Looking for advice

Greetings to all. We have a print magazine called The Reader that serves Southern California cities (about 11 of them). For about 9 years, hundreds of thousands of people and tens of thousands of businesses have become more and more familiar with our publication, the latter group (businesses) knows of it as a source of local advertising to all or part of our readership that earns about $8 billion annually. Our publication enjoys a good reputation with both readers and businesses, but admittedly we have not capitalized on the strength of the reputation we enjoy, in that we have not been very aggressive in our marketing of our advertising to the 10,000 businesses in the cities we serve. The size of our team is the reason for this.

I am looking for advice on what web tools and tactics I might use to communicate meaningfully enough with the many people that get our magazine-- so that they become the sales force we've been looking for.

There are 75,000 people in each of the 4 geographic zones that get our magazine (300,000 total). There is an average of about 2500 viable businesses in each zone. Our yearly sales goals are 110 businesses converted to customers per geographic zone, or about 10 per month.

I believe that given how many people already know of our publication, how many businesses know of our publication, the "big job" to do-- that of getting in front of these businesses and "selling them" on the advertising could be better done through leveraging the existing relationship these business owners have with people who know, like and respect our publication who have an economic motivation to spend the time to encourage them to advertise.

I would be extremely grateful for suggestions as to what you see are the ways we can leverage what we have, using resources we have, to reach our sales goals of 10 ad contracts sold per month per zone.

Thanks very much,


Chris

Founder, The Reader Magazine Group
A Noble Media Corporation Company
Redlands, California 92373
 


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advice:
Never pet a burning dog
Firecrackers can be fun, when you put them in your asshole
Dont post long ass intro threads about helping you solve a problem due to the short attention spans/patience for this kind of idiocy.
Dont eat Sushi at malls
Dont eat yellow snow
Never masturbate with jelly
Pray to Steve Waggenheim nightly
Always employ the power of the shocker during each coital encounter for extra win!
 
Are you the guys who make the san diego reader? If so, I literally have never seen a publication with more ads than yours. I would say it's easily 75% advertisements for laser eye surgery, depression studies, and hair replacement surgery places. It's like if someone scraped all of our campaigns and printed it out.

You have the best non salesmen ever
 
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[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-ptnxs0qVA&feature=related"]YouTube- Broadcast Yourself.[/ame]
 
NMC I've helped a couple magazines during their migration to web, which it sounds like what you're doing. In both cases it has turned out better than the publishers expected.

To get readers to go to the website, various teaser campaigns were tried. The most successful were contests involving the advertisers. For example you would do a free weekend at an advertiser's resort if they win contest 'X'. The advertiser, of course, pays you to be the prize so it is a win/win.

A topic we discussed was synergy between the print pub and the website. Should you make each one an independent destination, or try to get readers to both? In the end it was decided that the cost of independent content wold be too high.

I think the #1 added revenue source will be your new ad placements. For advertisers you'll be able to show them reporting and clickthrus to validate their ad performance with you. Not only will you get additional placements from existing ad accounts, you will definitely pick up placements from new accounts in your territories.

Also you know the cost of your Web operation will be a lot less, and the margins higher. It will drive paper pub sales as well. All in all it will be a learning curve for the first year but you'll be really happy you did it.
 
hire someone here to consult you (not me). no one is going to bust out a 2 page-long post laying out your goals and plans with whatever measly budget you probably have.