Advertising

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, defines advertising as a "form of communication whose purpose is to inform potential customers about products and services and how to obtain and use them." Read the Wikipedia article and follow the links.

You can also go to any library or text book or the web and learn tons of stuff about it.

We all need to communicate and promote our businesses but we don't necessarily have to do advertising. Print advertising has diminished in importance as our society has changed and web-based adveritising expenditures has begun to outstrip them. Internet advertising is either way ahead of print advertising or soon will be. Advertising on social media sites has moved up as well. Facebook is or was the 5th largest country in the world or will be.

I think of advertising as different from other forms of communication in that the business pays for specific messages. For example it pays a media outlet $X for N number of spots. If that same business stages a rock concert and pastes its corporate name all over everything it's something else, public relations probably.

If the business hosts a dinner at which a prominent person has paid to give a pitch for his business, the dinner is probably part of a public relations campaign, but the speaker is advertising. A thin line, but you get the point.

Be very careful what kind of promotion you do. You should have a tight business plan and sound monetization strategy. Then watch your expenses, be pretty confident it's going to get results, then make sure you get good advertising that doesn't break you and measure, measure measure. Any good advertising plan will have an evaluation strategy. If it's not paying off after X number of months or years, you rethink your approach and make appropriate adjustments.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.