Why you should never give away advertising and 9 other sacred rules when building an advertising-supported publication

If you are building a publication — online or off — with paid advertising as a business model, here are this old publisher, journalist and marketing exec’s 10 Sacred Rules:

1. Never give away advertising. You destroy your business model when you do. You say to advertisers and potential advertisers that space in your publication has little or no value. They get the message. They don’t forget it.

2. Never go off the rate card. You’ll never get back on. Set the value for your ads in stone. Offer discounts for multiple insertions and long-term contracts. Create a pricing structure for premium placement — for the best positions. And stick to the published rates. Always. If you don’t, you are doing what I talked about in Rule 1. And word gets around. And every advertiser will want to negotiate with you and cut a private discount deal. And no one will trust that they are getting the same price as the next advertiser.

3. Offer occasional — or even regular — specials. Create special sections, extra sections, special issues, around themes. Offer customer-appreciation sales during your traditional slow periods. PUBLISH the special offers, the special rates, and distribute the special offer to EVERY advertiser. So no one feels left out or that anyone else got special treatment.

4. Budget for public service ads. Allow for a certain percentage of your ad space — and in particular, your remnant ad space (that which is not sold and is still available at the last minute when you are “going to press”) — to be donated to worthy, non-profit causes. Announce this on your rate card. Solicit timeless ads for this remnant space and insert them when you can — up to the percentage you have budgeted.

5. Offer a non-profit organization discount on your rate card. That is for “guaranteed-run”-on-specific-dates ads. That way if a non-profit organization wants to promote a specific event in a specific issue in your display ad columns, they can do so. Donated, remnant ads mentioned in Rule 4 only run at publisher’s whim when space is available.

6. Use some affiliate ads when starting out as an online publication to fill or partially fill your dedicated ad column(s). Use ONLY ads that are highly targeted to your specific readership. Test and track these carefully. Run split-tests. Refine headlines, graphics, ad copy until you have an ad that pulls. Be careful in your selection. Only run ads for high-quality offerings. Request samples to make sure. And only run ads for products which offer you a high commission on sales — an amount at least equal to your rate card rate for the ad space.

7. Promote the value of your ad space. Launch and maintain a concerted ad-sales promotional campaign. Knock on doors, in person and virtually and by phone and by email and by real mail. Target only potential advertisers who have products/offers of high value and high interest to your targeted readership and for whom your readership is THEIR primary market.

Work, work, work to get the first paid ad as a long-term contract. And then work with the advertiser to develop and test an ad with a highly enticing offer for your readership. Or use only their best, most-proven ad. And track results. If the ad does not produce, work with them to tweak it until it does and does so phenomenally.

6. Never guarantee results. You can’t. Too many factors beyond your control. Guarantee minimum distribution for which you can provide certifiable numbers.

7. Create and launch a certain style of exciting, ongoing testimonial campaign.

8. Leave ad columns empty. When starting out, leave blank ad space in the bottom of your ad columns. And have a great house ad promoting the incredible effectiveness of advertising in your publication and put it just above the blank space. The “hole” in the page draws attention. Is honest. Shows that valuable real estate is available. Gets advertisers thinking. As the holes slowly fill up and the testimonial campaign builds, people see and sense your growing success.

9. Raise your rates every year. Everything else goes up. So should your ad rates. Otherwise you lose money and your ad space loses value. Do it in January when everyone else is doing it so that you blend into the crowd. And, since January is usually a slump time in ad sales, offer a big ad discount sale then. It may not bring in lots of business in a slump month, but will make you look generous rather than greedy for announcing a rate increase. Customers will still grumble. But they get over it. Just like you do when they increase prices.

10. Establish trades. You always will have remnant space in some issues. Many companies nationally are willing to trade with you for that remnant space on a dollar for dollar basis. For instance, when I was editor and assistant publisher at the Ojai Valley News in the early 1980s, we traded with the nicest restaurants in town, with the hot springs spa, with hotels in San Francisco and Manhattan where we liked to vacation, with health resorts, and so on. They would provide us with ads we could run any time we had room. They credited us with the dollar value of the ads any time we ran them. We used the credit many ways. As perks for our staff. As occasional gifts to great, regular advertisers. As prizes in contests. In addition, we traded for goods and services we routinely used in the business. Remember, these are dollar-for-dollar trades. You trade the advertising at rate card rate, they provide you the goods and services at regular retail rate. It’s a win-win.