I have heard from a few people that have received the Herd reference SC. Some of them live a lot further from Omaha that you do Elbee. Don't ya love the way the postal system works? Last year, I received calls from Australia, two days after the magazine was mailed in Omaha. It took almost three more weeks for mine to arrive. After that, I splurged and bought a first class subscription.
To Scott, I am a great believer in advertising. I am sure your ad will pay for itself. The only problem is that you are never 100% sure when the advertising will pay dividends and it has a lifespan much longer than most realize. A few months ago, I sold a bull to a guy who lived about 200 miles from me. I asked him if he had seen our ad in our local farm paper, and he said he hadn't. He said he was given a bunch of old cattle magazines by a neighbour who was retiring, and he had seen one of our ads. He actually had the magazine on the dash of his truck and I was very surprised when he handed me a 1980 issue. A few years ago, I received a phone call from a guy in Texas asking if we had any Maine cross steers for sale. I asked him where he had got our name and he had seen our ad in the 1982 SC. I dug out my copy and we had a very small ad... and along the bottom of the ad, in very small print, it read " we also have Maine cross steers for sale".
I consider advertising in the same way I think of fertilizers and other inputs required to grow a crop. I do not grain farm, so my crop is my cattle. It is really hard to sell them, if nobody knows what you've got.
A few years ago the late Mark Graham Sr, of Graham Land and Livestock, Waverly, MN told me that after advertising Ayatollah semen in every issue of SC for more than 2 years, they decided to only advertise in alternating issues. After a few months their sales records showed that they sold semen almost entirely in the months in which the ads were ran, and sale dropped to almost nothing in the other months. Despite everyone, knowing that they had Ayatollah semen for sale, they still needed to be reminded on a virtually constant basis. That says alot about human nature. Personally, I have more than doubled my advertising in the past 3 years, and have even run ads in British and Australian breed journals. Since I did this I have sold over 100 embryos to Britain and have sold embryos and several hundred doses of semen to Australia.My advertising has paid for itself over and over again. Don't ever forget that the world is your marketplace especially in this day, when you can have a tank delivered to almost any part of the world in a few hours. One of the keys to successful advertising is having good pictures and a good product. You have a good picture of your bull Scott, but don't stop there. If you don't have a good digital camera, get one... and carry it with you when you are checking your cattle. Keep taking pictures and never be content with just one good one....and never ever use a picture that you feel does not show your animal at it's best. This will definitely pay dividends. I was lucky to get a great picture of one of my donor cows. That picture has resulted in over $60,000 in embryo sales to people who have never seen her. She is a very good cow, and she is an exceptional producer, but this picture does the selling.I better get to the hay field!!