Advertising on the Cheap Think advertising is beyond your means? Not with these low-cost and no-cost options.

Advertising can be a costly, often prohibitive proposition forsmall businesses. But homebased business owners shouldn'tconsider themselves to be the "poor second cousins" ofbig business, shut out of the advertising opportunities availableto their rich relatives. Here are some no-cash tips that can helpyou get your small-business foot in those big-buck doors.

Print Ads

The design and layout of your print ads, whether for daily orweekly newspapers, free shoppers, direct mail or coupon inserts,will be handled at no charge through the publication or direct mailhouse doing the distribution. Your media sales rep will show yousamples of award winning print ads to get you in the mood.

Weekly subscription papers add color to their pages for specialeditions and, since they're using it anyway, will sometimes addthe same color to your ad at no charge if you ask. Tell yourreps to notify you whenever free color, which under normalcircumstances can be cost prohibitive, is available.

Radio and TV (Almost) Freebies

Radio and TV advertising isn't out of the question forsmall-business owners; in fact, with trade and promotionadvertising, you can pay for your advertising with products orservices instead of cash. Radio and TV stations may need yourproducts or services as much as you need them, and they don'twant to pay cash either! They will trade dollar-for-dollaradvertising for office machines and maintenance, cleaning anddecorating services, office supplies, delivery service, officefurniture, news and station vehicles (and the supplies andmaintenance that go along with those vehicles, such as fuel,cleaning, tires, oil changes, repairs, painting), printing, officeand/or client party planning and catering. . . the list is endless.TV stations will trade hairdressing, makeup services and oftenwardrobes for their news anchors; the stations often accomplishthese trades with annual contracts, insuring that your advertisingwon't just be a flash in the pan but will reach their audiencesconsistently.

Contact the general sales manager at each of your local stationsby phone. Ask the receptionist for the contact's name beforethe call is put through, and come right to the point when you gethim or her on the line. Managers frequently field these type ofrequests, so don't be shy. If they're not in need of yourproduct or service at the moment, send them your card or brochureand check back periodically.

Promotional advertising (found more often, but not exclusively,on radio) is slightly different than straight trade advertising inthat you get produced commercials plus live promotionalannouncements attached to a special station event. Perfectcandidates for this kind of advertising include catering companies,travel agencies, health spas, boutiques, specialty gift companiesand bakeries--basically any business that can provide prizessuitable for on-air contests and giveaways. Come up with your ownpromotion, and approach a local station with the idea. If theydecline, try another--there's always more than one radiostation that reaches your target audience.

Before you agree to do trade or promotional advertising with anyradio or TV station, be sure you'll be reaching the rightaudience. Otherwise, you'll waste your products or services,which you should part with as carefully as you do cash. And whenfiguring out trade amounts, use your highest unit price or hourlyrate--they will.

What other freebies should you expect to receive?

• Every radio and TV station will provide you with no-chargecopywriting. Many actually employ full-time copywriters, and someprovide the service through their media reps.
• Production of your radio commercials should be free, unlessyou're taking a "dub," or copy of the producedcommercial, to use on another station as well. You can even getaround this charge by providing each station you're going toadvertise on with a script and letting each produce its own versionof your commercial.
• You may be able to include the cost of producing your TVcommercial as part of the trade or promotional advertising. Ifproducing a full 30-second commercial takes up too much of yourtrade balance, have a 15-second ad produced instead. They'reless expensive to make and run, so you should be able to have thecommercial made and still run it with some frequency. Most tradedeals like this are negotiated during the first and third quartersof the year when demand on radio and TV inventory, as well as onproduction time, is down.

Interns, the Internet & More

Intern programs exist at virtually all colleges and universitiesand are one of the best freebie opportunities available to you.Juniors and seniors with lots of book smarts are anxious to getsome hands-on experience, and instead of a salary from you, theyreceive class credit from their learning institutions for theirwork. Interns are available in almost every degree program,including advertising and design, sales and marketing, computerprogramming, business development and human resources. As an internhost, you or someone who works for you must have some expertise inthe area in which the intern will serve, so the student receivesvaluable guidance and actually learns something. You'll beasked once or twice during each semester to provide a writtenprogress report to the university that will be central to the gradethe student receives.

Rod Stanton, owner of The Art Farm, hosted two marketing majors fromSyracuse University in New York, who served as consultants forStanton's graphic art and design business. "I provide myclients with a highly sophisticated look for brochures andcollateral material using fine art, oil paintings and originalillustration, and I was frustrated by the fact that not everyoneappreciated, or even perceived, the difference between what Ioffered and everyday graphic design," says Stanton, who runshis business from his home in Syracuse, New York. "Theseinterns acted as consultants to The Art Farm, in that they studiedthe market and advised me on how to better fit in among mycompetitors. The experience was wonderful."

Interns can build your business website, put together mediaplans and place the schedules, write copy, and do market researchfor you. They can also write and present sales proposals, writepress releases, study your competitors, look for opportunities topromote your business in the market, find ways to expand yourcustomer base, and, in general, reduce your daily level of work toa somewhat manageable level.

Working Your Website

Contact the webmasters of complimentary (but not competitive)sites and ask if they'd be willing to exchange banner ads. Youcan find these sites by performing a search for keywords (try allof the search engines below) that are closely related to your own.The larger sites usually sell banner space and won't beinterested in trades, but smaller sites may be.

Your business name probably isn't well known at this point,so don't rely solely on your logo to do the work in your bannerad. Rather, use a catchy or intriguing question or statement thatwill be more effective in tempting people to click on your banner.For example, "Do you hate your kitchen?" addresses a realpredicament and will grab the reader's interest more than thelogo of a kitchen remodeling company would.

Another method of generating traffic is to submit your site tosearch engines. But instead of paying a company for this service,submit your URL yourself for free to individual search engines.

Instead of paying a company to register your site with searchengines, submit your URL yourself to individual search engines forfree. It's as easy as filling out a basic form that you canaccess by clicking on the "Add URL," "Add Site"or "Suggest a Site" links usually found near the bottomof each search engine's home page. You can go directly to thesehome pages to add your site: MetaCrawler, Excite, WebCrawler, Hotbot, Google, Dogpile, AltaVista, Mamma.com and Lycos. And BBL InternetMedia includes links to several more search engines.

Re-register every three months or so-search engines won'talways pick up your submission on the first or even second time.Also make changes to your site frequently because search engineswill perceive an inactive site as "dead" and remove it tomake room for others.

Brains Can Be Better Than Money

When Melissa Trombley, owner of The Barking BakersInc., was starting out, she wanted to find a unique way tobring her all-natural gourmet dog biscuits to her customers, ratherthan spending a lot of cash to get customers to come to her.Melissa knew that lots of owners exercised their dogs aroundOnondaga Lake Park in her upstate New York community. She wanted todistribute product samples for the dogs along with informationcards about her business for their owners. She envisioned a vendorwagon that would attract attention to her product in a unique yetprofessional way, but she didn't have the cash to build it.

So Trombley approached Home Depot and made them an offer: Ifthey would donate the materials she needed to build her vendorwagon, she would display their logo on it. They agreed, she and herhusband built the wagon, and it was so unique and successful, alocal newspaper did a story on her company, which led to personalTV appearances on the local ABC, NBC and CBS affiliates inSyracuse, New York. Free building materials and freenewspaper and TV coverage--all because she came up with a creativeway to present her company to the public.

Kathy Kobliski is the author of Advertising Without An Agency, and owner offull-service ad agency, SilentPartner Advertising, in Syracuse, New York.