For the small businessman, notoriety and name recognition are two

For the small businessman, notoriety and name recognition are two sides of the same indispensable coin to success. Print and television sources are your best options for those first initial advertising excursions. Avoid the all-too-common mistake of over-selling your product or service and instead treat the first ad spot as an introduction to your company- not as an "all-or-nothing" proposition.
When first starting out, it is wise to begin advertising your product in your area via media outlets such as local newspapers and public access television. These types of advertising outlets do not come back with big, immediate returns but are necessary to making your company appear legitimate. What separates a well-run hardware store that fails from a mediocre hardware store with longevity is that fact that the successful company has found a way to convince the consumer that they have what they are looking for. This is not to suggest that you should spend less time perfecting your product and more time advertising, but it is definitely important to realize that not only are you selling a service, a product or an idea, but you are in the market of symbols as well, and symbols are extremely persuasive.
For your first time advertising in a print publication, stick with something simple that introduces your company and your guiding marketing concept. The guiding marketing concept can be anything from a particular attitude to a logo or slogan. Since you are not seeking to create a national brand at this step, you should stick to focusing on just one aspect of the ad that you want to play up with slick marketing tactics. Readers and consumers will not be swayed by overuse of logos, slogans, and attitude for a company that they are unfamiliar with. Instead, treat your first entry into the world as advertising as you might treat an introduction to a friend at a party; you would not immediately tell a new acquaintance everything about your life history, likewise do not employ every marketing tactic in your initial advertisement.
Your first advertisement in a print or televised medium should not be your one and only ad, it should instead set the stage for a series of advertisements. Now, as a small business you are certainly not in the position to be stretching for expensive ad campaigns and building an "audience" for your product or service, but you should not neglect the fact that two or three successive advertisements in a series can be more persuasive as a "story" of your company far more than a single ad can. With a single ad as an introduction, you need not worry about encapsulating everything about your company that you want to advertise, instead, treat this first advertisement as an opening handshake or opening pitch. In baseball, the pitcher sets up the batter he is facing not by repeatedly throwing his same, best pitch, but by creating a series of pitches to keep the hitter off balance and achieve strikes. Such is the method that you should employ for your ad campaign.
Keep your first advertisements simple and try to put your company in a position to build on the notoriety and respect you gain in those initial print and television spots. You need not spend too much money in advertising and need not plan on making an extensive series of ads so long as you can effectively "tell the story" of your company through a small number of ads.