Advertising
Banner Advertising on the Internet
By Gary Ilines

As with many aspects of the Internet, lack of knowledge and the thrill of speculating about things of which one is ignorant has led to a pile of unwarranted hoohaa about banner advertising. Internet banner advertising was not and is not a marketing gimmick about which one can debate its effectiveness or destiny, any more than we can debate the destiny of search engines or hotlinks. To get to the point, there is really only one way an Internet user is going to find your website - by clicking on a link on another website - and that link can either be text or a graphic. Graphics catch the eye and produce better results in most instances than plain text, thus the birth of the banner ad, a graphic linking to another webpage which users click if they want to visit that page. Controversial, eh!

Nevertheless, banner advertising is a very real phenomenon and, despite many fundamental differences which I shall discuss below, it is a form of advertising which, like TV or magazine advertising, is aimed at potential customers with the objective of name branding and selling products. And, with the afore-mentioned forms of advertising, Internet banner advertising shares the following characteristics:

• It is not a guaranteed recipe for success, banner ad campaigns can be an expensive waste of money, and it's not automatically the best business move for your company.
• You need a valid product.
• Your ad can be annoying, irritating, ugly and generally counter-productive to some or many people if not done right, and probably to a few even if it is done right.
• A lesser or greater degree of trial and error is involved and it is not a simple matter of sticking up an advertisement and sitting back and watching the big bucks come rolling in.

• It is cheap. Professionally made quality banner ads are available from animatedbanner.com for as little as $49.95. (Click here for more information on cheap quality banner design!)
• Internet banner advertising has the advantage that it involves an immediate and active response from the potential customer who can then be manipulated from your own online presence.
• It's very flexible and changes and tweaks based on research and experience can be made instantaneously.

So there you have a basic rundown of what banner advertising is and isn't, and how it compares to other forms of advertising. If you have a good product and a good website where people can buy your goods or services and you have at least a small budget for advertising, then read on because I am now going to tell you how to go about avoiding the pitfalls and how to make the money you spend on your online banner advertising return to you in increased revenue.

The first thing you need is a banner. As I have mentioned above, animatedbanner.com design excellent banner ads for as little as $49.95 and discounts are available for remakes or a series of banners. Therefore, there is no good reason not to spend a little money at first and get your company the right ad.

An important point to make at this point is that the sole purpose of your banner ad campaign - in almost all cases - is to sell your product, NOT to get people to visit your site. Therefore, ideas often spouted by people claiming to know about banner advertising to the effect that your banner needs to be mysterious, to get the user's curiosity, and make him want to know more, is unadulterated nonsense. Your banner needs to do three simple things: 1) show exactly what your product is, 2) to show it in a way that brings the best out of the product, and 3) to show that you are a serious and professional company. Fun and humor and cleverness have their place in certain cases, just as with the other forms of advertising we have discussed, but as with these other forms the main thing is a good product photo, a good product name, and a good slogan. Many people hate banner advertising, partly because many people are only happy when they hate something, but also because much of the advertising on the Internet is irritating rubbish which tries to be clever and falls lamentably short of its goal.

Once you have the right professionally designed banner, the next step is to decide where to put it. Again, with regards to banner placement, it is important to remember that the objective is to sell your product, not to get people to click on the banner. Therefore, the only successful place to put your banner will be on sites which by and large attract the type of person who also buys your product. If you already have a successful product, you will have the market research data necessary for this analysis. To take an extreme example, football commercials on TV are generally for beer, because guys who watch football on TV invariably like to drink beer. This may seem like an obvious concept, but it is frequently over-looked by companies involved in online banner ad campaigns.

Finding the right place to put you banner is the most challenging aspect of a successful banner ad campaign, because you need related websites but not competing websites, so a lot or research is involved at this point. Banner exchanges, for this reason, are generally a waste of time if not money. Advertising on search engines and directories can be successful because your banner will only appear when someone searches for the keywords you have selected, although the drawback of this is that when you banner appears, there are also ten or twenty other competing links on the same subject on the same page. Paying for banner space on appropriate sites is perhaps the best way forward and approaching the webmaster of a site if the site does not already offer banner space. Exchanging banner ads with another site is the cheapest effective way of approriately placing your ad. Many successful companies selling goods and services online have many of their own websites, from which they are able to succeed on search engines and to direct users to their ecommerce outlets via banner advertising.

Finally, and this is the rub for many failed banner ad campaigns, you need to continually monitor the activity coming from your banner and the success or otherwise of your banners in order to improve results and occassionally freshen things up with a new banner or two. Nobody said it would be easy, and in my opinion this is the single most important reason why failed online business venture do not succeed: because the online venture was seen as an easy way to make money. Making money and being successful on the Internet is not easy, the competition is fiercer than in any other marketplace, and success is dependent on constant effort and vigilance. But hey, let's face it, that's what makes the success so much the sweeter! Good luck with your online banner ad campaign!

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