Free Radio Advertising!

The greatest expense you are 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. In addition, regardless of where or how you advertise, it is going to cost you in some form or another.

Good advertising builds every successful business up. A successful business continues to thrive dependent 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. However, 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 that most generally associated with broadcasting, where you pay only for the responses you get to your advertising message. It is 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 these publications, select either the state or states you want to work first. It is generally best to begin in your own state and work outward from there. If you have a moneymaking 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.

On your first try, list only one radio station per city. Pick out the station people most interested in your product would be listening to. This can be determined by the programming description contained within the data block about the station in the Broad casting Yearbook or the SRDS Directory.

Let's say that you're listed 250 different radio stations. It's best to list the stations you want to contact alphabetically by the city or town they're licensed to serve, with a tab separating each state. The next step is either a phone call or a letter to the station manager of each of the stations.

This first contact should be in the way of introducing yourself, and inquiring if they would consider a PI Advertising campaign. You tell the station manager that you have a product you feel will sell very well in his market, and would like to test it before going ahead with a paid advertising program.

You must quickly point out that your product sells for, say $5, and that during this test, you would allow him 50% of that for each response his station pulls for you. Explain that you handle everything for him: the writing of the commercials, all accounting and bookkeeping, plus any refunds or complaints that come in.

In other words, all he has to do is schedule your commercials on his log, and give them his "best shot." When the responses come in, he counts them, and forwards them on to you for fulfilment. You make out a check for payment to him, and everybody is happy.

TO BE CONTINUED ... The Article is SO LONG and I NEED to UPDATE regularly.