I'm often surprised by how many home-based business owners and opportunity seekers have never thought of advertising in magazines. Magazines are the original targeted media. While TV shows and newspapers may try to appeal to a very wide audience featuring many different kinds of people, magazines have always focused their efforts on a tightly defined audience.

For example, look through the magazine rack the next time you're at the grocery store and you will see dozens of different magazines focusing on everything from cars, fishing, crafts, home decorating, relationships, and business. All these magazines cater to a different audience with different tastes and buying habits.

By choosing magazines that focus on your best potential customers, you almost guarantee your ads will be successful. It's an old rule in marketing that getting your ad in a magazine that intensely appeals to your best customers will get you ten times the results than advertising in a famous mass appeal publication like Business Week, Time, or Newsweek.

That's right, advertising your home-based business in Home Business Magazine will most likely get you far more response than getting your name in Newsweek.

And this is REALLY good news for those of us working from home. Smaller, more tightly-focused magazines almost always offer very affordable ads, usually in the back of the magazine. While full and half-page ads can cost hundreds or thousands, you can advertise in the back for about the same cost as putting a classified ad in your local paper. Then, as very few people know, there are also ways to get FREE ads in big magazines. Either way, it's cheap, targeted, and it could be your best path to new profits.

And don't let that "back of the magazine" position discourage you. More than half of people read magazines from back to front. Businesses advertising in the back actually have the most visible spot in the magazine.

The weeks ahead are traditionally a time when magazines drop their advertising rates. Place your ads NOW to take advantage of low rates early in the year which, incidentally, is the time of year when the most people are interested in joining a business opportunity.