Do Display Ads Work or Are They Too Expensive?
by Jason Ryan Isaksen

I personally find display ads to be a bit too expensive for my taste. I some times run display ads now that I'm making a good chunk of money, but when I was starting out, I strictly did classified ads. Classified ads in home business and business start-up magazines were always my favorite because I could write a tiny 10 word ad and get it into a national magazine like Entrepreneur Magazine for around $100 and I'd end up making around $500 from all the orders that ad got me.

I think display ads are much more effective once you've mastered writing good classified ads. There is much less risk involved with classified ads so you'll likely be less stressed and nervous while writing your little classifieds. In time, you'll become confident in your ability to write classifieds that get a great response and then it may be time for you to experiment with the larger display ads.

If you do plan on using large display ads like half page or full page, you'll get your best response by making them look like a news article. That's the beauty of an ad this big. You have enough room to write it in the exact same style that a news article in that publication would look like. Because obviously, if your ad looks like an ad, many people will just skim over it. But if you're ad just blends in with the newspaper or magazine as part of the news content, then you're readership will increase greatly.

How do you make your ad look like part of the news in that magazine or newspaper? Simple go buy a copy of the magazine or newspaper you plan to advertise in and take a look at the style of their news articles. If they don't use colors in their news articles, then be sure not to use colors in your ad. If they tend to put a light green background behind their news articles, then be sure you put a light green background behind your ad.

Make your headline the exact type of font and font size they are using for most of their news articles. And if they use rows or columns for the main article copy, then be sure you type your ad up as rows or columns. And try to keep your ad about the same size as their small news articles. Look for any comments at the beginning or end of the news articles and try to make similar comments so that the readers won't be able to tell the difference between your ad and all of the news articles.

Remember, people usually skip over ads because they bought the magazine or newspaper to read interesting news content. With small classified ads, there's nothing you can do about that. It's all ads back there and it doesn't matter because the people who read classified ads like to read ads. They purposely go to the classified ad section just to read ads. So never bother to try to make a classified ad look like a news article. It's just not possible anyway.

But if you're listing your ad in the main part of the magazine, newspaper, or ezine, you have the perfect opportunity to disguise your ad as a news article. And you always should!

You should know this: Magazines love for you to pay in advance for at least 3 months and some times even a year for the same ad. They like to do this because then they don't have to take up time talking to you or making changes to your ad in their publication. When you run your exact same ad for long periods, it saves them time and energy. So they will almost always try to get you to buy several months worth of advertising for one single ad. DON'T DO IT!!! If you do, you won't be able to test. Three months is the most you should ever pay in advance for any single ad.