My Personal Guide to Advertising for Business

The greatest expense you're going to incur in conducting a successful business is your advertising.

You have to advertise. Your business cannot grow and flourish unless you advertise. Advertising is the "life-blood" of any profitable business. And regardless of where or how you advertise, it's going to cost you in some form or another.

Every successful business is built upon, and continues to thrive, primarily, on good advertising. The top companies in the world allocate millions of dollars annually to their advertising budgets. Of course, when starting from a garage, basement or kitchen table, you can't quite match their advertising efforts - at least not in the beginning. But there is a way you can approximate their manoeuvres without actually spending their kind of money. And that's through "P.I." advertising.

"P.I." stands for per inquiry. This is a kind of advertising most generally associated with broadcasting, where you pay only for the responses you get to your advertising message. It's very popular - somewhat akin to bartering - and is used by many more advertisers than most people realize. The advantages of PI Advertising are all in favour of the advertiser because with this kind of an advertising arrangement, you pay only for the results the advertising produces.

To get in on this "free" advertising, start with a loose leaf notebook, and about 100 sheets of filler paper. Next, either visit, your public library and start poring through the Broadcast Yearbook on radio stations in the U.S., or the Standard Rate and Data Services Directory on Spot Radio. Both these publications will give you just about all the information you could ever want about licensed stations.

An easier way might be to call or visit one of your local radio stations, and ask to borrow (and take home with you) their current copy of either of these volumes. To purchase them outright will cost $50 to $75.

Once you have a copy of either of these publications, select the state or states you want to work first. It's generally best to begin in your own state and work outward from there. If you have a money-making manual, you might want to start first with those states reporting the most unemployment.

Use some old fashioned common sense. Who are the people most likely to be interested in your offer, and where are the largest concentrations of these people? You wouldn't attempt to sell windshield deice canisters in Florida, or suntan lotion in Minnesota during the winter months, would you?

At any rate, once you've got your beginning "target" area decided upon, go through the radio listings for the cities and towns in that area, and jot down in your notebook the names of the general managers, the station call letters, and the addresses. Be sure to list the telephone numbers as well.