Selling newspapers

Selling Success
Newspaper ads must be sold if the business is to survive and succeed. As the Publisher of your local paper, you are the person in charge of all sales. Never forget that, even if you decide at some point to hire a full or part time salesperson. Anyone you hire is just a sales person (regardless of what you choose to call them). But you are the top dog, so to speak. You make it happen.

I suggest hiring others to create ads, lay out the pages, and so on, so that you can concentrate on the part that makes you money. You sell the ads, you interview the people, you take as many photos as you can, you be the face and the voice of the paper.

Other business owners and managers will give you more respect than they will ever offer a paid salesperson. They know you can make good on anything you say. They see you as an equal, a fellow business owner and operator. They know that you are right there with them, where the pressure is felt in rough times. They know that you must work hard and plan well in order to keep going. You are peers together in the community.

Your confidence inspires fellow business owners to more confidence. Your smile is encouraging. Your handshake is meaningful. They see you in a way you may never see yourself. So the job of selling is half done before you ever open your mouth.

Know your costs before you ever go out to sell anything. Get good and concrete quotes from your printing and distribution sources. Add in the costs of your time in building the paper, and add for travel, fuel, etc. Make sure you know what it costs to be in business (don't forget taxes, which will need to be paid in quarterly if you show any profit at all).

Add to the costs of operation any living expenses that must come from the paper. Is this the only income you have? If it is, then you must add all your monthly and annual bills into the mix. Once you have a real dollar amount of what you need each month, you must divide that by the number of issue you will publish each month (you can also work from the annual amount, if that makes it any easier). How much do you have to bring in for each issue of the paper?

A simple and quick example:

Let's pretend that your combined business and living expenses are $100,000 per year. If you publish every week, then you will need to divide that amount by 52,
since there are 52 weeks in a year. That comes out to $1,923 that must be produced in ad sales each issue, or each week. If the paper is a 24 page paper, then we know we can sell ads on at least 22 pages of the paper. You will usually not sell any ads for the front page, and maybe not for the last page.

So we take the required amount of income for each issue and divide it by the number of pages on which ads will be sold. I'm going to round the actual amount ($1,923) off to an even $2,000. And then I'm going to ad an extra $500 per issue for unexpected expenses. That may seem like a lot, but it is never quite enough, when something bad happens.

Now $2500 divided by 22 pages gives us a page value of $113.63, rounded off again to $120, that absolutely must be raised by ad sales for each page of the paper.

In reality, we are not going to sell all the available space on each page, especially not at first. Plus you must keep in mind that you never want to sell more than half of any page, since it is a newspaper, and not an advertising sheet. The other content on the page is what makes people pick up the paper and look through it.

This means that no one, not even your mother, should ever get a whole page for only $120. When you sell the ads, they need to add up to more than the bare minimum of what you need each issue, or you will go broke.

It all works out. In the industry, the advertiser who buys a 2-column inch ad, for only one issue, pays more for the space than the advertiser who buys half a page for six consecutive issues. And the advertiser who buys a full page pays even less per column inch than the guy who bought a half page ad.

The space is sold by a kind of volume discount, just like ice cream or laundry soap. It's fair because you spend a lot more time building and positioning many small ads than you do building and placing one large ad.

If the pages are standard tabloid size (11 inches wide by 17 inches high), then the available space is typically 10 inches wide by 16 inches high, since a half inch margin around the page is usually left unprinted. If the page has 4 columns, that gives it a total of 64 column inches, since each of the 4 columns is 16 inches high.

In our imaginary example, then, we can sell half the page, or 32 column inches. $120 divided by 32 is a rock bottom price of $3.75 per column inch. But for the paper to survive, no one must ever pay that rock bottom price.

A full page ad that runs consecutively for 52 issues a year should probably be sold, then for $4.00 per column inch. And all ads below that size, that run for fewer issues, should be sold at a higher rate, until the guy who buys a 2-column inch ad for just one issue pays something like $6.50 per column inch.

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