Advertising in Your
Newsletter
Making Your Newsletter Pay for Itself
Part 2 of a Series
In our last newsletter, we began
discussing advertising in your newsletter by detailing the benefits of
including advertising in your newsletter, and how to solicit
ads. We continue this series by taking a look at ways to use the ads
you’ve obtained and how best to place advertising in your newsletter.
It is
helpful to set up a policy for the types of ad layouts that you will
accept before you begin soliciting advertisements for your newsletter. The
reason for this is simple. When a vendor approaches you or you solicit an
ad, you will likely be asked several questions. “How big can the ad
be?”, “Can I include color?”, “Can you design the ad for me?”
Knowing the answers to questions such as these will help make your
newsletter production process much easier.
Decide on
several sizes for ads that would be suitable in your newsletter. If you
are charging to include ads, of course, larger sizes will command a higher
price. If you are including ads for free, you may decide to allow only one
standard size, in order to have enough room for other ads and the regular
information and articles you normally include in each issue. Sizes
generally include a business card size (3.5 by 2 inches), an eighth of a
page (4 by 2.5 inches), a quarter of a page (4 by 5 inches), a half page
(8 by 5 inches), and a full page (7.5 by 10 inches).
If you
find that you have several ads and they are crowding the space that you
need for the main information in your newsletter, consider placing all ads
on a supplemental sheet to be inserted in your newsletter. This will keep
your newsletter free from clutter and will provide your readers with an
easy way to save ads for the future. However, this option does include
added cost for you, in the time needed to layout the supplemental page,
and the actual cost of printing. Be sure to calculate these costs into the
price you charge your advertisers.
You will
also need to make decisions on the type of format you will accept. If it
is possible, the easiest types of ads to accept are those in digital
format. Ask your advertisers if they are able to design their own ads, and
if so, if they can provide them to you on a floppy disk or a CD. All they
need to do is save the file as a picture, and you will be able to insert
it easily into the word processing or desktop publishing program you are
using to produce your newsletter.
If your
advertisers cannot provide you their ads in digital format, at least
require that ads be in “camera-ready” format. This means that the ad
is in its final format and is of a suitable quality for reproduction.
These types of ads will already be the proper size. Generally, a laser
printer will produce output that is considered “camera-ready.” You
then can use the ad in one of two ways. You can scan in the ad and, since
it is in “camera-ready” format, you will not need to do any additional
formatting work. Or you can simply attach a hard copy of the ad to your
completed newsletter before taking it to be printed or photocopied.
What if a
potential advertiser says, “I would love to advertise with you, but I
don’t know how to design an ad myself”? In a coming month, in our continuing
series on advertisements in your newsletter, we will look at ways to
design an ad, from start to finish, and how to use this skill to increase
your newsletter’s potential.
If you want to learn more about using advertising in
your newsletter, check out the rest of this
series, as well as other informative articles.
