Banner Advertising Rules

When it comes to banner advertising, the same rules don't apply to everyone. If you want to make your advertising work, it's more than just having an attractive banner. For example, are you trying to develop awareness of your brand, attract prospective customers to your site, or actually make sales? Is banner advertising for you? Ask yourselves these questions before making any rash decisions.

But whatever you are trying to achieve with banner advertising, there are few key rules to getting it right.


Don't lose sight of your objectives

If building awareness is your objective for banner advertising, then make sure that the series of campaigns you develop will follow this trend. Eventually, building awareness and brand will result in traffic to your site and perhaps even produce some sales, but don't get the messages mixed up.


Look before you leap when it comes to planning real estate

Because banner advertising isn't simply about having eye-catching designs, where you place your advertisements is crucial. Before you design your banners, evaluate the web sites you will be placing them on. Is there too much information on the page? Will your banner clash with the site's own banners? Is the content competing with the content of your banner? Avoiding issues like these will set you on the path to success.


Tailor your banner advertising to your target audience

With the Internet, remember that the experience your audience has will vary. Therefore, design your banner to work with different browsers as well as with different connections like dial-up and broadband. Also, make sure you've researched your audience, so, for example, if your audience is made up of novices on the Internet, don't use a Flash based banner.


Keep diligent watch over the performance of your banner

Keeping on top of how often your banner was served and the impact it has had to your web site traffic is key to present and future campaign plans. Make sure you are getting accurate results from the suppliers, because hits or clicks on your banner can sometimes suffer due to browser caching and proxy server caching. Caching simply means images and banners are stored locally so that users don't have to call them from remote locations. Once you've analysed the data, make sure you use it effectively to make improvements or do more research.



About The Author: Derek Jones is the owner of Mirage BBS North Wales, a collection of websites dedicated to Internet Products and Services, Affiliate Marketing and Online Communities. He also has a new business blog where you'll find business hints and tips, news and reviews as well as anything else of interest. You can view his blog by visiting: http://www.derekjones.co

Create A Free Business Website With GBBO

Did you know that if you live in the UK, you can create a free .co.uk website for your business with GBBO (Getting British Business Online).

GBBO is a joint initiative by Google, Enterprise UK, BT, e-skills UK and many other partners to help small businesses create their first website and help them understand the opportunities offered by the Internet. They've set a target of helping 100,000 UK organisations get their first website easily and for free by the end of 2010.

Because they're working with Google & BT, they're able to offer you a free .co.uk website for 2 years, after that you'll only have to pay a few pounds to renew your domain name for a further 2 years - you're not tied in to a contract and they won't put ads on your site without your permission.

Here's what GBBO are offering:

- A free .co.uk address
- A free customisable website
- Free unlimited website updates
- Easy to set up business email
- Free online marketing

You can find more information by visiting:
(Link removed - service no longer available)

Get Web Hosting For Free

They say that the best things in life are free, and it's certainly true here.

If you plan to get a website, here's one good free web hosting provider I highly recommend.

Founded in December 2006, 000webhost.com ($0.00 webhost) offers you a free, reliable web hosting package packed with advanced features for hosting and building professional dynamic websites. They provide secure free web space with all the web hosting tools you could possibly ever need.

Their cPanel control panel is packed full of features and included is an easy to use website builder. You get 1500 MB of disk space and a huge 100 GB bandwidth. Moreover and most importantly, there is no kind of advertising on your pages and you can host up to 5 websites, totally free.

Here's what their free package includes:

- 1500 MB of Disk Space
- 100 GB Bandwidth
- Host your own domain (http://www.yourdomain.com)
- cPanel Powered Hosting
- Over 500 website templates ready to download
- Easy to use website builder
- Free POP3 Email Box with Webmail access
- FTP and Web based File Manager
- PHP, MySQL, Perl, CGI, Ruby
- No Advertising

This service is perfect for starting a new online community, blog or personal website and one I use and highly recommend. Why pay for hosting when you can get it for free :) To find out more, visit http://www.000webhost.com

Improve Your Business With Google Insights For Search

Google Insights allows you to see what terms or phrases people are searching for online in a specific area or timeframe. As a result, you can make better decisions about what to promote on your website, how to tailor your advertising, and how to make your business more profitable.

By showing you what words people are searching for in a specific area or timeframe, Google Insights helps you make informed decisions about your business.

For example, you can tailor your advertising and business to reflect current market trends. So if there is a peak in people searching for a product that you don't currently stock, you could start doing so. Or if people start looking for a product or service that you offer, but don't really promote, you can change your marketing to take advantage.

Using Google Insights, you can:

Make better decisions for your business - including stocking new products or services, or researching which new markets to move into.

