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While I'll get into detail later about how to convince a business to run, you may have a new account that's willing to advertise in your newspapers already. If this account has never advertised with your paper, you'll need to set him up as a new account before any ads can run.

Some of the things that need to be done include getting a new account into the reservation and billing system, preparing an advertising contract, handling cash and checks, helping an account apply for credit, and dealing with advertising agencies.

Although your publication's forms may differ from the two you'll see here, you will get a good idea of the process you'll need to go through.

New Advertiser Form
One of the first things you'll need to fill out is some kind of a New Advertiser Form (or enter it directly into your advertiser order entry, billing, and account receivable system if you have access to it).

Check out the sample form below. This contains the information necessary to set up a new advertiser in your newspaper's system.

As in our sample, your newspaper's New Advertiser Form will ask you some of the same things that we discussed during the section on filling out the Ad Reservation Form.

Critical information about the advertiser may include such things as the billing name, the name it does business under (also called DBA), the address, telephone number, your territory number (or other identifying code) as well as information on any advertising agency it may use.

Your form may also ask for you to categorize the account by its type of business. This will help identify the ad as it moves through the production process as well as help if your newspaper wants to send a targeted promotional piece to certain kinds of businesses to help sell a special section, for example.

You'll probably also need to let the billing and credit department know when your account wants to run and the deadline date for reserving that space. For example, if they want to run an ad two weeks from now, the deadline date for reserving that space might be a week and a half from now.

There could also be an area for contract information specific to the section or edition of the paper he wants the ad to run in. This helps the billing people charge the account using the right rate structure. The form may ask you to indicate whether or not the account has signed a contract. As we discussed in the section concerning using the rate card, contracts are used by most papers to encourage advertisers to run frequently. When an advertiser signs a contract, he is agreeing to run an ad a certain number of times over the course of the designated time period.

Next: Payment and the credit application