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If you’re thinking of putting an advertorial in your local newspaper, take $500 and walk to your toilet. Drop the money in the bowl and flush it – your money will be better spent, and you will have escaped acute embarrassment.

Which is unfortunate really because, with a few tweaks, an advertorial in your local newspaper has huge business generating potential, but instead most of them end up a bland waste of space with as much life as a cold boiled egg.

The first mistake to avoid is having the newspaper’s staff writer do it for you – even though the newspaper will try to convince you the journalist knows best. They don’t.

I know from years of experience in all sorts of newsrooms – including as the news editor of a local newspaper -- that most journalists are contemptuous of advertorials, or they simply don’t have the commercial sense to make the words compelling.

(To be fair, some insipid advertorials can be the fault of the advertiser who is trying to do things on the cheap. To which a common rule applies: "Do it properly, or don't do it at all".)

Let me demonstrate with an example I found in my local newspaper (I didn’t have to look far). Naturally names and places have been changed, because this poor advertorial example could be the fault of the paper, or the advertiser...

The headline

The headline is your attention grabber. It’s almost the only thing most people read, so it has to be compelling enough to get their attention.

In our example, the headline simply gives the company’s name: TOWN PLEASANT FURNITURE LTD

There are lots of things wrong with this headline.

1. It is all in capitals. People think capital sentences are shouting and therefore rude, and secondly, we identify words by their shapes (not by the letters in them).

CAPITAL words don’t have any shape, top or bottom, so the eye skips them out.

2. In this example, the headline is also just the company’s name. An effective headline must grab attention and make a promise.

The average person is bombarded with more than 3,000 messages a day and as a result we ‘filter’ most of them out. Competition is stiff. Unless you have something interesting to say, it’s all over.

An example of a good headline (one of the best ever written), will be familiar to many of you because it is so memorable:

“How to win friends and influence people”.

This is the title of a book by Dale Carnegie – no wonder it’s one of the bestselling books of all time.

It offers you value with the words “how to”, and then it promises two benefits: “win friends, influence people”.

Introduction paragraph

The first paragraph of our example reads: Town Pleasant Furniture has been situated in Long Beach for over 20 years and was purchased in November 2010 by Michael Laurel after moving up from Palmerston North.

I almost don’t know where to begin with this one.

Firstly, it’s all about the company. There is nothing in there for the reader. Why would we care how long the company has been around, and who bought it when? It’s boring, and we simply don’t have the time to waste on listening to other people talk about themselves.