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As a small business owner, you are undoubtedly aware of the importance of advertising. Unfortunately, you are probably also keenly familiar with the costs, which can often be prohibitive. A key to your survival in today's fiercely competitive market is your ability to find inspired, cost-effective ways to promote your business. Let's discuss some of the options available to you.

An email campaign is very cost-effective, as you can usually conduct one at no cost as long as you do all of the work yourself. It can attract a moderate amount of business, as well. If you focus on creating appealing, noticeable emails with pertinent content, readers will respond. It is even more valuable if you can personalize each email, preferably by referring to the recipient's name in the subject line. Needless to say, that can be quite difficult and time-consuming. The primary obstacle to conducting a successful email campaign is building up a list of email addresses to which you can send your information. Email campaigns are only effective if you can reach a hefty number of potential customers, and it may take a significant amount of time before you can build up your campaign to a sufficient level.

Another relatively cheap option is to distribute a newsletter. This is very much like an email campaign, except that it is in the traditional, hard copy form. You design a newsletter ' preferably in an eye-catching format ' and print out one copy, or, alternatively, save it to a disk or thumb drive. Of course, you can also choose to print out all of the newsletters yourself, but this in not really necessary since newsletter printing is rather inexpensive. You can take your copy or disk to a print shop and get copies printed, usually for less than ten cents per sheet. You then take the newsletters to the post office, where they will help you package them and send them to your target audience. You can usually pinpoint a specific area or neighborhood, which is very convenient when you are targeting a particular demographic.

There are drawbacks to newsletter printing and mailing as a means of advertisement, however. For one, the costs are greater that in an email campaign. Also, newsletters are somewhat impersonal and therefore do not always illicit a high rate of response among readers. The keys to maximizing your efforts in a newsletter campaign are design and consistency. If your newsletter is attractive and well laid-out, it will fare better with your customers. And, if you consistently send out your newsletter every week or every month, it will stand a better chance of 'hitting home' with the recipients.

Yet another advertising technique is to put a color brochure or pamphlet into a newspaper as an insert. However, because of the color printing and type of paper that is usually used, this is significantly more expensive than the other methods we have talked about. Also, it can be extremely costly to include inserts (or even traditional ads, for that matter) in a daily newspaper. Unless you have a relatively large advertising budget, you are probably best sticking with other methods, or at least placing inserts in smaller, less frequent publications.

There are more traditional advertising methods available to you as a small business owner. You can advertise in newspapers, though, as we mentioned, this can be quite expensive. Radio and television are also options, those these are often too expensive for the small business budget.

The key, again, is to be creative. You must think unconventionally in order to maximize your advertising dollars. Using the internet is relatively cheap, but the competition out there is also fierce unless you find a way to make yourself (and your product) stand out from the crowd.

Whatever your method of advertising, be unique and innovative and, above all, persistent. These qualities, when incorporated into your advertising techniques, will eventually pay off.