Improve your business marketing - including changing your website or the wording of your advertising to promote your existing offerings more effectively.

Start using Google Insights now at:
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

Increase Your Website Traffic

Here is a simple list of SEO tips and tactics to help get more traffic and links to your website with some very simple and easy to follow steps.

Many people think that having a good website is all you need to get tons of visitors. Wrong answer. Getting traffic to your site takes hard work and diligence and is not accomplished overnight.

Think about it this way - how are people supposed to know where to find your site if you don't tell them? You must advertise. Here are some proven ways to advertise your site without spending [much] money:

The order of these does NOT matter and will not affect how your site ranks or gets traffic if you decide to do these in a different order as to how I have listed them nor will missing any of these out affect your rankings or traffic. Remember though, the more work you put in the more traffic you will get as you submit to more sites by using these different SEO tactics for link and traffic building.


Usenet Groups:
Subscribe to the Usenet groups and advertise there. A good place to start is Google Groups

• Be sure to submit your site in appropriate groups!
• Be sure to sign up with a backup email or you will get onto every spammers database!
• Be sure you don't SPAM -- only submit a write up of your site once to any given group.

Directory Submissions:
Submit your site to as many privately run Link Directories/Search Engines as you can find. These will not generally boost your traffic in any major way but will help to maintain steady stream of qualified visitors.


Text Advertising / Links:
Text links and advertising is very effective, but it will cost to have your advertisement put on any site so this is something you will need to set a budget for.


Banner Advertising:
Fixed banner advertising is always a good form of advertising and is said to be much better then text links. Use Banners with care, IE only on sites in same niche as you would with directories and link exchanges.


Social Networking:
Social networking such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and mega blogging sites. This should be used to give information and not used to advertise your site/company.


Reciprocal Linking:
Reciprocal linking is a good deal but you need to watch your link partners as some people are not as honest as the next, and will remove your link after a couple of weeks once you forget about it. For this reason I recommend using a link manager for all link exchanges just to be safe as these will check your reciprocal links for you.

Three way link exchanges are similar to reciprocal linking but between three sites not just you and another. Basically site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links to site A. This form of link building will also compliment your SEO campaign as well.


Banner Exchange Programs:
These don't cost you a thing, but will lead to a few extra visitors. Plus, you're spreading your brand all over the place on the other sites that are signed up to the same banner exchange programs.


Pay Per Click and/or Affiliate Marketing Programs:
Pay per click is as the name says, you pay each time someone clicks a link to your site on search engines and/or on other sites in sponsored link sections.

Affiliate marketing can be set to use either pay per click, pay per lead, pay per sale or pay per customer acquired and generally work the same as any other pay per click program.


Email Marketing:
This is sometimes taken as being spammy but as long as it's not over used to spam thousands it should turn out ok.

Email marketing is cost effective and you can use it to send out information about special offers and new products etc, but be nice about it and don't over use this sending to many emails out all the time.


Reviews:
Ask users/customers (depending on the site) to write a review for you, be it short or long it's still a review and will help to show new visitors that your current client base likes how you run.

Do the odd review about your own company to get things started! Most if not all sites have done this in the past and will more than likely do it again in the future, but just make sure it looks like a real review and is only the trough!


Create your own RSS Feeds or Atoms:
These are a great way to offer visitors the option to sign up to your sites news and/or update depending on how you set it up and what type of site you run.

The most important thing to remember is that you need to offer and provide good, strong content on your site for your visitors to want to come back and keep using your site, and for the search engines to see your site is worthy of the top listings.

If you want the list above to work and keep working you will need to follow these simple rules for your on site SEO tactics and keep your site fresh and up-to-date all the time.

Create good quality content that is helpful and useful to your visitors. If you just copy and paste information/content from others sites you will not get the traffic or visitors you're looking for to stay with you as it will be old news they have all seen before.

Keep your sites and its content fresh. If you're after repeat visitors that will want to keep coming back to your site time after time, you will need to keep not only the look and feel of your site fresh but also the content you put on it. This means you will want to do updates on your site as often as you can and keep your visitors informed on any changes.

Outsource article writing to keep the fresh content coming in. You should be able to get some quality articles/content written for you for about $5 each (based on 500 works per article and a minimum 10 article buy so that's just $50 for 10 articles).

Your videos on your site as well as on others such as YouTube. Everyone likes to watch a video now and then because it's easier then reading all the time. One thing you will want to remember is not to have your video on auto play as this can annoy some people.



About the Author: Nathaniel Bailey is an Online Marketing Developer and have been working in SEO for over 2 years. Not only does Nathaniel work for a well know SEO company but he also runs SEOToolPack.com http://www.seotoolpack.com/ a free SEO site and blog!

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