Newspaper ads are outdated and can be very expensive

Would you advertise in your local newspaper if you could do it for FREE? Of course you would. But traditional advertising in newspapers can be crazy expensive. A newspaper in my local area is currently charging just under $400 for a 1/4 page ad for one week. You have a one week shot at getting attention for $400. I think that is crazy.

Plus, the traditional ad in the printed newspaper is only viewed by those actually looking in the paper. Plus, they actually have to be looking at the section of the paper your ad is on.

I was not very happy recently when I created an ad for our church Easter services. We decided to give a printed ad another shot. Plus, they give a discount for churches so it was about half the normal cost.

I quickly found out why is was half the cost. They had a two page section of church ads all lumped together. Huge fail. You had zero chance of standing out from the crowd.

I am not in competition with the other churches. However, I was hoping my ad would actually show up in the content and not with ads. None of the ads look good lumped together either. Separately they look okay, but together they all clashed and looked pathetic.

Newspapers can still help your church

One of the best changes to local newspapers is they have gone online. So, when you purchase an ad now you have it online too with a lot of papers. This is good, but these ads still do not show up in search engines. So people still have to be going to that website intentionally to view your ad.

The bad part is that it is still an ad. They did not go to the newspaper to view an ad. They want content.

So, I have been working on ways to solve this problem and I will share them in a future post. But, do you have ideas for how you can get your ads for free in local newspapers and to have them look like content instead of ads?