not a one-shot deal. It is a commitment for a full 12-month ad run. It is essentially the same as going down to your local paper and making a deal to run an ad every day for the next year without the opportunity to stop or change the ad throughout the year. Thats a huge risk. I dont know any businesses that do that except for car dealerships, but they get to change their newspaper ads as often as they like.   95% of All Yellow Pages Ads Are Weak!   As you can see, Yellow Pages have a potentially big payoff but also have a big risk factor. Thats why you need to be very careful about any ad that you place. It needs to be a winner. If it isnt, youll be flushing your money right down the tube every month and theres nothing youll be able to do about it. If youre going to advertise, make it pay off.   The good news is that 95% of all Yellow Pages ads are WEAK. Why? Usually, because small businesses worry more about how much they are going to spend rather than the ad itself. Far too many businesses let the Yellow Pages company do the ad design and layout. Big mistake!   This is the advice youll typically get from a Yellow Pages rep:   Use a big ad Use a heavy border around your ad Add color to it Use a bigger ad Make your name and logo really big, and have a lot of "white space" in your ad Use an even bigger ad Give your hours of operation, phone number, address, as well as the MasterCard and Visa logos (if you accept them) Use more than one really, really big ad under multiple listings! The Yellow Pages companies have no incentive to make your ad work. They only care about how much they will make from the ad. That is why I always recommend having a professional marketer do the design, or at least do an assessment on the ad. Listen, it costs the same to run an ineffective small business Yellow Pages ad as it does to run a super-responsive one. Why not make it responsive and get your moneys worth?   Your Primary Yellow Pages Objective   Its critical to know what your primary Yellow Pages objective is before you begin to design your ad. Ill cut to the chase right now. Your primary objective is to get your prospect to call you. Not to sell them on your product, not to get them to come into your store, but to call you. Besides, thats why they grabbed the Yellow Pages anyway, to make a phone call.   Knowing this now, you should design everything in your ad to get them to not only give you a phone call, but to be the first and only one they will call. That is the first step. Once you get the phone call, your primary objective is to get them to visit your store.