Banner Placement, Marketing

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Banner Placement and Ads - Lesson 5

Banners are powerful marketing devices used to divert traffic to your website. When a user clicks on your banner, they should be taken to your target web page. The amount of times a banner is clicked when it is viewed is known as the clickthrough rate. Here are basic rules for successful banners:

  • They need to have an attention grabbing headline
  • They must be simple and get your point across
  • They must invoke action (Eg. "Click here")

There are three main types of banner advertisements that you can run:

  1. Pay-per-impression banner campaigns.
    This is the most common yet risky form of banner advertising. It is also the most secure type of banner advertising for the website owner. The website owner hosting the banner gets paid for the number of times users see the banner. The owner of the banner is not guaranteed any results or action from the banner being viewed and there is no guarantee on how many visitors will go to the banner's target website. The owner of the website is getting paid for the number of times the banner is displayed no matter if it brings a 0.1% clickthrough rate or a10% clickthrough rate.

  2. Pay-per-visitor banner campaigns.
    You only pay the owner of the website hosing your banner when a visitor clicks on your advertisement and visits your website. You therefore want your banner to reveal almost everything about what you are trying to sell so that only really qualified people are clicking through. In making your banner as targeted and precise as possible, you are almost turning unwanted visitors away. Banner brokers are companies that target and place banners on your behalf on websites that have your target market. These companies will charge you a certain amount per visitor but you are expected to purchase a minimum buy that they stipulate. For example, if the banner broker charges $1.00 per visitor, you may be expected to buy a minimum of 1000 visitors.

  3. Pay-per-click banner campaigns.
    This is almost identical to what is above because you are paying per visitor. The difference is that with pay-per-click campaigns, the websites that display the banners get to choose the companies and banners they put on their site. If you don't have a banner that pulls good clickthroughs, they will pull you off and not use your banners again. Websites hosting pay-per-visitor campaigns have no control of what you display, so you can target exactly who you want to come to your website. If your banner is too targeted and does not have a high clickthrough, the website hosting your banner will not make much money because they are getting paid per click.

Exchange Programs

When you have created your banners, you need to find places on the Internet to place these banners. Exchange programs are agreements with other website owners to place their advertisement on your web page in exchange for placing your advertisement on theirs. When exchanging banners, it is important to try and place your banners in context. If your banner is placed on a web page that deals with the same subject as your website, your banner will be a more effective marketing tool. Most exchange programs work on a "two to one" ratio. This means that for every two banners you display on your website, one of your banners will be displayed on someone else's website.

There are several banner exchange programs that you can join. First you will need to register with the exchange programs that you choose. You can then upload your banner or textual advertisement and it will automatically appear on other registered web pages throughout the world. In exchange you will be given code to put on your web page that will host rotating banners from other registered websites. While most exchange programs allow you to choose the types of websites on which your banners will be placed, some won't. Make sure therefore that you join a banner exchange program that will target your banners to websites related to your industry.

Online Classifieds

Placing your banners on online classified advertisement pages is a great way to market your e-business website. Online classified advertisement pages are high-traffic websites. Several major sites host classified advertisements for free and others such as Yahoo! charge a fee for placement of classified advertisements on their website. Once you have written and tested your advertisements you can place them on hundreds of websites. This can dramatically increase your profit potential. For example, if you earn $50 / week from a successful classified advertisement that you have placed on one website, imagine the multiplication of your income from placing that advertisement on hundreds of classified advertisement websites.

The only drawback of submitting your classified advertisements to free classified advertisement websites is that you may need to pay attention to your advertisements and resubmit them regularly so that they don't get pushed too far down the list by other new submissions.

Online classified advertisements are a good way to start the marketing for your e-business.

Affiliate and Paid Placement

Affiliate programs are also called associate programs, reseller programs, commission or pay-per-sale, pay-per-lead, pay-per-click and click-through programs. If you were to setup an affiliate program, you would reward other website owners for referring customers to your website. You would only pay your affiliates for visitors that satisfied a requirement like clicking on a link, purchasing a product, filling out a survey, asking for more information or requesting a quote on a product.

These paid placement programs are very easy to join and they cover many different possible arrangements. You can pay for the placement of your advertisement on an affiliate website for a period of time, for clicks received through your advertisement, for sales or sign-ups that come through your affiliates' websites etc. Your affiliate websites will be assigned a special URL that would track all of the visitors that they send to your website and all the sales, signups or clicks. You can have your affiliates simply post a banner, small graphic, or a text link to your website. You can earn decent amounts of money by placing your affiliates' advertisements on your website as well.

There are services available on the Internet where you can register to be in an affiliate program. Other website owners who use these services can sign up to host your advertisements. All they do when they sign up is download your banners or advertisements and place them on their website. The service would then independently track and verify the clicks, sales, or sign-ups that originate from that particular affiliate website. These affiliate program services can even facilitate payment.

Ezine (electronic magazine) advertisements are another powerful way of using affiliate programs. Ezines are email newsletters that people have signed-up to receive. They are full of interesting content so that people actually read them when they show up in their inboxes. You can pay the ezine publisher to include your banner advertisement and a link to your website in an ezine edition. It would help if your advertisement would fit into the context of the information in that particular ezine edition.

When you buy advertisements in ezines, it is important to make sure that they are not just purely classified advertisements with no articles or informational content. Most people who receive ezines like this don't even read them. Ezines that have informative articles followed by classified advertisements are much better buys for your advertising dollar.

Free for all to Post Here

FFA stands for "free for all" and is short for "free for all to post here". FFA websites are websites where you can post a link to your website, a banner or perhaps a short description of your website without having to pay any fees. When you have posted an advertisement on one of these FFA sites, you will receive an email from the site host confirming that your link was placed.

Posting your link on FFA sites individually, one at a time is not effective. Almost all these FFA sites have a maximum number of posts that will be displayed and the old posts are dropped to make room for the new ones.

There are many FFA submission services that will post your link to hundreds of FFA sites at once. Be sure to create a separate email address if you use one of these submission services because you will receive confirmation emails from several hundred FFA sites.

The methods mentioned above are nowhere near as effective as hosting your own FFA website. One of the privileges of hosting your own FFA website is that you get to send out all the confirmation emails with your advertisement in them. There are services on the web that will allow you to host an FFA site on their server without charge or for a small fee. There are also autoresponder services available which you can connect to your FFA site to send the confirming emails.