Friday, September 12, 2008

Making Money with Articles: Banner Advertisements

By M Romeo


The king of the internet right now is content filled, unique, article based websites. But, without traffic, the best information in the world is useless. That's why website promotion is so important. Back in the early year of the internet, banner ads were very important. Then people started ignoring them, and the value of banner ads went down significantly. However, now might be the time to look at banner ads as a significant part of your web promotion plan.

Banner Ads and What they Can do

Banner ads are a good way of getting targeted traffic from a similar type website to come to your own. The monthly fees vary widely from high traffic websites that can run into the thousands of dollars a month, to highly targeted smaller niche websites that might sell the same space for $50 for the year. If you find the right website you might be able to save quite a bit of money versus the equivalent cost of PPC or the time and effort required to get the website optimized for the search engines. One other avenue to look at is, the banner exchange networks. It's possible to find free banner exchanges, although we'll look at the benefits of each type of banner ads.

Banner Exchange Programs

There are numerous new programs called Free Banner Exchanges. Which helps to get website owners together so that each site can exchange a banner with a complementary site. For instance a webmaster site might exchange banners with a web hosting site. However, there are major issues with these free banner exchanges. First, you're limited in how many of these exchanges you can do. You have 1-4 exchanges depending on your layout that you can use, and then your website starts to look cluttered and unprofessional. Secondly beware of who you exchange banners with. Look out for "banner farms", websites that have many banners all across their website. Most of these websites look pretty unprofessional, and will hardly send you any traffic, you're better off not exchanging at all. The banner farm is the one who would win, by you giving them free traffic for almost no return.

Paying For Banner Ads

While banner ads can cost money, if placed strategically in a well thought out promotional plan, your banner ads can be a very wise investment. The most important factor towards placing your banner ad is making sure that the website gets good traffic, that is very relevant to your own offer. It does no good to have a banner ad about a digital camera on a website about bicycles. Second, make sure that you place your banner ad in the top third of the web page in an inviting location for visitors to click on your advertisement. Last, make sure that the website doesn't have tons of other banners or links out to your competitors, as this will dilute the effectiveness of your ad.

A website promotion strategy can be helped with effective banner ad placement. Make sure you place interesting and intriguing ads on quality sites for highest effectiveness. Hopefully the above tips have given you some help to implement your banner ad strategy. Good luck, and happy placement.

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