Effective, Cheap Advertising

It's not hard to come by; the hard part is deciding what method. Me being the owner of a Small Gift Basket company (http://BlackRiverBaskets.com), I understand how hard it can be to market your business cheaply. Adsense (Google's Pay Per Click Program) gave me clicks and impressions but no conversions. I burnt through $55.00 in about two weeks. Granted that isn't very expensive, business cards would have been more effective. Some will argue that the impressions are worth the money, and they very well may be when it comes to brand recognition, but when I say effective advertising, I mean making people into customers.

So below I'm going to list some of the really effective ways to advertise cheaply, and pretty effectively too!

Business Cards: This is a must. No professional business lacks business cards. They are cheap enough and they give all of the pertinent information. When speaking to people, bring the conversation to where you can say "Oh, I've got a business, here's my card if you need anything." Leave it at that and continue the conversation. People are a lot more comfortable doing business with someone who looks established, serious, and professional.

Flyers: Everyone hate's these and crumpl -- Wait, no they don't. I'm a crumpler and even I read the business name before crumpling! If it is a business that I need I read the flyer. If I need my haircut and I see a flyer on my car I'll read it first if it mentions hair. The big downfall of flyers is people put way too much information on them. It's tempting but treat it as a big business card. Contact Info., Business name, short list of things you do or sell, advantages to doing business with you rather than the competition, thank them. That's pretty much it.

Word of Mouth: I'm a fanatic with delivering a great product in a great way. Once you have a happy customer, they will refer other people to you. Then you have more customers that already trust you! Word of mouth is by far the best method of advertising. This is why giving out freebies is a great way to drum up some word of mouth!

In case you're wondering, I'm not really touching on internet type advertising, as I've said, internet conversions are expensive! What I'm demonstrating is cheap effective advertisement to reach your local audience. I use these methods with my business too. In one of my next articles I will give some tips on effective internet advertising.