Welcome! Introduction Best Accounts to Choose Common Mistakes Gathering Info Securing Artwork Determining Ad Size Attention Grabber Benefit Headline Copy Other Elements Producing the Ad The fastest way to increase sales! Participate in this award-winning, newspaper-specific ad sales course on-site or in a Webinar.  • Get past upfront stalls and objections without any pushing  • Make the account believe he really needs you  • Get better information from your prosepct  • Develop quick ad strategies that work the very first time  • Eliminate size, frequency, content, cost and most other objections before they ever arise  • Get dramatic responses for all kinds of advertisers  • Never have to push an advertiser to run again click here

How do you figure out what ad size to recommend to your prospect? While for a lesser ad rep the answer is "whatever they'll go for," the answer really is, "whatever it takes for them to succeed."

Some salespeople look at the ad the prospect is running in the competitor's newspaper and then simply make it a little bigger. The salesperson's faulty logic is that they'll slowly ease them up to an even bigger size over the course of weeks or months. The problem is that the original ad might have been much too small for what the advertiser needed to accomplish, and a slightly bigger ad might still not work. And the advertiser will be lost.

As hard as it sounds, if you're really going to be successful (and sleep at night) you've got to eliminate the "what the advertiser will go for" variable from the ad size equation. A good rule of thumb is that the advertiser never wants to run anything substantial, so instead, you've got to focus on what size will solve the business' problems and make them a profit.

After all, doctors don't make recommendations based on what the patient will "go for" or can afford but instead on what will get that patient better. The same applies to what you do. If you're doing it right, you're in the business of making businesses profitable.

So first, think about what their average sale is. If an advertiser makes a few hundred or a few thousand off of each sale, then they may be able to afford to run big. But do they need to?

To help figure this out, think about how big their successful competitors are running. To compete effectively, your potential advertiser might need to get up to a size close to the competitor, even if, and perhaps especially when, the competitor is running huge ads.

Just as importantly, think about how few people are about to buy the product. If there's almost nobody about to buy a product during a normal sales cycle (typically a week), you might have to work harder to ensure that all those few people see the ad with a larger size ad. If their average sale is high enough, they should be able to make a profit off the ad as long as the ad is effective.

The more mainstream way of determining ad size is to take the monthly gross sales of your prospect (though they probably won't tell you) and apply a certain percentage based on industry averages. Your advertising department might have a chart listing nearly every business type out there, as well as what percentage of their gross sales is spent on advertising for each industry.

So, if you can get the advertiser to tell you what their gross sales were last month or last year, then you can apply this percentage, usually about 5%, to their gross sales to come up with a yearly advertising budget. Then it's a matter of dividing up the yearly budget into monthly or weekly budgets, based on their business cycles.

You can find these charts in the yearly planbooks that some newspapers publish. One of the most popular is the Newspaper Association of America's Planbook. These magazine-sized calendar planners contain other interesting information as well. You might want to ask your manager if your newspaper publishes a planbook or has one from NAA.

Once you decide on an ad size, it's time to add the various elements. There are really only a few basic elements to any ad–an attention grabber, a benefit headline, body copy, logo and other specifics like phone number, address, hours of operation, etc.

Next: The attention grabber