If your business is not taking every possible venue of advertising into consideration, you are losing money. It does not matter the overall size of the business in question, or even the target audience. There is always an audience out there that you have not yet tapped into if you have not openly promoted your business.

The possibilities of advertising venues are virtually endless. The most proven methods are those of media, of course. If your business is targeted for a particular local, then the local newspaper(s) are likely your best outlet. Next to that are the yellow pages of your local phone book. Do not settle for the white pages. Most people looking for a product or a service rarely even bother with that section of the phone book.

Another excellent option for local advertising is that of the billboard sign. Consider the consumer. He/she drives to work every day and passes this massive billboard sign beside the highway. Every morning and every evening they see your face/product/service right there, just beside your logo and motto. You can bet it will be ingrained into their memory for years to come.

From a regional or national standpoint, radio and television are your best options. Everyone listens to the radio when in his or her vehicle and everyone watches television while at home. Be prepared as these two options can be quite expensive, particularly that of the television.

From the online aspect, there are a large number of options for advertising. One of the more popular is that of text ad links. Google Adsense is likely the most utilized as well as the most seen on the web. There are hundreds of thousands of real advertising possibilities online. Surf around, put the words Buy Ads in the search engines, and see what comes up. It is best to stay on the first page results, as these are generally the most lucrative.

With the majority of the traditional advertising techniques out of the way, consider the less traditional and more original manners in promoting your business. How about putting coupons for your services in the newspaper? This is known as an incentive. The customer feels as if they are getting something extra from you. You can utilize this to double your business by offering a buy one get one free incentive, such as “Bring a friend and you get one free,” type of deal.

Be creative and come up with methods that you have never seen before. One good example of that is the networking method that online e-commerce guru John Chow is using at this moment. Chow has a contest on his website. To enter you have to put a link to chows site on your site. The prize is 500.00. Using this method, Chow will easily get ten thousand dollars worth of advertising for five hundred. You see, Chow thinks outside the metaphorical box, allowing him to be the cutting edge advertiser, not the follower.

There are a few no-nos in advertising, things that will do more harm than good. First, we will look at the online version. There are three kinds of overall links. There are good ones, bad ones, and dead ones. The good ones are, obviously, good to have. The bad ones are those that lead to low PR sites or sites that receive little to no traffic. The dead ones are sites that have long since gone under. Keep on top of your site link status.

Next is mass emailing. While this proved extremely effective in the early Web 1.0 era, let us not forget that this format also played a major role in the fall of 1.0 . Today, you will be lucky if you get 1 second of view time via email before your message is deleted, and that one-second is generally because of slow computers.

Lastly, avoid errors in your ads. Regardless of the format, offline or online, advertising is a reflection of the level of professionalism a business has. One misspelled word will destroy that image. Simply using a spellchecker and/or hiring a proofreader can avoid this. The proofreader is the best way to go, as most spellcheckers can occasionally make a mistake.

Another error in advertising is that of the broken promise. If you promise fifteen percent off, make sure that the client gets at least that. A dishonest business or a business that cannot live up to its own expectation is a business that will fall.

Remember, be creative, think outside the box, and become the next John Chow.