is because the item only cost $ 30 dollars, and you had it last year, and you don’t want to appear stupid asking questions about $ 30.. The problem is that these unidentified items can add thousands of dollars to your advertising bill.

When you read your Yellow Pages contract ask the publisher’s sales Rep what all the initials are and why do you need them. In almost all cases you don’t need them because there is a cheaper or free version available.

White page listing (WBLN) – If you have a business phone you are entitled to a free listing of your business name, address and phone number in the White Pages and the Yellow Pages.

You will be told that it’s much easier for your customer to read a bold listing (BLN) and it only cost $31 than the semi bold free listing. Unfortunately it is not $31 but $372. The $31 is for one month but the contract is for a year. It is very clever the way the publishers show all costs on your contract by the month instead of by the year, even though the contract is for a year.

Ninety percent of all business name listings in the white pages are the free listings version and their customers seem to be able to find them. People read the white pages alphabetically and the bold print can actually be confusing.

White Feature Listing (WFL) – This is the super big print that you see in the white pages. A bold white page listing (WBLN) cost $31 a month while the super bold (WFL) listings cost $90 a month or $1080 for the year. Can you imagine paying $1080 for something that is free, yet thousands of businesses have WFL’s.

Anchor Bold Listing and Number (ABLN) – If you purchase a display ad you receive a free Incolumn listing in the same heading the display ad appears. You will be told that it’s much easier for the customer to read your name if it is bold. An anchor listing is the business name, address and phone number and where your ad is located (see our ad on page 456). The price of a bold anchor listing can ranges from $30 to $114 a month or you can get it for free (ARL). As my son would say Duuuh.

Buy the largest display ad -All advertisers are told that the largest display and will receive the most calls. However research shows that the ad that contains the most pertinent information that the consumer is looking for, in an easy-to-read format, will receive the most calls regardless of size. Spend your money on ad design and copywriting instead of Yellow Pages ad space and you can reduce your advertising costs by 50% or more.

Process color ads – The Yellow Pages sales Rep will bring in a sample ad for your business that looks like it’s straight out of Time magazine. Unfortunately a process color ad adds 40% to the cost over a black and yellow or spot color ad. There is no evidence in any study of Yellow Pages advertising that a process color ad increases customer calls.

Businesses that have followed my advice have been able to reduce their Yellow Pages costs by as much as 50%. Take charge of your yellow page program, and examine every item on your contract.

Yellow Page Advertising gives you the perfect timing to spell out your benefits headline to your identified market and your soon-to-be clients. This is an opportunity for you to create an impact and talk about your business – how long have you been here, the need that you are answering, the benefits they can get and the associations you have with others that will highly support your trustworthiness in the market.

Yellow Page Ads are placed from the largest to the smallest. This means that categories start from the full page ad, then to the three fourth sized ad and so on. And since it is also seniority-based, the sooner your ad is submitted, the better off you are. Plan to get the size that would fit to your need and get a results oriented ad designed for you right away. This will give you the chance to be in the first list.

You don’t have to invest effort and time to create colorful designs in-house for your advertising needs. The circus in the advertising battles has created an illusion that lots of color splashed around will bring you great returns. However, scientific surveys have been conducted year after year and it yielded the same results. Colors do not guarantee better results than non-colored. So, grab the chance to get effective Yellow Page advertising now. It is one area of your advertising that can be focused on once, and the results pour in all year when done right. Clearly a benefit for you.

Yellow Page advertising gives you a focused infomercial-like message, to a focused group of people at a time when they are focused on purchasing. The advertiser will too often spoil this opportunity with a “Throw everything at the wall – and see what sticks” approach. Fact is, most people see the endless list of everything a company claims to do and they just look elsewhere for solutions to their problems.

Free internet advertising makes it easy for you to put free ads on several of the premier quality web sites whenever you want, for free. You know that you are visiting the forum merely for the free advertising for your website but it is better not to make this obvious if you want other members to react well to your advertising. Internet forum etiquette demands that you spend a little time “lurking” ie logging in at the forum and reading previous and current threads before you even think of starting to use the forum for advertising. Whether you write your own articles or pay a ghostwriter to write your articles for you, the combined cost of creating and distributing your article is far less than the value of advertising that you will receive in exchange for the reprint use of your article. When you write articles that are consistent with the topics that your potential clientele will read, you are able to consistently target the people you need to reach with your advertising. If an advertiser is already paying 20 cents per click and your blog Internet advertising rate card charges them what works out to about 5 cents per click and there is a promise of the same or an even better conversion rate, you have won over that advertiser.

The interstitials or pop-ups are one of those ads that interrupt the users. You may have noticed a banner advertisement appearing in another window, when you make a click over a particular location. This form of ads gets the viewers without considering their willingness. No doubt that it attracts attention, when deigned in a perfect way. The important thing is that the design must not be annoying to the users. The floating ads are also becoming popular due to their ability of being noticed. These types of ads are the ones, which flies or float across the screen, when a webpage is being viewed. These ads are highly noticeable and this is the reason behind their popularity. Nowadays, it is being considered as a powerful branding tool of Internet advertising. To sum it up, the banner advertisement is one of those tools that when used effectively, can draw a great deal of response from the target market. In this way, it becomes easy for the advertisers to penetrate their target markets and achieve good market share.