I'm sure some of you guys here use newspaper ads to promote your online business. If you do use newspaper ads could you let me know how effective they have been for you?

Newspaper ads can be effective, but only if you have a large enough ad. Most of the time, people overlook the smaller obscure listings. The only way to really make it work is to have a large ad and even then, the return may not prove to be worth the money spent on it.

I believe that nowadays it is not really effective to use a news paper to promote your business. There is so many effective ways like forums, online advertising and many more.

I think I would suggest using t.v. ads more than newspaper ads nowadays, well, if you would be spending money why not in something that would be giving you more exposure, well, if what you would be advertising is about jobs, I guess newspapers could be useful since lots of people use the newspaper for that.

I recently researched this idea.

Due to the competition from online ads, newspaper/magazine ads can be bought at a bargain through harsh negotiation. Best to target lots of smaller organisations who know they have to bend over backwards and offer you seven discounts. The reason a magazine or newspaper can sometimes be better value for money than online is that the readers can be shown your ad over several editions and thus your brand is slowly reinforced. They also leave the magazine in reach of other readers, and thus you get a slightly different experience to a purchased user click.

I used newspaper ads in the very beginning but now stay away from them. With all the online marketing resources it just seems to be more targeted and cost effective than buying a classified ad from some paper.

I think it depends. I used a newspaper ad for my design services without much success. Now, I believe that newspaper ads will work for my design business just not the same way I went about it the first time. I paid $80 to be in the services section (a box near the classifieds) for a month in my local paper. Small town paper, I was charging three figure prices for custom web design for small businesses. Sure enough I only got one call from a lady who sounded drunk. Not one serious inquiry.

I later realized that had I shopped around I could get a very similar ad (in a services section near the classifieds) in the Philly Inquirer for $250. I felt robbed. A look at the math of this: It cost roughly 3 times the cost of the ad I bought. I am absolutely certain, without even looking it up that the population of philidelphia is much much more than three times the population of my small town. Not to mention that the phillidelphia inquirer has a much larger reach than just the city of Philidelphia.

What I learned is you need to shop around a lot, try for bigger papers. And as I started out saying about it depending what you are selling, I think it will only work for a service like mine. I would never advertise one of my web properties running adsense or CPA campaigns in the newspaper.

Very expensive medium unless you know that you can get a return. I think it might work for a significatn service, costing a bit of cash, but people generally wont put the paper down or save a page to log on for something they dont REALLY want.

You might look into magazine "remainder sales". I understand magazines sell space at reduced rates the last minute before the publishing cut off date.