If you want customers knocking at your door, your print advertising must stand out from the crowd. It isn't witchcraft. Creating effective advertising comes down to two things... hard work and great creative. True, there's no magic formula, but there are guidelines. In the spirit of the season, we'd like to treat you to few goodies from our little bag of tricks.

Get the readers attention. Treat your reader to an arresting headline. The trick is to stop the reader just long enough to start reading your ad. Shorter is more memorable but there's no magic number of words. A headline should be as long as it takes to get the point across. Precisely.

Choose a visual that reinforces the headline. Together they should summarize your sales pitch. Don't haunt the reader with complicated imagery or unrelated pictures. Dramatic visuals help readers absorb and remember your message. If at all possible, go four-color. Color pulls 40% better than black & white but costs only 30% more.

Your headline stopped the reader, expand on it. Treat the lead paragraph as your only chance to pull the reader into your copy. Follow through on your headline or the reader will vanish.

Your layout should be a treat for the eyes. Make it visually appealing, but not fancy. Don't clutter, clash, or complicate. Make it clean and fat-free. Never reverse body copy. Make your ad friendly, inviting, and most importantly... easy to read.

Treat your reader to clear, conversational body copy. Your company's friendly, so write friendly. Use short sentences. Don't scare the reader away with sesquipedalian disquisitions. (Never send a reader to the dictionary.)

Become your customer. Write with the reader in mind, then read through the customer's eyes. Treat his interests as your own. Go ahead, toss-out tasty tidbits of product information, but always explain how and why it's important to the reader.

Choose frequency over size. It's more effective to run a quarter-page ad four times than a full-page ad once. Not everyone reads every issue. If money is no object, a one-page ad is the best buy. Two-page spreads get only 30% more readership, but cost twice as much.

Request special positioning for your ad. The best pages, in order, are: inside front cover, outside back cover, inside back cover, and facing the table of contents. In general, the closer to the front the better. A right-hand page beats a left. Facing editorial is better than facing an ad. For fractional ads, keep on top of the page, stay to the outside and out of the gutter.

To get you gotta ask. First, decide what you want the reader to do. Next, for goodness sake, let him know. Make your offer clear, and action easy. A free booklet, sample, consultation, estimate, evaluation. Show a picture if possible. Offer a bonus for prompt response.

Advertisers get bored, and agencies get hungry. However, avoid the temptation to pull an old ad that still does the trick. Stick with an ad until response rates fall or until the message is outdated. Good ads can pull just as effectively from issue to issue, for decades. (We have clients who've been running the same ads for years. We miss the work, but love the results.)

For more tricks to creating advertising that works,call Rosemary at 703-591-0100, ext. 42 for a free, no obligation advertising review.