How to Use Offline Classified Ads to Quickly Lift Your Home Business to Success

A Home Business Article Contributed by Christopher Kyalo

How to Use Offline Classified Ads to Quickly Lift Your Home Business to Success

Classified advertisements in the local newspapers are a valuable tool for rapidly lifting any home business to success.

Despite all the major changes that the internet has brought, people still religiously read local newspaper classified ads and more importantly respond to adverts that are of interest.

The Most Effective Way for a New Home Business to Generate Leads

The mistake many classified advertisers make is try to do everything with their classified ads. That is to introduce their products or services, describe the benefits and sell, all in one tiny classified advert.

Even the professionals who've sold using classified ads for many years seldom try to do this.

As a home business starting out in classifieds, a good idea would be to first focus on generating as many quality leads as you can. The first thing that a new business and especially a home based business requires, is as many leads as possible.

The Headline is the Key to Success for Your Home Business Classified Ad

The headline usually the first line in smaller classified advertisements is what will decide how effective your advertisement will be. Tests have shown that a simple change of the headline, without changing any of the copy in the body text, can increase the response of an advertisement by 500% or more.

That's a huge number and it illustrates just how important the headline is for a home business classified advertisement. In fact many experienced copy writers spend much more time on the headline than they do on the rest of the copy.

The Headline for Your Home Business Offer Should Address Specific People

The temptation for many people is to have a headline that addresses all people, in the process you lose all of them.

Actually you should be as specific as possible. Sure you will lose a lot of readers, but those will be readers you were targeting in the first place. If for example you are advertising a product that deals with migraine and you notice that a majority of your customers are women, then calling all ladies suffering from migraine will be a better headline than calling all migraine sufferers.

You might complain that your home business will lose all men suffering from migraine. The truth is that if 90% of your clients are women, then you will probably lose nothing and the men suffering from migraine who would have come to you as a result of the general headline will still come to you as a result of the headline targeting ladies.

Look at Several Adverts and Test Several

An effective way of coming up with your winner advertisement is to look at existing advertisements in the local newspaper where you want to place your advertisement and then compile the wording for yours based on what others have done. Do several adverts and then test as least two or three different ones to see which one will pull the highest response or number of leads for your home business.

There is really no other secret for success in classifieds for your home business other than testing all the time to constantly look for a better classified advertisement, even after you have begun to enjoy some success.