Advertorials bring together the benefits of both advertising and editorial content. They are in fact advertisements, in the sense that you purchase the content space; yet you use the space to develop what looks like editorial content (written by magazine or newspaper staff) in order to promote your business. Although you can technically use this space to run either a hard or soft sell, the soft sell (indirectly pitching your products or services) tends to work better because then it comes across more like legitimate editorial content.

Ideally, an advertorial will not only come across as a legitimate article, but will also be typeset to look like other editorial content within a given publication. So developing an advertorial means getting all the typesetting specs of a publication and laying your advertorial out to those specifications. For this reason, an advertorial can be sketched out ahead of time, but the text can't be finalized until you're in the typesetting stage. You need to stick with their typesetting standards and your purchased ad space.

The only downside to an advertorial in terms of coming across "legit" is that most publications will require that you include the word "advertorial" somewhere in your ad space. They may also require that you run a border around the ad. If you don't, they may include one for you, and it might be thicker than the one you would want. You want both of these elements to be as subtle as possible, so it's to your advantage to find out their requirements and fit them as subtly as possible.

I provide both writing and typesetting services for advertorials, which means that you don't have to bounce back and forth between a writer and typesetter in order to tweak the text for the space available. (I used to typeset professionally for a monthly newspaper and today typeset books for some of my clients, so this is done precisely to a publication's specs.)

My rates depend on the size of the ad you're running, but start as low as 35 cents per word (for a 2000 word article) with typesetting included. (I handle getting all necessary specs from the publication.) Typical rates will be between $300 and $700.