Creating Flyers
The 5 Most Common Mistakes Made

So many small businesses are creating flyers to advertise and a lot of them are making mistakes that cost them customers.

I have written this page so that you can be aware of common blunders to avoid.

Having mistakes on any advertising materials can make you look careless, take down your business image and ruin your credibility.

The result? You may lose customers which equals less business.

Remember these 5 common mistakes to know what to avoid when creating flyers for your small business.

• Cluttered and hard to read text and pictures. Try to use one or two focal pictures and limit your fonts to two or no more than three. Don't use a font for the headline that may be hard to read or too small. Stand a distance away from your flyer to see how it would look far away. Read more below on clutter and why it should be avoided.
• Missing contact information. Always remember to include the answers to the questions Who? What? Where? When? and How? so that readers can know how to respond.
• Copy that doesn't sell, pose a question or state benefits to the reader. Strive to use power words. Power words help because these are words that attract the reader's eyes and subliminally make a statement stronger.
• Sells too hard. It is possible to have too much of a good thing. Be moderate with how much you sell your product or business because you don't want to appear too pushy.
• Misspelled words or grammatical errors. Proof, Proof, and Proof again. You can never proof copy too much. Check your name, number, headlines, and other text on the page.

Clutter Is Your Worst Enemy

One thing that I want to emphasize is that white space is good to have when creating a flyer.

White space or negative space is the portion of the page that is left unmarked or unused to visually separate elements. DO NOT clutter your flyer, it actually makes it look worse.

Most of the time non-designers will try to fill space because they believe that everything must be filled. That's not true.

The biggest mistake that people make when trying to design a flyer that stands out is adding anything and everything to it that they think looks nice.

Think about it, ice cream is great with a few toppings like chocolate syrup and a cherry on top. But now add some sprinkles, a little bit of caramel, strawberries, a few peanuts and pecans, and finish it off with whipped cream. All these things are great alone, but altogether it can be one undesirable mess. Did that kill your appetite?

Well, the same is done when you clutter your flyer. It is undesirable because the message is unreadable and confusing. Possible customers or clients then won't bother to read or keep the flyer.