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Most business owners recognize that advertising is essential to their business. However, despite knowing this, most business owners detest advertising because it is dreadfully expensive. The problem is that if you do not advertise, only your friends and neighbours will ever get to know of you.

For instance, in our average sized town of 65,000 people, there are thirty-eight pages of builders in the Yellow Pages; each page has two columns and each column lists forty to fifty names on it.

These small businesses fantasize of TV and radio advertising the same as the big companies, but it is just too expensive or at least they think that it is. Colossal companies like Coca Cola and MacDonald’s expend hundreds of millions of dollars on radio and TV advertising, but small business have other, smaller opportunities to advertise locally.

One of these less expensive, sometimes even free, methods of advertising on the radio is ‘per inquiry’ or PI Advertising. This is a type of radio advertising that is very beneficial to the advertiser, because advertisers only pay for every inquiry about their advert. It is a little like Google’s ‘pay per click’ or ‘PPC’ advertising on web sites.

First of all, you will require a list of all the radio stations in the locale that you are interested in. You can get hold of a list of licensed radio stations at your local library or they can get one in for you.

Then write out the names of all the stations in your target area. It is usually best to begin with your own region and fan out from there, but if you have a precise target audience, you will have to some investigation first.

Next you should look through your list of radio stations and mark the ones that are of interest. For example, if you are selling skateboards, it is probably not worth advertising on a Classical FM music station.

The next step is to contact the manager of the station or maybe the Advertising Director. Explain your plan to that person in detail. it could go something along the lines of:

“I have a product that research has indicated will sell well in your catchment district if it is advertised on your radio. However, I want to do a test run before committing to any long term advertising plan”.

“I will do all the writing of the commercial and I will do all the book-keeping. I will send the item out and I will deal with any issues and returns quickly and efficiently”.

“You will derive xx% of every sale we make. You take the phone numbers of the inquiries, pass them on to me and I will regard every name you give me as a sale for you. The product I want to sell is a xxxxxxxx, which retails at $xx plus $1 postage and packing”.

This concludes ‘How To Get Free Radio Advertising – part 1′, in the second part, we will be looking at how to secure your free, on-air, radio advertising campaign. Please look for part two on this web site.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on a range of subjects, but is currently concerned with Bose Radioss. If you would like to kcurrently more, please go to our website at Bose Digital Radio.

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