If you use this checklist, you will scare away potential customers and eventually drive your small business off a cliff. Guaranteed!

• Create a headline that does not include a customer benefit and does not differentiate you from your competition.
• In the text, focus on your company, your philosophy, your mission and your success.
• Try to accomplish more than one objective with the ad.
• Talk in great detail about how your product is made or how it works, rather than how it can help your customers.
• Use a formal tone.
• If a formal tone doesn’t work for your ad, try condescending.
• Tell your customers what they already know.
• State the obvious.
• Mimic your competition’s advertising.
• Jam as much copy into the ad as you can, and do not use white space.
• Use big words, long sentences and large, unbroken chunks of text.
• Use clichés.
• Use clip art.
• Use stock photography, preferably photos that you’ve seen in other ads over the past five to 10 years.
• Use as many different fonts and font families as possible.
• Do not use bullets, numbered lists or subheads.
• Use abbreviations and technical jargon that many of your customers don’t understand.
• Speak in generalities.
• Make spectacular, unbelievable claims.
• Rely heavily on adjectives and superlatives.
• Do not use testimonials.
• Present facts and do not tell your customers how the facts relate to their needs.
• Never introduce objections.
• Include irrelevant information.
• Maintain a laid-back tone, with no urgency whatsoever.
• Do not include a call to action.
• Do not profread.

P.S. Do not use postscripts.

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