How to Start Your Own Business, Based on My Experiences: Part 6

Now that your video store in all setup and ready to open, now you need to get customers in the door ready to rent your movies. You are excited and optimistic about the success for your business simply because you know it's there, you know you have the best prices and the best selection around, but after a week or so you realize that you are not getting the traffic or visitor to customer conversion you were expecting. So what can you do?

The first method of advertising and of course the most common media used for advertising is the local papers. A word to the wise and budget minded do your homework on this before you layout the money for your printed advertisement. There are many things you need to know about the paper you are thinking about advertising in before you layout your money. The most important thing needed to know to determine the value of the paper is the amount of daily readers that particular paper has. While the numbers are not a perfect count, the methods used to estimate are fair. Papers determine their daily reader aspect by counting how many prepaid subscribers they have for their daily and Sunday papers (both separately and combined). It is important to note that anywhere you look; you will find that there are more Sunday readers than daily paper readers. This of course if due to the weekly ads that are delivered with the Sunday papers. It is for this same reason that the cost to advertise in a Sunday paper is higher than that of the daily papers. You see, the newspaper is very much like the location of your business. The papers that get less subscriber and reader attention are not as valuable to the printers as the paper that gets many more times the number of readers in one day than the rest of the week. Its all about traffic count, they know that more people will see your ad in the Sunday paper than they will any other day of the week. You should also be aware of contract requirements or offers that these papers have. In many larger areas, your price per printing will be much cheaper if you sign a thirteen, twenty six, or fifty two week contract to advertise on a regulated basis.