Roxann, I am a Media Consultant with one of the top Media Companies in the country. I am the perfect person to answer this for you because we specialize in local advertising for small to medium size businesses. Our products range from print & internet to billboards and commercials. To answer your question, it really depends on where you live, what you sell, and whether or not your products/services are local or can be sold via internet throughout the country.
To give you an idea on cost, generally speaking, the Yellow Pages works extremely well in most areas and bring you a strong return on investment. As for the best and least expensive form, that would be the internet, but that can be misleading. In order for the internet to work in the "least expensive" way, you will have to build your own website, and making sure that it is built to appear on the top search engine results. You will also have to maintain/update it on a daily basis to make it appear daily due to the search enging algorithms. All this can take hours out of your day when you probably should be doing other things. People tend to hire an IT guy that will then get on the payroll, insurance, benefits, etc. So instead of hiring an outside company to do all of this and more for a few hundred bucks a month, your stuck paying this guy about $3000-$4000 a month.
Reply back and I will break it down for you free of charge.
