Welcome!
Welcome to our basic training course Everything You Need to Start Selling Newspaper Advertising Tomorrow. If you're new to ad sales, this course will teach you exactly what the title says. We're confident it'll make your transition to ad sales a smooth one.

This document is divided into a number of lessons and topics within each lesson. It's designed to be equally appropriate to weekly, daily, and monthly newspapers as well as shoppers and everything in between.

We understand that different newspapers have different organizational structures, procedures, and policies, and we've taken this into consideration when creating this course.

After working with over 400 newspapers in the past few years, we've come to the conclusion that the vast majority of things you need to learn are very similar no matter what kind of newspaper you work for, or even what country you live in. Sure, the forms look a bit different, rate structures and credit policies vary, but these distinctions are usually minor and can usually be explained quickly to a savvy advertising salesperson, which is exactly what you'll be when you finish this course.

The vast majority of the things you'll need to know are universal in the industry--how rate cards work, the difference between circulation and readership, how various pieces of artwork reproduce on newsprint, the different types of competitors you'll encounter and their advantages and disadvantages, how to make a layout, how your current and potential customers will help and hinder your progress, how to make a sales presentation, how to overcome the excuses for not buying an ad from you--all these things and much more will be covered in this course.

For example, when we teach you about how to calucate the cost of an ad, we'll include explanations of the most common rate structures and even some variations on those. You'll quickly be able to identify how your rates are organized and be calculating costs of ads in your newspaper in no time. We'll also arm you with questions to ask your manager to get even more specifics.