Way No. 17 – No call to action
What applies to the Internet (see landing page) also applies to advertising.
I guarantee: leave out the call to action and no one will come to you and want to buy from you based on the ad. The only exception to this is the "pork belly ad": ads that advertise current special offers. You see these less and less these days because this task has been taken over by the extensive, colorful inserts of the large supermarket chains.
I admit it: Aesthetically designed ads like the one from Mercedes Benz, where only the star is visible on the gray gradient, appeal to me too (you can probably still remember cameroon telegram screening this campaign, right?). But try that as a small solopreneur! An ad like that doesn't bring you anything, especially not customers.
Offline advertising: flyers
If you have a purely online business, you probably won't need flyers - but for many solopreneurs who also serve their customers offline, flyers are still a highly effective advertising tool. But it is precisely here that so many mistakes are made, and I will briefly introduce you to just a few of them:
Way No. 19 – Inappropriate layout and paper quality
A flyer is traditionally an A4 sheet folded twice. The professionals call this a wrap-around fold (because in the printing industry you don't "fold" or "bend" - you "crease"!). Wrap-around fold means that you can open the flyer once to the left and then again to the right. This is in contrast to the zigzag fold that you use when you want to put a letter in an envelope. A zigzag fold like this is generally unsuitable for a flyer because the reading order remains unclear.