Your business is great. Your business provides a high quality service at a highly competitive price. Anyone could see that your business should be the first place they look for the service you provide. So what's stopping your business from being a whole lot more successful than it currently is? Perhaps a lot of the customers who should be handing over their money to your business are going elsewhere, perhaps they don't know about you, perhaps they don't know what you provide or why they should favour your business above any other. Perhaps, in a crowded market, you need to stand up taller and shout a bit louder.

Perhaps you need more or better advertising. Take Alan, for example. Alan knows his fish restaurant is as good as any in the Merinbay area, and feels he ought to be getting a larger slice of the annual tourist influx. For several years, he's had leaflets printed and distributed to hotels, tourist information centres and local attractions, and also dropped through the letterboxes of self-catering cottages, but it seems that visitors aren't taking any notice, aren't even giving the leaflet a cursory glance.

As summer is getting ever closer, Alan's decided that those leaflets need a complete overhaul; they've looked plain and uninviting for far too long, and it's time to start enticing diners with a brighter design, clearer text and some mouthwatering images. Of course, with business having been somewhat less than it ought to have been, he can't bring in advertising expertise from outside - and fortunately, with Microsoft Publisher, he doesn't have to.

Sometimes, staring at a blank sheet waiting for ideas to come to mind that you can fill it with can be rather daunting - it's often hard to know where to start, particularly when unfamiliar with the software being used. But Alan doesn't need to worry - the Publisher website has a huge range of templates to download, and all he has to do is look through the different categories for the one that's most appropriate, that's the best fit for how he wants his leaflet to appear, download it and open it in Publisher.

Now, instead of a blank page, he's looking at something that's halfway to just the leaflet he wants to promote his business - and for the other half, the content, there's already space set aside within the template for whatever Alan wants to say or display. He'll need photographs, and he can just drop them into place on the page, and even edit and enhance them without having to leave the software. He'll need text, of course, and this can be typed into the allotted spot, and easily formatted for just the right appearance. And he'll want a nice appealing header on the front of the sheet, too - in Publisher, all he needs to do is to type the name of his restaurant, or a slogan or anything else he wants to stand out on the front page, and the software comes with a wide range of tools to stylise that text for that perfect visual appeal.

Of course, even if he has the best looking template and the ideal content, the layout and look might still be a little shy of perfect. After all, every business is unique, and maybe Alan wants to tweak the design to make it that little bit more unique and individual. Fortunately, those Publisher templates aren't set in stone. Elements of the page - such as your text or images - can easily be dragged to a different location, and automatically aligned to make sure everything looks straight and tidy; they can also be adjusted, so Alan can alter the colours if they don't quite reflect his business in the way that he'd hope for.

And just as Alan can easily and quickly transform the leaflets with which he promotes his company, so can any business with any kind of print advertising. Seeing as few markets are likely to get less competitive any time soon, and given that all kinds of customers have a greater reach than ever to find the company whose prices and service suits them best, effective and diverse advertising is more critical than ever before. Microsoft Publisher can help enhance many forms of advertising which your business can use to reach customers - and it's worth considering a short training course for yourself or your staff to get to grips with the software - and if you can be sure of reaching your customers, then you have the opportunity to convince them to buy from you. Your business is worth promoting; with Publisher, you can be confident that customers will see as clearly as you can just what's so good about it.