FIRST LESSONS IX POULTRY KEEPING. 



LESSON XXI. 



Selling Exhibition Stock and Eggs for Hatching. 



FEW keepers of thoroughbred fowls do not have some opportunities to sell stock and 

 eggs for hatching at better prices than would be obtained from common stock. Nearly 

 all want to take advantage of such opportunities. A great many regard them as 

 beginnings of a trade which may develop to proportions which will warrant their 

 giving their time exclusively to this business. 



Advertising. 



Some opportunities to sell come without " advertising." To all who see it a nice flock of 

 fowls is its own advertisement, and is sure to excite in some a wish to have some of the same 

 stock. Whether this unsolicited demand for stock and eggs would alone become worth while, 

 depends mostly on the location. In a section where the poultry interests are as yet little 

 developed, it would not be likely to amount to much for some time. In places where the 

 interest is good and growing, a poultryman located where many passers by see his stock, will 

 sometimes be able to do quite a large trade without advertising in the public prints, but in 

 most cases the man who wants to sell fowls and eggs to any substantial amount must make 

 announcement of that fact through mediums which reach many more people who want to buy 

 than see his stock accidentally. Where one man may build up a local trade without adver- 

 tising a hundred to get the same volume of trade must advertise judiciously and continuouslv 



The poultry papers are unquestionably the best mediums for advertising poultry and eggs* 

 They circulate almost wholly among people interested in poultry and possible buyers of stock 

 and eggs. Some of them have a proportion of sample copy and premium circulation to people 

 who do not read them, but, as a rule, the papers go to persons especially interested in poultry 

 and in the habit of looking through their poultry papers for advertisements of anything in this 

 line they may want. Farm papers as a class are far below the poultry papers as mediums for 

 advertising poultry, though a few farm papers giving especial attention to poultry are good. 

 Daily and weekly local papers it is seldom worth while to advertise poultry in. Occasionally 

 one will make something of a specialty of poultry advertising, especially in the Sunday paper*, 

 and give very good returns, but these cases are exceptional. Ofteuer the money spent in 

 advertising in them might as well be thrown away. Some years ago I a ran three inch ad. for 

 a month in the height of the egg season in one of the best positions in a daily paper without 

 making a single sale. At the same time an ad. published in a poultry paper published several 

 thousand miles away was bringing me customers right in my home town who read the local 

 papers every day, yet never saw the ad., because they were not thinking of poultry when read- 

 ing it. When they took up their poultry paper they looked all through it, looking particularly 

 for ads. of breeders near them. 



