18
Dec

Banner Advertising 101

Author: Jerry Iannucci

With the recent release of Instant Banner Creator by John Merrick & Soren Jordansen I thought I would say a few words about how to take advatange of banner ads to advertise your websites.

To read my recent review of Instant Banner Creator and see some of the banners I made click here.

Banner advertising has been around since the mid 90s and provided the economic foundation for Internet marketing during the late 90s.  Today, many people see banner ads as an annoyance and are often ignored making it difficult to generate decent traffic from them.  However the real value of banner advertising comes when they are used for the purpose of branding.

Banner advertising is cheap.  For a few dollars a day you can buy thousands of impressions to get your banner seen across the Internet.  Even though you won’t be getting much direct traffic from these ads when you promote banner ads that include your picture or company logo you are creating a brand awareness that over time people will begin to recognize.

When people see a commercial on TV they don’t generally jump off the couch and run out to buy the product being advertised.  However the next time they are in the store and they see that product they might be more compelled to buy it.

With Instant Banner Creator it is very simple to create a banner that allows you to brand yourself or your company.

Before doing any banner advertising I would suggest signing up for a free banner rotator like the one offered by IntelliBanners.  Even if you only plan to promote one banner I would highly suggest you use Instant Banner Creator to make a few extra banners that you can test against one another.  With IntelliBanners you can track how many people are clicking each of your banners.  You can then determine which banners get the most clicks and delete the ones that don’t work.  You can then make more banners and continue testing them against each other to find out which ones are the more effective.

IntelliBanners will also help you determine the best sites to advertise your banner ads.

Here’s my IntelliBanners list of the top 10 sites showing my banner ads:

Source Hits Unique Hits % Unique Clicks CTR
01 traffic-splash.com 74281 15500 20.87% 18 0.02%
02 startxchange.com 62533 22108 35.35% 16 0.03%
03 dragonsurf.biz 25001 7793 31.17% 30 0.12%
04 bootscootintraffic.com 18040 4161 23.07% 6 0.03%
05 blue-surf.net 14902 4331 29.06% 7 0.05%
06 fasteasytraffic.com 13442 1523 11.33% 3 0.02%
07 trafficbunnies.com 12236 531 4.34% 1 0.01%
08 hitsafari.com 11898 2106 17.7% 4 0.03%
09 royalsurf.com 9234 1683 18.23% 2 0.02%
10 ilovehits.com 8268 3568 43.15% 10 0.12%

It’s easy to see here that Traffic Splash and  StartXchange.com brought me the most impressions but Dragon Surf and ILoveHits by far have the best click through rates.

I get a lot of my traffic from traffic exchanges because it is extreamly cheap and it fits into my niche.  If you don’t have time to surf for credits you can also use the IntelliBanners advertising co-op to show your banners for you.


Click Here to Join IntelliBanners



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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Banner Advertising, Internet Marketing, Traffic Exchanges. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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